Week 6

If you're reading this blog for the first time, you might want to start from the bottom.



I'm writing after an entire week now...Been busy with things that I couldn't get time to update everything here.
All the pages have been styled uniformly(even the wordpress blog which doesn't look like wordpress at all now) And everything looks good.
And I believe phase 1 of the intern project is done. The flow of the app, without the authentication part however, seems good. Just need to incorporate authentication now, which I'll start doing next week onwards along with LinkedIn work.

Screenshots will come up soon...

25th & 26th June

We need a more user-friendly interaction in the web-application which persuades and convinces users to, well, use it. The current setup does not do that. First the NCR login, then the LinkedIn login, and what not.

The flow would be so much easier if the user gets automatically authenticated and then is shown some information about himself/herself. That's when the Common Auth could come in handy. Whenever you open a web page that has the Common Auth utility, it gets your credentials from your Windows account and automatically signs you in. It's currently compatible with Internet Explorer, but I'm sure there's a way to tweak it to run on our application with other browsers like Chrome and Firefox as well.

But all that had to wait. Finally, after four weeks, my own system had arrived. I didn't want it to, though, now that I was so used to Intzar sir's machine, which also had a plethora of softwares installed and bookmarks saved, and I would have to start from scratch on my own machine.

In the meantime, Naveen sir introduced Manbir and me to CVS, a type of version control system. He walked us through the basics and asked us to install some softwares, including a IDE (Eclipse) and Java, on our systems.
I had a lot more things to install on my system before I can get to these.

The system has finally been set up. I had to take a cut from 64-bit to 32-bit, but it's pretty much the same as long as programs and softwares support both. Re-installing wampserver was a pain but I managed with ease, surprisingly. Also installed and bookmarked several essential stuff, including this blog...

24th June

I'll be resuming my work on login part today. Despite being told not to, I kept on adding tiny bits and pieces to the search page and making it better minute-by-minute. Couldn't help it, I had an inexplicable urge to perfect it.
Anyway, it's been handed over to Manbir. I have been told once again not to touch it. Getting caught working on it once more could land me in trouble, worst case.

Page prompting user to sign in using LinkedIn

Page displaying the skills in the database.

Editing Skills (Add/Remove)

Saving changes in database

21st June

I left version control systems for a while and got back to coding. Since I wasn't satisfied with Manbir's search algorithm and he was busy in something else (WordPress), I thought I'd fix it myself. Also, as per Sushil sir's ideas and instructions, I made a webpage which Prateek sir (finally!) liked.

Furthermore, Prateek sir gave a few more of his own inputs and after working on those the webpage turned out looking like this:

Primary search page

Secondary search results page

It's elegant and simple. Reminds me of Windows 8 for some reason.

Now I had to work on the login part once again, using the same 'template'. Two colors, two fonts. That's it.

19th & 20th June

I spent all of yesterday studying version control systems and took a tutorial on Git.

Git is one of many version control systems (another being CVS).

The tutorial taught me several basic commands, but I still felt like something is missing. I just know basic commands and the idea of Git; I'm not quite sure how I'm going to implement it on Github and on my project just now.

Also, following up on Prateek sir's ideas on how the flow and layout of pages could be, I drew a flowchart algorithm describing the flow and sequence of events for first-time and non-first-time user visits to the application.

Today started with a bang. LinkedIn's developer website is not opening here, because of which all my API calls are failing, rendering my webpages nothing short of 'useless'. The LinkedIn login functionality has vanished, so there's no moving forward until it comes back. The errors while attempting to open www.developer.linkedin.com hints that NCR may have blocked the website.
We've posted an incident, hoping the issue gets fixed soon.

Meanwhile, Manbir's search page as well as algorithm needs to be refined. If I'm not doing anything else and he too is busy, might as well work on it...

18th June

I finally found an answer to the synchronization problem. I had posted a question on Stack Overflow's younger sibling, serverfault.com, because the query I had seemed more appropriate for that kind of forum.

My question was ridiculed and torn apart by the community, however, and I felt quite humiliated, perhaps because it was my first time in an embarrassing situation online. The question was even closed due to being off topic, but I got the answer I needed nonetheless.

Version/Revision/Source Control Systems (VCS).

Now I'm supposed to study a bit of theory. I don't mind it, since I'm going to 'apply what I learn' soon.


In other news, forget letting Manbir access my system, I'm not even able to access his files right now because his wampserver isn't functioning properly. Stay tuned for more on this!

17th June

I incorporated some beautiful and web-friendly Google Web Fonts in my code today, and it seems to be working fine.

I'm still having trouble sharing my database with Manbir; access issues.

Problem Statement:

Find a way to synchronize your code in both systems (Manbir's and mine), so that we are simultaneously working on the same code but on our own. It would all be compiled later on the staging server.

Problems that might occur:

• Overwrite issues, since we're reading and writing the same file.
• Loss of project data on all systems working on it, if the PC acting as the sever crashes.
• PC deployed as server must be on for other systems to access the files.

Apart from that, I was really itching to code, even though it was not the agenda. So I continued debugging and adding more features to web page I was working on, and also managed to find a less 'जुगाड़ू ' way around it. Now the CSS works even when it's included in the head section of the document.

Also, I've had quite a bit of headway in making the page for non-first-time users, where they can view and edit there already-stored skills in the database. Still, I've got lots of brushing up to do on that front, including the feature of removing skills from the database, as well as fixing that 'auto_increment' issue that is for my own personal understanding, so I won't dwell on it any further in this blog at least...