January : 2010 : Archives : Intrepid Studios, Inc. (Minneapolis Web Design & Development)

At my student job over at the Student Unions & Activities at the U of MN, we just completed a pretty big project. It was tons of fun and we're still improving it. It is a WebKit-based touch screen directory application. There is no Flash, there is no Silverlight. It was written using jQuery, PHP, MySQL, and cutting edge CSS3. The floor maps were done primarily in Google SketchUp and I modified some in Photoshop with extra information. The app runs on a Mac Mini and uses a webcam to detect movement and stop the screensaver so people can use it.

My primary responsibilities included overall graphic design and UI (Photoshop, HTML, CSS3), some JS work, and some PHP work.

Big thanks goes out to the team: Ellie for her astounding SketchUp work, Zach for his managerial prowess, Ken for his awesome paging routines, Ethan for his JS ninja skills, Trent for his hardware expertise, and Sungho for getting the webcam working!

We're proud to announce a new website we've developed for our client Measure Custom Clothing. They sell custom suits and shirts at low prices in the Twin Cities area.

The site was developed in .NET, programmed in C#. In addition to the public-facing pages, I also developed a custom sales order and customer management system. Managers and sales associates can create new sales orders, print them, email them, and keep track of their status with an administration panel.

If you're looking for a good suit (and I can vouch for their quality), please check them out!

For a project at work we wanted to show the time to the user (kiosk application) in real-time. I needed it to be super simple, just updating text every minute in a paragraph tag. I was about to write my own jQuery plugin, but someone has done it for me.

Here's what we ended up using, thanks Doug!

http://github.com/dsparling/jclock

That has the latest version.

I would have preferred it using datejs's style format specifiers but it does the job aptly.

PS. I found it by Googling "jClock," the name I was going to use for my plugin.

On Windows 7 RC1, I've had trouble with the rule check with SQL Server 2008. It would constantly say I needed to restart when I didn't need to.

Here's a quick fix to bypass that rule:

1. Navigate via command line to the directory of the setup. When uninstalling, this is located in: C:Program FilesMicrosoft SQL Server@Setup BootstrapRelease
2. Run this command:
   
   setup.exe /Action=[un]install /SkipRules=RebootRequiredCheck
   
3. Use "uninstall" and "install" where applicable.

Refer to this blog post for some other tips.