Colin Sullivan » web

Kenyon Finally Launches!

Colin — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 15:50:20 +0000

My Symfony project is finally complete. I cannot take credit for the design, but I am quite proud of how the backend came out. Of course, all of the coolness is stuff the general public cannot see. Symfony worked out quite well, I would certainly use it again if I had to do a PHP project in the future.

Integrating the site with Paypal’s Payflow Link service was very easy as well. They give you many options for testing, and the service is very well documented. The only problem I couldn’t figure out how to get around is this JavaScript alert that is thrown every time a user completes a purchase, warning them that their data is being sent insecurely back to the merchant’s site. This is not a very helpful error in my opinion, as they are not sending any credit card information and it will undoubtedly just scare users. Overall, the service works quite well.

IBM: Extreme Blue Internship

Colin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:36:42 +0000

This summer I will be interning at IBM in Austin, TX. I will be part of the Extreme Blue team of interns, working for IBM’s Emerging Technologies division on a project called Big Sheets. I will be doing mostly JavaScript interface work, and am looking forward to the experience. Over the summer I’ll write as much as I am legally able to about my time at IBM.

Concert

Colin — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:40:05 +0000

Concert is an online collaborative organizational tool for sounds. I am developing Concert as part of Software Design and Documentation class here at RPI. See our wiki for more information.

The idea behind Concert is that many groups of musicians, like [ ], record practices and riffs with the intention of going through them later and picking out the good from the bad. With our band anyway, this has not been working. Mostly it is because the recordings are on my computer, and we have yet to sit down altogether and sort through them all. When we have time to get together, we prefer to work on new material, or simply play, thus producing more recordings.

Concert solves not only this problem of choosing the good from the bad, but also solves the problem of organization of the various audio “segments”. Concert will allow all the members of a group, say Tim, Garrett and myself, to collaboratively listen to each of the audio recordings that we have piled up on our own time. A user of Concert can then highlight a segment of one of these audio recordings and “tag” it, effectively organizing parts of the audio recordings. Other users in the same group will be able to see these changes, and add/remove audio segments from these tags.

On the technical side, we have a few challenges to face. One challenge is on the backend, with the audio manipulation. We are hoping to provide the functionality for a user to download an “audio segment”, that is, a segment of an audio file that they have previously uploaded. Another set of challenges, which are the ones I am trying to deal with, are on the client-side. We are hoping to use HTML5 instead of flash for the audio playback. I have already solved a few quirky issues that I’ve found with this new technology, and overall it seems fairly solid.

Overall, we hope to have a small working prototype of Concert by the end of the semester. We’ll see where this takes us.

CMS in Symfony

Colin — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:01:53 +0000

I was recently hired by Synthetic Cinema to develop a content management system for kenyonappliances.com. I developed the entire backend using the Symfony PHP framework, and implemented some Javascript functionality on the frontend.

Features

Entire e-commerce solution, so Kenyon can sell their products directly to customers.
Dealer login, enabling dealers to select which products they carry
Google Maps “Dealer Locator” which can be specific to items carried by dealer
Administrative users can receive notification of low stock and product invoices
Unlimited number of static pages, all editable through administrative interface
All products & product categories handled through admin interface

Implementation

PHP Symfony web framework
Symfony plugins
Javascript
- Google Maps API
- jQuery/Ajax
MySQL

New Website

Colin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:43:47 +0000

As you can see, I have designed a new website. Please contact me if you see anything wrong with it, or have any suggestions. It is a work in progress, and I could use some constructive criticism. Now I have to get back to school work, which I took a day off from to finish the site.

RPInventory

Colin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:53:27 +0000

RPInventory is a web-based inventory system designed for use by clubs at RPI. I have been working on the RPInventory team for the past year, doing mostly Ajax/Javascript interface work.

We use jQuery for all manipulations and Ajax calls, and PHP/MySQL for the back-end.

For more information about the project, http://www.rpinventory.com/.

Choice Merchant Solutions – CMS

Colin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:56:59 +0000

The content management system that I designed for Choice Merchant Solutions allows administrators to control which pages users have access to, effectively modifying the “navigation” section of the website for each user independently.

Written in PHP/MySQL/Ajax, it is another dynamic web application.

PyroInventory

Colin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:04:49 +0000

“PyroInventory” is a complete inventory system for fireworks and explosives, customized for a Pyrotechnics Entertainment company called “Pyro/FX”. Written in PHP/MySQL, it is a dynamic, database-driven web application.

I’ve been working on PyroInventory for the past two months, and am pretty proud of it. A demo will be available soon.