All Your Base Are Blog to Us

The assistant professor from Hershey who I'm doing the simulation proof of concept for finally got a chance to look at it and said he liked what he saw. We'll be getting together via phone to discuss the project in more depth as he can't come up to University Park till some time in August. So I'll find out soon which direction we'll go next with it.

In the meantime, I've decided to retrofit the work I'd been doing for the PSU All-Sports Museum to take advantage of XPath in Flash. The sports museum has me working on a touch-screen kiosk (a side job I'm doing on my own time at home). I've pretty much recreated the functionality of what was done for the other team sports kiosks, which were created in Flash. The kiosk I'm creating has to do with media personnel who have covered Penn State sports. I originally did it to match the way they did the other kiosks, using external text files, but after seeing what I can do with XPath, I was able to eliminate all the text files that they previously used by exporting one XML file from FileMaker Pro. I had to rethink the way I handled the info, but it really wasn't too difficult to make the shift. This will pay off tremendous dividends for the Museum personnel who need to add data to this kiosk in the future. One of the coolest advantages is that in FileMaker it's as easy as clicking a button to alphabetize all the records by last name, which I needed to do for the interface. Once I get some real content from them I'll be able to share the interface. If they someday decide to go this route with their other kiosks, they could serve all their content from a single FMP database server. This project has really turned into a great vehicle for professional development for me.