The Home Office Project: Zero Point

Well, we have settled into the house.  Yeah, there are still things left to unpack and still other projects to complete, but by and large we are moved in and fully functional.  For the next few weeks I have set up the office in the guest bedroom, but I am on a deadline:  retcon comes for a visit on February 10th and I will be out of town working in Fort Worth for the week preceding that visit.  This leaves me with sixteen days in which to get the home office functional, and get the guest bedroom set up properly.

The full home office project is a long term plan that will take me several months (more likely a year) to fully complete.  It involves paint, flooring, trim, built in bookcases, and built in desktops.  The game plan is to complete the paint and flooring right away, which will then allow me to move all of the office equipment into the room.  The rest can be done a bit at a time.  So that means I need to knock out the painting and install the laminate floating floor in the next two weeks.  I intend to document the entire project from start to finish.  Here, then, are pictures of the room at zero point before I start pulling the trim and pulling up the carpet.

The Home Office Project - Photo Gallery

Of this, I am proud

So our air department has a data entry reduncancy issue.  They have to enter the same information in multiple unconnected systems in order to do their job.  It's not just a pain in the butt, it dramatically reduces the number of transactions they can complete in a day.  One part of this involves the printing of either the FedEx label or the USPS envelope.  FedEx has made available a web service for performing all kinds of transactions with them, including printing your own shipping labels.  To be able to use their system, however, you have to pass a certification process which understandably involves your printing a variety of test labels and sending them to FedEx to verify, so they are sure that they will be able to properly scan the barcodes.

I completed a piece early this week is basically wired so that the user just enters the record locator for the ticket request.  Once they have selected that record they just have to hit a "Generate Label / Envelope" button, which pulls up a form pre-populated with the Sending and Destination addresses and with the FedEx account number already entered.  From that form they can make any changes if necessary (almost always not), and click one button to create the FedEx ship request which gives them the tracking number and creates the shipping label to be printed.  Or, if the tickets are being sent by mail they can click one button to print the envelope.  Assuming the data was entered correctly into Sabre to begin with, the user never needs to enter any of that information again - the label or the envelope just pick up the existing data from the other system and print them out.

Now, actually getting the binary data for that FedEx label was a chore in and of itself.  It comes back from the web service as a string, which needs to be parsed through and then written one bit at a time to the final image file.  While parsing through that data you have to watch for an escape character, and if you hit that you have to read the next two characters to find the high bit and low bit in order to correctly write the escaped bit into the image.  Once you have the final image, then there is the challenge of sending it to the printer properly sized.  If the image gets distorted at all then the barcodes will not be able to be scanned.  It was a fun and interesting challenge.

The end result so far is that the users are very, very happy with the interface.  And just a few minutes ago I found out that we passed the FedEx certification on our first try.  This makes me very, very happy.  I have happy end users, I have happy team members, and that makes me a happy boy.