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January 14, 2005
Barcode Integration
Spent the morning and part of the afternoon in Lancaster at the office. Went in for what I thought was a meeting with Barcode Integration to hand over our new scanners. It ended up being a wait and stare at the ceiling day. There was some glitch in the firewall on the Windows XP laptop which held things up for hours. So we ended up coming home before the software was installed.
We did play with the handheld scanners for a few minutes and it was pretty cool. We crumbled up the barcodes ran them under water and ripped them in half. And we still had a scan! This was impressive and fun. I will still have to print them out on inkjet printers and some other things and see what happens.
This is all the final stages of a pretty big project, I had written a ticketing system to generate a barcode for print at home tickets. This way customers to our website could buy tickets online and print them out. No more mailing tickets. So it was a fun and challenging project to find a barcode that would work, come up with a ticketing scheme and serial numbers and what information we needed to encrypt into a barcode. Then I had to find a company that sold handheld wireless scanners and had the ability to network them together.
I also needed to think through how people would abuse the system. Like trying to make multiple copies of the same ticket. Forging tickets, etc. I can not tell you how I made sure these things couldn't happen incase someone wants to rip us off, I do not want them reading my blog for clues.
Needless to say the ticket portion of our code has over 790,000,000 different ticketing combinations. Which are matched back to the original event and encoded. Which gives us 33,180,000,000 (33 Billion) to 1 odds that someone can forge a ticket and get into the concert for free. If they manage to forge a ticket, our scanners also record every ticket that is scanned and if there are duplicates it will reject any duplicates. Anyway all of this is to say ticket forging is gonna be hard to do.
So it is a good feeling to see something that is in your head work out even a small project like ticket scanning. Nw to finish some small details and role it out for testing.
Tonight was also Caleb's Birthday party. His real birthday is December 27, but we celebrate in January to give him his own day. Caleb got a ton of tools and toolboxes(he will soon have more than me). He also got a K'nex Big Air Ball Tower. A project we will have to spend a few days working on.
560+500=1060 jj
Posted by smitty at January 14, 2005 11:31 PM
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