Dreamweaver
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I'm posting this as am sitting here stuned at the program I just built, After 25 years I can say I have built somethng I can be really proud of.
What program do you think is your best work
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Minty
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At my previous employers, I had helped develop an Access system with SQL Server BE that completely ran the Field Service section of my company.
We had enhanced and improved it over a 6-7 year period to be a really useful bespoke tool.
It had quoting, contract creation and document storage, contracted equipment on risk, with multiple parent and child items (over 250,000 items), Customer and site management, complicated multi-warehouse stock management, and a complete field technician service call management including out of hours cover and automated customer communications based on field updates. It could even identify the closest available technician based on travel time.
It integrated with a website that customers could use to see all their equipment on contract and raise and monitor a service call.
We were really and rightly proud of it.
The company got bought out and the whole thing was cast to one side in favour of an over-complicated one-size fits all "enterprise" solution, that really upset the old companies core customer base. What a waste.
We had enhanced and improved it over a 6-7 year period to be a really useful bespoke tool.
It had quoting, contract creation and document storage, contracted equipment on risk, with multiple parent and child items (over 250,000 items), Customer and site management, complicated multi-warehouse stock management, and a complete field technician service call management including out of hours cover and automated customer communications based on field updates. It could even identify the closest available technician based on travel time.
It integrated with a website that customers could use to see all their equipment on contract and raise and monitor a service call.
We were really and rightly proud of it.
The company got bought out and the whole thing was cast to one side in favour of an over-complicated one-size fits all "enterprise" solution, that really upset the old companies core customer base. What a waste.
Dreamweaver
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That sounds like a labour of love shame some companies haven't the vision to see past there own ego's
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I have so many things that I have done over the years that give me a sense of accomplishment that it is a hard call to say what was my best work.
Since I also had a career as an OpenVMS system administrator for 28 1/2 years with the U.S. Navy, I had a chance to do a lot of really diverse coding. One thing I wrote for the VMS box was an idle-job trimmer to take care of cases where one of our remote sites would auto-dial in to upload and download files, but the remote unit would get stuck in a loop and never hang up. (Before the days when EVERYBODY was on hard-wired internet.) Our phone bill was horrendous and, at the time, there was no money in the budget for a 3rd-party job trimmer. So I wrote one. The first month it was in service, it killed enough idle/hung jobs to save us $60,000 in phone bills and yet never actually killed a job that was doing something and merely waiting for some other process to finish.
Once we switched from a dial-in to a networked system, we turned the job killer off. However, we fired it up again when people were logging in and consuming certain database-related license credits by not logging out. (They held the credit for the duration of the login, active or not.) We would have had to buy a much higher tier of license, something like another $10,000 per month. But the JOB DEMON program got resurrected and dumped the idle jobs, so we saved that expenditure. I would say that over its lifetime, that one program saved the Navy over a million dollars by simply trimming jobs that didn't need to be there.
I had a bunch of candidates for the "best work" title, but that one was the biggest money-saver.
A small piece of it exists today on this forum in the code repository where I put a text-parser class module up for consideration. JOB DEMON used the OpenVMS version of that same parser to read its rules so that it could know how to tell how long a job was allowed to be on the system based on what it was running and which user group was involved, among other issues.
Since I also had a career as an OpenVMS system administrator for 28 1/2 years with the U.S. Navy, I had a chance to do a lot of really diverse coding. One thing I wrote for the VMS box was an idle-job trimmer to take care of cases where one of our remote sites would auto-dial in to upload and download files, but the remote unit would get stuck in a loop and never hang up. (Before the days when EVERYBODY was on hard-wired internet.) Our phone bill was horrendous and, at the time, there was no money in the budget for a 3rd-party job trimmer. So I wrote one. The first month it was in service, it killed enough idle/hung jobs to save us $60,000 in phone bills and yet never actually killed a job that was doing something and merely waiting for some other process to finish.
Once we switched from a dial-in to a networked system, we turned the job killer off. However, we fired it up again when people were logging in and consuming certain database-related license credits by not logging out. (They held the credit for the duration of the login, active or not.) We would have had to buy a much higher tier of license, something like another $10,000 per month. But the JOB DEMON program got resurrected and dumped the idle jobs, so we saved that expenditure. I would say that over its lifetime, that one program saved the Navy over a million dollars by simply trimming jobs that didn't need to be there.
I had a bunch of candidates for the "best work" title, but that one was the biggest money-saver.
A small piece of it exists today on this forum in the code repository where I put a text-parser class module up for consideration. JOB DEMON used the OpenVMS version of that same parser to read its rules so that it could know how to tell how long a job was allowed to be on the system based on what it was running and which user group was involved, among other issues.
Dreamweaver
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Sounds like a very useful tool I've always injoyed reading about things you were doing before I was even out of school, A program that has been going longer than I've been working with access thats really cool 
Isaac
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Great job Mick - it looks very nice!
Couple I did at a healthcare company that I really enjoyed and people got some satisfaction over.
One was to handle Medicare enrollments for a healthcare revenue cycle management company. Faxes came in as PDF's and went to a PDF viewer, the database would take legally required screenshots of internet sites for them and save it, lots of queuing and assigning work, production reports, etc.
Another was a Claims Audit database to support a long feedback loop in between claims auditor and claims manager and claims processor, where they would do an audit, challenge, response, back and forth until final status. Lots of production reports.
Both databases I enjoyed because they allowed me to get really creative, including plenty of SQL Server and SSIS packages & SSRS to handle notifications, emails, broadcasts, report subscriptions etc.
Then one day an expert from Washington DC came in to the company, he worked for Market Prominence--the industry software designed to handle all this. He spent about a year at our company helping it be configured until it could finally do about 90% of what my app did. I was satisfied with that process! ha.
Couple I did at a healthcare company that I really enjoyed and people got some satisfaction over.
One was to handle Medicare enrollments for a healthcare revenue cycle management company. Faxes came in as PDF's and went to a PDF viewer, the database would take legally required screenshots of internet sites for them and save it, lots of queuing and assigning work, production reports, etc.
Another was a Claims Audit database to support a long feedback loop in between claims auditor and claims manager and claims processor, where they would do an audit, challenge, response, back and forth until final status. Lots of production reports.
Both databases I enjoyed because they allowed me to get really creative, including plenty of SQL Server and SSIS packages & SSRS to handle notifications, emails, broadcasts, report subscriptions etc.
Then one day an expert from Washington DC came in to the company, he worked for Market Prominence--the industry software designed to handle all this. He spent about a year at our company helping it be configured until it could finally do about 90% of what my app did. I was satisfied with that process! ha.
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We had an automated batch launcher system for the Navy that counts as one of my longest-running tools. (It used the parser as well.) This was OpenVMS, not Windows, so they had a batch system but they didn't have the Windows Task Manager to control batch launches.
My launcher system ran for 26 of the 28 1/2 years that I was with the Navy (and past the time that I retired). It could launch a specific named batch file under any username at frequencies as high as every 15 minutes and as low as once per year on a specific date at a specific time of day. It also allowed for repetition on the basis of quarter-hour, hour, day, week (of the month), monthly, quarter-year, and year. It could also submit the jobs at any priority in any queue. At its highest usage, it controlled over 200 scheduled jobs. That wasn't necessarily a money saver but it WAS a sanity saver because it meant that project people didn't have to stay for a late shift - and our night operators didn't have to intervene - to launch important jobs that had night-time network connection requirements.
My launcher system ran for 26 of the 28 1/2 years that I was with the Navy (and past the time that I retired). It could launch a specific named batch file under any username at frequencies as high as every 15 minutes and as low as once per year on a specific date at a specific time of day. It also allowed for repetition on the basis of quarter-hour, hour, day, week (of the month), monthly, quarter-year, and year. It could also submit the jobs at any priority in any queue. At its highest usage, it controlled over 200 scheduled jobs. That wasn't necessarily a money saver but it WAS a sanity saver because it meant that project people didn't have to stay for a late shift - and our night operators didn't have to intervene - to launch important jobs that had night-time network connection requirements.
Dreamweaver
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Dreamweaver
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Thanks It's been playing tracks like mad the played list is at about 1500 think I have caught all the errors just tweeking now and checking for missed items like 2 popup edit screens somebody forgot to add "That's when the bit below my name comes into play lol"
Dreamweaver
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One thing I'm thinking of doing is only add a play for a track if it has been playing for more than xx seconds at the moment it just adds it which is a lot simpler?
Dreamweaver
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I've updated the code so it will only create a play record 30 seconds before the end of the track, this was very simple to do don't know why I didn't think of it before.
Isaac
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This sounds pretty cool actually. Nice job. Maybe it will be the next spotify!
But seriously, how many people have made money over making something as a prototype, gaining a bit of a following, then selling it to someone with more resources to amplify it to globally-used-grade software? I think it would be a cool category of entrepreneur.
But seriously, how many people have made money over making something as a prototype, gaining a bit of a following, then selling it to someone with more resources to amplify it to globally-used-grade software? I think it would be a cool category of entrepreneur.
Dreamweaver
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All my programs are freeware the only limit is they require membership to download from my site.
Dreamweaver
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For anybody who may be interested I have just added Apollo 32 Bit version 1 to my testers downloads should any VIP Members here wish a copy Let me know And I'll send you a copy.
regards mick
regards mick
Dreamweaver
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I've now Uploaded the 32 bit version which is available To both members and Guests along with all my freeware programs
link in my signature
link in my signature
HillTJ
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Mick, Looks great. It's a great sense of achievement to see a concept come to life. My proudest achievement is a "Safety" system for want of a better description. It includes risk assessments with allocation of ranked Consequences/likelihood, Workplace inspection checklists (with significant assistance from Uncle Tony, a great guy), Hazard Reporting, Accidents/Incidents, Register of Meetings, First Aid Providers, SDS Register, & document Archiving. The suite integrates with Outlook email & Calendar, multiple options for printing etc etc. Database is split & uses an auto front end updater from ForrestBytes (another great guy). Took me 6 months of diligent spare time & multiple posts to the forum when I got stuck. This system combines all the previously disjointed systems into a single interface & utilises lots of bits of code I've found. Upon unveiling, my immediate boss & his boss loved it & wanted me to roll it out to other divisions. This was soon stalled by the "Bigger" boss who was only interested in the financial implications of safety, stuff that's above my pay grade. So, I run it constantly on our site, other divisions have nothing! But that's progress.....
Isaac
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That sounds familiar as to the work I do now. inherent risk, controls, = residual risk
I started out with Condor DB back in 1985. Had a Chameleon MSDOS, dual floopy, 256K RAM. Used it for inventory at an optical office for 3 ophthalmologists. Wrote a GW Basic program to figure the last digit of a UPC and printed a UPC symbol that would fit on a small plastic tab that slid on the temple of glasses frames. I was thrilled when Access was released and it was more than I could have ever hoped for!
Inventory was transferred, along with a patient table and eventually a Rx table and forms that would store the glasses Rx. I could track the Rx and call patients when the glasses were late and call when the glasses arrived. Before we installed a new phone system, Access would dial the patient phone number. The Rx form would calculate for an imbalance between the two eyes, called anisometropia, in case a special grind was needed to correct for the imbalance.
Also a Manufacturer table and a representative table, with numerous forms and reports for all of the tables. I kept track of reps and their appointments. Could total each reps frames in stock and which ones needed to be returned if not sold.
Rewrote the UPC in VB and created my own font for UPC symbols. Still use it today for my wife's Cherished Teddies DB.
When the HIPPA regs became law, I realized my meager understanding of VB wouldn't allow me to sell my DB and I retired in 2009. I still have a copy of the DB and I updated it to Access just recently when I bought a copy of Office 2007. Really quite an accomplishment for me as I don't have even a little bit of VB coding understanding. My wife and I moved to Arizona and I don't know if my DB is still in use.
Jim
Inventory was transferred, along with a patient table and eventually a Rx table and forms that would store the glasses Rx. I could track the Rx and call patients when the glasses were late and call when the glasses arrived. Before we installed a new phone system, Access would dial the patient phone number. The Rx form would calculate for an imbalance between the two eyes, called anisometropia, in case a special grind was needed to correct for the imbalance.
Also a Manufacturer table and a representative table, with numerous forms and reports for all of the tables. I kept track of reps and their appointments. Could total each reps frames in stock and which ones needed to be returned if not sold.
Rewrote the UPC in VB and created my own font for UPC symbols. Still use it today for my wife's Cherished Teddies DB.
When the HIPPA regs became law, I realized my meager understanding of VB wouldn't allow me to sell my DB and I retired in 2009. I still have a copy of the DB and I updated it to Access just recently when I bought a copy of Office 2007. Really quite an accomplishment for me as I don't have even a little bit of VB coding understanding. My wife and I moved to Arizona and I don't know if my DB is still in use.
Jim
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