30/5 Move onto Google Maps

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Start 9.00 a.m.
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Had project meeting yesterday, and i outlined a list of important tasks and prioritised them. Because i only have a week left of implementation pretty much i really need to have a priority list so i dont spend ages figuring out problems that dont matter as much as say getting the mapping to work. So heres just a quick list from most important to least important:

1. Get internet working on my virtual machine
2. Get the geocode finding logic done for addresses (this is important but i wont spend too much time on this, its not as important as doing the mapping of jobs, but i want to do this first so i have descent geocodes to work with)
3. Figure out how to get the distance of locations from google.
4. Start designing algorithm for calculating which is closest. Me and my supervisor had a talk about this yesterday, just a concern i have. Well this algorithm in general is my biggest fear besides running out of time. The main concern atm is that i will be able to write a crappy one that can calculate say a route from A to D and map B and C between it in a straight line. BUT say, if A,B,C and D are round in a circle, how do i calculate that?... If two distances are the same, which one do i chose, the one on the left, or the one on the right. Will see how this goes anyways.
5. After i have an idea how this is going to work, i sometimes just need to think hard about these things and write them down, i will work in how i'm going to do prioritys, and the problems asociated with this.
6. Once i have all this done i will begin to implement the algorithm.
7. If number 6 goes ok.. i will move onto the passing the geocodes to google and getting back the data i need.
8. Now this task is something i'll probly do at the same time as the other stuff, or just do some trouble shooting as last thing during the day. I'm having problems with deleting records from the form view, its not passing the paremeters into the class where its deleting, also editing a couple of things is having the same problem. This is probly something simple, but hey, this ASP stuff, i'm lost lol.
9. The last thing of important is adding in the searching features, this might not be hard? Who would know, but certainly time consuming for a task that doesnt actually affect the working of the system. So i'm putting this last. If i some how miraculously get time spare, the most important search feature would just be searching jobs that you want to map, to make it easier for the user.

I fixed the problem i was having with my virtual machine. I got a blue screen of death and things went down hill from there yesterday, but the issue i was having and the blue screen of death arent related, my thinking is, that because the blue screen of death happened i was forced to restart the server and restart IIS. So the original error i was getting was a nasty long with with a few parts, first of all 'text/html; charset=utf-8', but expected 'text/xml' and a whole heap of crap under that, the second part to mention is "[HttpException]: Failed to start monitoring changes to C:\Inetpub\wwwroot because access is denied."

So the first thing i did was have a look at what had cause this same wierd html error the first time, which isnt something that could fix this problem. So i assumed that this was an error thrown back at you if the web service wasnt working. So i moved down to the next obvious error and where it was happening which is the http exception. I spent a long time thinking that it was a user permission problem some where along the line, and after creating numerous users on the main website directory and changing around permissions to no avail i found a handy website that mentioned changing the IIS ASPNET settings to framework 2.0. Now this actually sounded familiar.. i mean it should be set to 2.0 anyways shouldnt it? So i gave it a go AND IT WORKED. Very ametuer mistake i admit, but i havent played around with IIS in a long time haha.

So thanks Rahmat Faisal : http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=177088&SiteID=1

So i think why this only happened now and after the VMBSOD (Virtual Machine Blue Screen of Death) is because IIS restarted and put in place the fact that i had changed from windows authentication mode to forms mode. So framwork version 1 may not have been able to handle this, and i was getting problems with my web.config.

So now thats working my next thing to do is figure out how to get the internet working on my VM so i can connect to Google Maps.

I'll add the above problem into Technical problems as well as more information about the deleting and editing problems i'm having. Also i was very sick yesterday and pretty much didnt sleep last night so i'll mention that as being a potention problem to the project depending on if i get better under Personal Problems.

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Break 10.00 a.m. - 12.00 p.m.
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Other Links

http://blogs.claritycon.com/blogs/satish_vemula/archive/2006/02/19/227.aspx
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q317955
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;824308

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Sleep 3.00 p.m. - 5.00 p.m.
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Still trying to get vmware internet going, maybe its cause i'm using wireless? dont no, might move onto something else.

Ahh waste of day. I searched for a while trying to find a basic guide to setting up a vmware machine to connect to the internet through the local machine and failed miserably, then played around with it for a while myself, so i took the next step and called CheekyMohnkey up at his secret jungle hideout and asked for his opinion on how to set this up. I ended up getting the internet working on my virtual machine. I had first of all set the vmware players ethernet settings to NAT, then go into my servers LAN settings and set the IP address as automatic. At first this didnt work, but after a restart it worked fine. :D

During these moments of panicing and waiting to find the CheekyMohnkey i decided to start looking into the distance thing with Google Maps. I found an interesting website that incorporates getting distances out of the array when you pass it two locations.

http://maps.forum.nu/gm_driving_directions2.html

The reason i need to get the distances is so that i can determine which place is closer to the starting location. I can either do this by sending in two geocodes and getting the distance road wise, as in if you drove there, how far would it be, or i could use another function that throws in two geocodes and gives you the distance in a straight line.

Me and DaDude (my father who is also doing a little bit of playing around with Google Maps) talked about this issue, and DaDude mentioned that Google might actually have a function that calculates this for you :O!!!! Theres go my project lol!!! j.k anyways. So i need to find this out, well itl be one of my next steps anyways. So if google can do this for you, i will need to deside whether or not to do this, because i want to incorporate prioritys, this may not be an option. But thats something i will have to think about. Otherwise i will decide whether i want the exact distance (this will have to grab alot of data) or just grab the distance in a straight line to get a basic idea of which is closest. I am leaning towards the basic straight line.

Anyways, i was suposed to be sleeping more than 2 hours ago now :\ seeing as i'm sick i better not over do it, i'm working so slowly anyways.

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Finish 11.15 p.m. 8 hours productivish work, yesterday 10 hours productivish work
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