One of the perks of working in R&D at Medidata is “Innovation Time”. Twice a year, engineers get to spend two weeks building whatever they want. Ideally some of the things we build will go back into direct product development but if not, we are encouraged to open source the work. Fresh from attending Microsoft’s Build 2013 conference in San Francisco, I wanted an excuse to use all the latest Microsoft web stack tools.

I’ve got the Microsoft Money style cashflow chart going with the flot library and some massaging of ASP.NET MVC 3 to output JSON. The chart correctly predicts future cashflow based on your set bills and future transactions. Next up is multiple accounts and currencies at once.

I am finally fed up of having to install Microsoft Money and set up syncing of the data file, so I’ve decided to try and build a web based version. Mint.com does not support non-US markets and apparently does not even support adding your own transactions that have not been downloaded from a bank. “Private Money” is the codename and it looks a bit like this at the moment: The stack:

My Avatar Kart game now has: A skybox An original track a floor for the world Debug and chase cameras A starting countdown I also finally got Avatars in the code (Xbox 360 only so no videos yet). Microsoft has not decided to release the bones for the avatars, so I cannot do custom animations or poses yet. Therefore they are standing in the karts at the moment…

During my down time I’ve been cracking on with XNA and am developing “Avatar Kart” – essentially Super Mario Kart on the SNES with Xbox avatars (we have to wait until XNA Game Studio 3.1 this summer for avatar support). In a couple of days I’ve managed to finish: CPU Car AI Physics and wall collisions Terrain effects Lap counts and car rankings Split screen The track is still from SMK and the cars are empty but it does the job.

I’ve put together the first version of a simple program for displaying flashcards in fullscreen, mainly as an exercise in WPF but also because its damn useful for all sorts of teaching environments. Flash cards are simple text files that anyone can edit – just load them up and hit spacebar to cycle through them. “Big Flash Cards” is now at version 0.1 🙂 It supports Unicode so is perfect for Japanese lessons, for which I designed it.

My dissertation project saw me making an XNA game (Lines) and website to go with it (edngames.com) which used web services to make essentially a cut down Xbox Live on the PC with rich presence support, automatic high score uploading etc. I feel it was very successful (and the markers agreed) but I didn’t get the time to spend on the game portion that I wanted to, instead concentrating mainly on the distribution scenarios and the user experience.

At work I am currently tasked with redeveloping an intranet application used to track customers, products owned, support contracts, support records and all sorts of other CRM-esqué functions. The version used at the moment is a very fast Perl/MySQL/Mod\_perl/Apache setup built over a few years. Its got to the point where the company needs more functionality and hacking extra functions into the current code is getting more and more difficult. Why Symfony?

Update April 2012: Five years later after several server moves, this is no longer online – I’m still hunting for the files. Most likely it wouldn’t work on new keitai’s anyway. Edo no Tango (Ed’s Tango, エドの単語) is a Flash Lite based Japanese language vocabulary and kanji flashcard utility. Developed to help my study, it currently contains lessons 10 through 17 from the Genki series of Japanese language textbooks. It uses Flash Lite 1.