Greetings from the Far East!

Hello from Hong Kong!  Wow, it feels like ages since I’ve blogged, and I guess it has been a while.  Part of the reason for this is that I don’t have internet at home (I know, its unbelievable!).  Another reason is that I’ve been pretty busy seeing relatives and working on projects for various people.

For the three months that I’ll be here, I’ll be splitting my time between two projects:

The first project will be with my uncle on a Greek <-> English lexicon.  As mentioned before, I’ll be helping him parse out some MS Word docs that contain Greek <-> English translation data and shove it into a database of some kind.  After I do that we’ll want do perform some manipulation on it; hopefully we’ll end up with some kind of translation service that people can use.

After some meetings with my uncle, it turns out that he might eventually want to apply for some kind of patent on this system.  So I’m not even sure if I can talk about this project too much.  Nevertheless, it is my firm belief that this is either a) not patent-able  because the underlying architecture is very common b) if it is patent-able then Google has already done it, and c) well if still is patentable then I better get some kickbacks.

This week, I’ve written a basic Java application that will divide employees into working shifts and generate a basic work schedule that follows certain scheduling requirements (ex. x # of workers on the floor at any time, shifts that are on x-weekly rotations, etc.).

Just to give you some background, our factory basically has 4 types of workers: permanent full day staff, full day staff, morning staff and afternoon staff.  Permanent full day staff work everyday regardless of the shift rotations, everyone else is on a pre-determined x-weekly (bi-weekly, tri-weekly, whatever) rotation.

Now, for the past few years, they used to do all the scheduling by hand; which isn’t too surprising, most of the world probably does it that way too.  So what I’ve done is divvy up the employees into working shifts based on the rules that I was given, and generate a schedule by outputting to various Excel spreadsheets.   Writing the information was handled by the JavaExcelAPI , I found it to be quite powerful and easy to use.

Anyways, that’s it for now, I’ll keep posting when I get the chance