Filip Norrgård’s blog @ filips.net
Filip’s blog about mobile technology, tech itself and other stuff

Dingo Approaching Proof-of-Concept Stage
31 January 2005 in Code-ing | Comments enabled

My hard work seems to be paying off, with my project “Dingo” soon approaching public release beta. What is Dingo? Well, it is a program that is capable of downloading the timetables (or schedules) that one has stored in my univerisity’s schedule planning web page, called Wompat (refferring to the animal called wombat — don’t ask my why). With me still? Good. Now, the problems I (and more others) faced with Wompat was that there was no automated way of inserting the schedule into your personal scheduling program (Outlook, iCal, you name it), PDA and/or phone.

Dingo is the program that is designed to solve this problem. Currently I am experimenting with getting a transistion from week number and the weekday to a complete date. (Our university plans courses by the week number, not by the dates) So far, I’ve gotten it working for the year 2005 and any other year which doesn’t end or start on a Thursday and/or a leap year. Not perfect yet, but I’m getting there.

The next exiting phase is the generating of iCalendar, vCalendar and Outlook appointments for the exact dates of the courses. My homemade iCalendar/vCalendar generators seem to work nicely, although Outlook doesn’t like my iCalendar files but the vCalendar files (strange, in a way). The direct inserting into Outlook is also working fine and no major problems there.

A feature which I’m especially proud of is the automatic downloading of the schedule webpage. See below for the current implementation. This was the trickiest part to execute, codewise, as Wompat utilizes cookies and server-side codes hidden in the HTML code to get the timetable for, e.g. spring 2005 and listing the full schedule. (It is even more trickier to describe how it works on the server. )

But, thankfully coding all of this using C# and .Net technologies has made it easier than it is for me to get my Java applet to connect to a MySQL server (does it have to be so impossible for me?). I will have to see how well this will work on Mac OS X running dotGnu and whether dotGnu’s .Net and Windows.Form implementation is complete enough for Dingo to run unmodified.

However, that is currently second priority as there are some things I have to download before being able to compile dotGnu on Mac OS X and I don’t have the energy to compile anything currently. Still, seeing this small one-man-project drawing to a close, I can’t help but saying that “these are exiting times indeed”.