The Next 4 Months

Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Uncategorized

I’ve got this bad habit of doing “something else” during exam season - I would be busy thinking about how I’m gonna spend the 3 week semester break. This time, it’s worse - it’s a 4 month break.

Of course, since I wanted to get a dSLR camera, the first priority was on getting a decent part time job. Thankfully, I managed to find one. No, I’m not the kind that would work 3 months then say “sorry, this job not suitable for me after all” and disappear. It just so happens that Kone wanted someone for the same exact period that I’m available.

The other thing of course, is the side projects that I like to work on. There’s always this thought of the “usefulness” of the project I’m gonna do. A photo gallery? There’s plenty others out there, and it’s not really something to shout about. Then there’s this concern of what technology to work on: LINQ? PHP5?

So while doing my FYP documentation, I realized the technology isn’t that important after all - you can’t possibly predict what technology your future company would be using. As long as it’s not Assembly, it should be fine =) I was going to settle on a PHP feed reader project using the CodeIgniter MVC framework, but something even better came up. I was on the bus back to Ipoh, thinking bout the damned bus routes I need to follow to get to Kone, when I realized - why not make the RapidKL bus routes search-able? That would be way cool!

By search-able means you can enter a starting point and a destination, and the system will tell you what buses to take. Not only was it something extremely useful, it was technically challenging too! This would be a good chance for me to brush up my SQL too. This will be a web based system, so PHP5 it is. There’s also a .NET Compact Framework version planned!

The system would most probably be community driven - after all, I can’t possibly enter and validate all the bus routes RapidKL has, since it’s in an image format. So if you’re keen on this, check back in about a months time!

Permalink | February 3rd, 2008

5 Responses to “The Next 4 Months”

  1. Ben Says:
    February 3rd, 2008 at 10:05 pm

    Hmmm… read your previous post. Then you’d better brush up on your discrete maths (graphs). Otherwise I can’t imagine how you’re going to make your search system work!

  2. Jeffrey04 Says:
    February 4th, 2008 at 3:30 am

    hey, I am also about to start a web2.0 style community project but i think you have a better idea :D

    anyway, I am not using any framework at the moment to forcing myself to learn more through coding the site. Using a framework would be something that I plan to do in future though. It is not the matter of reinventing the wheel or not, but the main thing I want from this project is to learn, learn by doing.

    good luck :D What makes u choose code igniter as there are plenty of other choices such as cakephp, symphony, zend framework etc? or just stick to ruby on rails instead?

  3. Jonathan Ng Says:
    February 4th, 2008 at 6:39 pm

    Well, CodeIgniter looks simple enough. Anyway, I have yet to try any of the PHP MVC frameworks, so either one will do I guess. My host no ruby on rails anyway.

  4. Teng Foung Says:
    February 5th, 2008 at 5:23 pm

    You reminded me that it’s time to take out my php book and read :)

  5. Eyrique Says:
    March 21st, 2008 at 3:20 am

    hey jon ^^ long time no see your blog d. talking about rapidkl searchable, a friend of mine did something similar. http://www.2bryan.com/route.php and http://kltrans.2bryan.com/ check this out. perhaps some community work could come upon. hehe..

Leave a Reply