All over but the shouting
Nov. 6th, 2007 10:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thewayneI've been doing an interesting project for the last six weeks or so: I wrote a vote tally system for the City. We had a previous system, but the guy who wrote it was long gone, and the seemingly very talented web admin that we hired lasted maybe a month before being fired. So I was tasked with (a) writing a system that would store votes, (b) write a data entry system to input results, and (c) write a web interface to display the votes on the City web site that would also feed the City's cable TV channel in ASP with IIS.
I've never written ASP or worked with IIS before. I've never written dynamic code for a web site, all of my sites are pretty much static content. And I've never used Visual Studio Web Developer, I'm just glad that it's a free download.
Let me tell you something about Visual Studio Web Developer: the documentation SUCKS. I had several occasions where I change one bit of code and the entire page blows up. I got very adept at recreating code, let me tell you!
The end result is pretty cool, it's up at http://www.las-cruces.org/vote07/index.htm. The result pages refresh themselves every ten seconds. I developed the second to last screen which shows all races on one page to show on our two big projection TV's in City Council Chambers, then I found out that they also wanted to show it on the City's cable channel. I didn't know that the graphics resolution of TV was so low. I knew it was low, but WOW. So I developed the last page that rotates among all the races every ten seconds, and it looks pretty good on TV.
It's a pretty darn cool system. One database, three tables (Candidates, Polling Places, Votes), three stored procedures, fifteen or so queries. One Access program for entry, ten or twelve ASP pages. It's data-driven, so the amount of work to re-tune it for a new election is actually rather minimal.
I'm hoping the City attorneys will let me release it on SourceForge, I think there are other places that might find it handy. We'll totally re-develop it when we get a new web admin in and settled, but I would imagine some of it will carry forward.
The "all over but the shouting" is that the polls have been closed for four hours and we're just now getting the last polling place. EIGHT VOTES separate the Mayor from his Opponent. Drum roll, please....
Challenger beats mayor by 74 votes.
I've never written ASP or worked with IIS before. I've never written dynamic code for a web site, all of my sites are pretty much static content. And I've never used Visual Studio Web Developer, I'm just glad that it's a free download.
Let me tell you something about Visual Studio Web Developer: the documentation SUCKS. I had several occasions where I change one bit of code and the entire page blows up. I got very adept at recreating code, let me tell you!
The end result is pretty cool, it's up at http://www.las-cruces.org/vote07/index.htm. The result pages refresh themselves every ten seconds. I developed the second to last screen which shows all races on one page to show on our two big projection TV's in City Council Chambers, then I found out that they also wanted to show it on the City's cable channel. I didn't know that the graphics resolution of TV was so low. I knew it was low, but WOW. So I developed the last page that rotates among all the races every ten seconds, and it looks pretty good on TV.
It's a pretty darn cool system. One database, three tables (Candidates, Polling Places, Votes), three stored procedures, fifteen or so queries. One Access program for entry, ten or twelve ASP pages. It's data-driven, so the amount of work to re-tune it for a new election is actually rather minimal.
I'm hoping the City attorneys will let me release it on SourceForge, I think there are other places that might find it handy. We'll totally re-develop it when we get a new web admin in and settled, but I would imagine some of it will carry forward.
The "all over but the shouting" is that the polls have been closed for four hours and we're just now getting the last polling place. EIGHT VOTES separate the Mayor from his Opponent. Drum roll, please....
Challenger beats mayor by 74 votes.
