David's Blog

Barcode Box is a “toy” application I wrote a few weeks back, at the start of my UROP. It’s a toy in the sense that I wrote it as a means to figure out Android development – I hadn’t expected so many people to find it useful. A fair amount of positive feedback and suggestions were received and so earlier this week I implemented a few of them. QR code is at the end.

Preview

Features

• Scan barcodes in to a notepad style list
• Add annotations to scanned barcodes
• Launch the appropriate application for URI barcodes (i.e. web addresses open in the browser, market links open in the market)
• Share scanned barcodes by regenerating the barcode on screen for others to scan
• Create barcodes from user entered data

New in 1.1/1.1.1 (1.1.1 is a bugfix)

• Export barcodes to CSV on microSD card, including notes
• Export barcodes as CSV by email, including notes
• Rapid scanning mode – no confirmation after each scan, just keep scanning and press back when done
• Annotations show below the barcode data in the list view
• User interface improvements

Unfortunately due to a loss of signing keys, version 1.1 and 1.1.1 had to be released as a new application under the name “Barcode Box 2″.

QR code

This is mainly for my own reference but if it turns up in a Google search and helps somebody that’d be cool too. I’ve just set up a full machine backup using the tools built into Windows 7. The following command when executed as an administrator will backup the entire contents of C: and D: drives to an E: drive at 3am daily:

SCHTASKS /Create /SC DAILY /TN DailyBackup /RL HIGHEST /ST 03:00 /TR “WBADMIN START BACKUP -backupTarget:e: -include:c:,d: -allCritical -quiet >> E:\backupLogs.txt”

From my experience, the backups run a *lot* faster than when using the GUI front end.

Last year as part of some supervision work I created a very basic client/server network chat application in Java, named SimpleChat. Somebody may find this useful, so I’m posting it here. In terms of design, SimpleChat uses Java RMI (remote method invocation) and the observer design pattern to transfer messages. This means the code is pretty neat because it avoids having to work on the socket level.

It’s simple to use so no documentation is required, although somewhat feature limited. A possible redeeming factor is that the Jar file is only 9.33kB – which includes both client and server functionality.

Source download: SimpleChat Source (69)

Application download: SimpleChat Application (77)

Screenshots: