Today was a day of preparations for the election system (requirements came out yesterday after testing confirmed a bug in both Practical systems, one from Jondaryan and another from Crows Nest – each with their own errors the same in nature but with different data) that had become a priority yesterday. We have something like 15 business days left until the election and the requirements daily become increasingly more complex and different. Today’s introduction included adding the ability to determine which one of four states a vote is in (up from two: voted or not) and a new requirement to search and report on electoral roll details. The main application is going to be written in Delphi and is designed to handle the bulk import of data from the barcode scanners. Its also designed to handle the situation with the increasing states of votes. The back end for the system is going to be MySQL and we’re going to place a web front end once the data has been entered into the system so that we can easily report on the information available. I’m probably going to spend tomorrow building the system to handle all of the little things that are required, shouldn’t take me too long to do it all and test that its working.

The other thing I did today was prepare the groundwork for one of my other research projects to prove feasibility. It looks like at the preliminary testing stage that things are going to work properly, its going to take a bit of time and effort to get things up and running but it looks like it may yet work. With any luck I’ll get some more time to look at it tomorrow though I’ll probably end up looking at road defect maintenance software as well as voting software, yay! Fun for the whole family.