Prototype Projects
The following is a list of side and test projects. I believe these show I continue to try and innovate, learn, and try to solve challenges rather than simply doing the minimum effort my job demands. When I hear someone say “I wish I could…” and I start trying to think how to solve the problem. Even if these projects were never widely used I learned from the process.
Web Based IVAN Software
I attempted to start an online version of the IVAN video case study software twice. Time constraints stopped development both times, but I had working prototypes to show for it and enhanced my understanding of PHP, MySQL, HTML and SMIL files. The resulting prototype allowed users to upload video files, select clips from them, and combine clips into a video sequence.
Today there are a number of Flash and Ajax products that do a better job at the video editing, but the concept of online video case study software similar to IVAN could still be useful. iShell 5 promises a web browser plugin and potentially would allow the current IVAN application to move to the Web without sacrificing many features of the desktop version of the application.
VGA Over Cat5e
The College of Education technology classrooms have a lot of cables and some do not have
a lot of conduit to travel through. VGA over Cat5e is nothing new; there are a number of companies offering this technology, but in most cases you need power on both ends, special boxes, and a fair amount of money to implement VGA over Cat5e.
I tried making my own using a RS232 9-pin to RJ45 adapter and rewiring it to a 15-pin VGA. The result was the worlds cheapest VGA over Cat5e adapter costing about $2 (if you already have Soldering equipment). The biggest problem was cable length; my tests found signal degraded significantly over 20 feet. The commercially available powered VGA over Cat5e adapters can go 150-600 feet. My homemade solution would still work for shorter run situations where a VGA cable is either difficult to run or Cat5 already exists.
Online Video Conversion Tool
YouTube lets users upload a number of different video formats that they convert for you into a FLV flash video file. This is a popular feature for teachers and students, but professors wanting to use YouTube for college business and teaching can run into permission and content concerns. My solution was to setup a server that not only converted uploaded videos, but allowed the user to set permissions, visibility, and auto-generate an embed tag.
The tool was built with HTML, PHP, CSS, and ran on Windows with Apache, MySQL, and Red5 Flash Streaming Server. The two tricky parts were converting the video file and setting permissions. The first problem I solved by launching a program on the server called ffmpeg from the command line once a video was uploaded. The second problem was solved by creating a folder in each users’ directory with a .htaccess file that the server could change depending on the owner’s desired permissions for each video.
The project as a whole was never fully implemented because of time constraints, but the underlying coding that allowed files to be uploaded and converted over the web was integrated into another project.
Explo Simple Video and Document Project
This is a good example of a quick side project that has been able to remain useful for many years because of 
its simplicity. I was asked to make a simple online viewer that streamed Flash video and pulled up related PDFs for the selected video. This project included a simple entry and edit interface. I had forgotten about the project until someone mentioned they were still using it four years later. Some text is blurred or blacked out for privacy or permission reasons.
