My Spousal Unit is a Recurve Archer, which is Olympic style.  You’ll never see her in the Olympics, but she’s pretty good for our backyard (New York) and has won a tournament or two in the last 7 or 8 years.  My role is to drive her to the tournaments, haul her equipment around, set up her scope and sit on my tail in a lawn chair for one or two days.

If you’ve never watched an Archery tournament then it’s akin to watching your lawn for 7 or 8, unabated hours.  The first day is much fun, but day two can be draining.

Archers practice for hours on end.  Most of the time – in competition – they shoot 144 arrows, in batches (Ends is their terminology) of 3 or 6 at a time.  Usually, there are two people shooting at a target and when their time is up (one hour in dog years), another crew of two step up (the 2nd Line).  When it becomes obvious everyone is done, they walk to the target, write down their score for each arrow, draw little lines in the target, then walk back.  Whistles blow at different times to keep them from killing each other.  Sometimes people miss the target, then the chubby guy with the whistle walks around with a metal detector.  Eventually, they come back and start again.

Bored yet?  Good.  I need company.

Anyway, I decided to make a way for Archer’s to record their practice scores via the web – knowing that no archer would ever use it.

Here’s how I did it:

1)  I used our Online CMS & Knowledge Management System (the Template tool), to draw a set of concentric circles of the correct color.  Positioned each of them correctly – and rasterized the vectors into an image.

2)  Next, I made a web page, a couple of Tables (for storing the data) and a bit of Javascript that records the position of a mouseclick and submits it to the Table that holds the x,y position of each arrow.

3)  Step 3 (give or take), was to write a couple of queries that would calculate the score (based on the mouseclick position), sum all the scores – and also allow for clearing all the arrows off the target – and store in a history Table.

4) Finally, I made a dot chart – which plots every arrow dynamically – and returns the dot to the page.

was a vector, now an image

The query:

SELECT “xyarchery”.”archer” as “archer”, “xyarchery”.”session” as “xyarchery_session”, “xyarchery”.”arrow_number” as “arrow”, IF(mod(“xyarchery”.”arrow_number”, 6) = 0, 0, 1) + IF(“xyarchery”.”arrow_number” = 1, 0, “xyarchery”.”arrow_number”) / 6 :: integer as “end”, “xyarchery”.”xx” as “x”, “xyarchery”.”yy” as “y_display”, 400 – “xyarchery”.”yy” as “y”, round(GREATEST(10.5 – sqrt(((“xyarchery”.”xx” – 200) ^ 2) + ((“xyarchery”.”yy” – 200) ^ 2)) / 20, 0)) as “score”, ‘    ——>’ as “spacer”, IF(“xyarchery”.”lock” = ‘true’, ‘Practice arrow’, IF(CASE   WHEN “xyarchery”.”xx” < 190 THEN ‘left’  WHEN “xyarchery”.”xx” > 210 THEN ‘right’  ELSE ”  END || ‘ ‘ || CASE   WHEN “xyarchery”.”yy” < 190 THEN ‘hi’  WHEN “xyarchery”.”yy” > 210 THEN ‘lo’  ELSE ”  END = ‘ ‘, ‘Nice! 10x’, ‘Was ‘ || CASE   WHEN “xyarchery”.”xx” < 190 THEN ‘left’  WHEN “xyarchery”.”xx” > 210 THEN ‘right’  ELSE ”  END || ‘ ‘ || CASE   WHEN “xyarchery”.”yy” < 190 THEN ‘hi’  WHEN “xyarchery”.”yy” > 210 THEN ‘lo’  ELSE ”  END)) as “adjust?”
FROM
“younicycle_com”.”xyarchery” AS “xyarchery”
WHERE “xyarchery”.”arrow_number” > 1
ORDER BY “arrow” desc
LIMIT ALL
OFFSET 0

If anyone has an overwhelming interest in testing it, the page is here: Archery Scoring

Printer just jammed.  Back to work.  btw for any archers -> my wife shoots around 1,200…. 1,220.  Hoping for a 1,250 this year.

Much of my ‘old – line’ business includes the entire process of Benefit Statements (Total Compensation Statements), to include data manipulation, design, print and fulfillment.  Personalized, financial documents have more impact – but there is only so much information that you can squeeze onto one piece of paper, which leads to the topic at hand – SaaS and QR Code.  If you aren’t familiar with QR Code ( a type of 2D barcode), it is definitely worth a look.  Pretty interesting concept – an example:

SaaS QR Code

1) Create a document

2) Create a QR Code with entered data (example: ‘http://postgresql.org’)

3) Place the QR Code on your doc – and print it.

4) Assuming you have a smart phone (may require a small software install) – point your smart phone at the printed QR Code – and you will be prompted to ‘Go online’.  If yes, you would be directed immediately to the web page for PostgreSQL (example).

Of course – the actual website page could also have a user form, where user info could be submitted.  We already have all the other necessary SaaS Tools (database builder, query editor, report & pdf generator, CRON, etc), so it will be a snap to schedule the creation of a Report within an SaaS Account, which would in turn be emailed to us at a certain time each day.

Short version?  Printed documents need not be ‘dead-end’, but can become living and allow for dynamic interaction.

So – I decided this is just too interesting to delay until 2010, so we are testing an implementation now on our testbox and should apply to our Production servers by the end of next week.  We still have a few items that need to be added:

1) Allow creation not only of gif, jpg or png – but also eps – which can be scaled.  This will allow creation of QR Code signage (say for a url of a restaurant menu – or a list of upcoming events) – really large output.

2) Add capability for QR Code color – and background color.

3) Add capability to use a datasource or a Table with values that will store the various settings and initial data input.  This is where the Benefit Statements come back in play as  we will be able to make personalized QR Code.

Below is the current GUI we used for testing.  It will change significantly, as outlined above.