I’m sure you’ve come across IE7’s warning “This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to display the nonsecure items?” Or IE’s more recent warning “Do you want to view only the page content that was delivered securely?” Other browsers have similar messages, which will rightly unnerve cautious internet users. These warnings are the result of the page being secured, delivered over HTTPS, but some of the page’s resources being delivered using HTTP. It’s a simple thing[...]

Relational databases tend to be furnished with many foreign key constraints. These prevent some types of invalid data from being added to tables – you can think of them as an ASSERT if you’re more familiar with C# and the like. Normally, the performance impact is minimal, based on the following arrangement: The column being referenced by the foreign key will almost always be the primary key of its table. As such it will be indexed so that, when adding[...]

TortoiseSVN 1.7 added some Windows integration goodness in the form of integration with Windows 7’s “Libraries” feature. Windows 7 Libraries are a way of giving a name to a group of related folders. You can then search the library, which will look through all the different folders you added to it. The important thing to remember is that all the folders you add to a library will remain in the same physical location. There are a few special, default libraries[...]

Sometimes when you are running a long running script or stored procedure it’s nice to know whereabouts it has got to, often we put in print statements for this purpose. The problem is that half the time you won’t see the printed statement until SQL Server decides it can’t buffer anymore and shoves it back to the client (e.g. Management Studio) which may not be until it has finished in some cases. Instead of using print in these situations the[...]

OCC represented Cupid for the International Congress on Telehealth and Telecare at the Kings Fund on 7-8 March. There was a lot of interest in the results from the Whole System Demonstrator which has established the benefits of telemedicine for chronic diseases. The European Commission was directly represented by speakers from the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing. Cupid built links with two other FP7 projects, Chronious and inCasa.

Telemedicine is the use of telecommunication and information technologies in order to provide health care at a distance. Here at OCC we are involved in a number of telemedicine projects around Parkinson’s disease and the latest is CuPiD. Part funded by the European Union (FP7/2007-2013), the CuPiD project is developing and field testing home rehabilitation services for the major motor disabilities caused by Parkinson’s disease. OCC is responsible for transforming these services into telemedicine services; available in the home with[...]

OCC have donated some of our old PCs to help Shepherd’s View set up an internet café to help support their residents. First Housing is the Shepherd’s View service that focuses on helping young parents by providing a supportive environment, helping them develop their skills and self-confidence as parents and as individuals. Shepherds View work in partnership with parents and children, developing supportive relationships based on mutual respect and openness and offering a range of support to young parents so[...]

PSOCC V2.2  is now rolling out to OCC’s PSOCC users. The new look PSOCC improves the way support providers can securely share information and workloads. New reports let users more clearly see the support that’s needed and the outcomes achieved. The improved screen layouts provide the adaptability needed by new commissioners whilst retaining the integrated SP reporting still required by some LAs. PSOCC is one product in OCC’s range of software solutions designed for the Support Providers, enabling them to[...]

The PERFORM project is one of 50 projects selected from 450 applications to be displayed at the Innovation Convention 2011 exhibition to be held in Brussels on 5th and 6th December 2011. A working version of the system will be on show. OCC’s software engineers are developing, testing and integrating software to model a person’s tremor for a wearable home monitoring device for people with neurogenerative diseases. OCC has a long standing involvement with research into virtual reality related healthcare[...]

OCC is sponsoring the Predictive Asset Management conference at the Mayfair Conference Centre, London, on the 19th and 20th October. OCC’s Reynold Greenlaw is one of the speakers at a panel discussion on the 2nd day: “Strategies and predictive applications to minimise CAPEX and OPEX”. Kaz Librowski, Technical Director,  and Reynold Greenlaw, Account manager  are look forward to meeting other attendees  from Utilities, National Grid  and CapGemini, and explaining about the software OCC have developed for managing the assets for[...]

Right from the start, we wanted to make our application as usable on a tablet as it was on a laptop or desktop computer, which means offering top-notch support for touch as well as mouse-clicks. The only area where this presented a challenge was in allowing a user to use touch to drag and drop in our HTML5 Canvas controls. It was clear how to do this with mouse-clicks; you would bind your mousedown, mousemove and mouseup events to the[...]

Backbone comes with methods for fetching and saving data models to and from the server. However, we want an application that works offline and synchronizes with the server when online. Therefore we require to communicate models both with the server and with  the browser’s local storage. The good news is that a backbone extension “backbone.localstorage.js” provides the communication with local storage, and by simply dropping its .js file. The bad news is that you then cannot communicate between backbone and[...]

To summarise, I have to say it was a very productive week with many hours spent on development. More than in a normal work week. But I believe it was worth putting in the extra hours to see the final result. CoffeeScript was a very nice discovery and made writing JavaScript really nice. It was hard though to change my mind about some ways things get written but once past that, all was well. Almost. At some point the code[...]

The last day of Dev Camp is over and are trying to tie some loose ends, doing some last-minute polishing and fixes. The application is in pretty good shape, it allows us to open a questionnaire, fill it up, save and edit. In both offline and online modes on desktops as well as on smartphones or iPads. From our point of view it is a success. I didn’t expect that in 5 days we’d be able to do so much.[...]