We had a nice media event at the County Courthouse to show off some of our recent achievements in IT. The bulk of the presentation was for the public wireless access blanketing the courthouse and online legal library access offerings, but the wiz-bang that shone for the media was my docket scroller*. Cool stuff-- incidentally, my big mug takes up half the screen in this KBTX video clip:
See the video clip directly (media player)
Some pics of the docket scroller in progress:
* I say "my," but that's just because I am the one that probably lost the most sleep over this.. It was a great idea, but it took a lot of additional know-how from others to bring it to fruition. The hardware selection and physical mounting, the linux box config, discerning the layout to appease the 6 courts' judges and coordinators.. It was a good notch for my experience managing a large project, and much was learned through and through.
The "courthouse docket scroller project" is a complex system of 8 flat panel monitors that shows court dockets to the visiting public. The front end is powered by two linux boxes each with two 2-port video cards displaying a dhtml web app in full screen Firefox. The back end provides the xml data feed that is built dynamically every 15 minutes by a custom php script that logs in via telnet to our horrendous, legacy TSG justice system, queues up a text version of the day's docket for all courts, and massages the info into an XML file.