The Beauty of Barcode
Although I’m pursuing myself to know how in construction and civil project based business, still, I cannot help my self to reject several (interesting) IT projects from some of my good friends. It doesn’t mean that I’m abandoning my commitment out of my family business, but hey, would you leave a challenge that looks like fun to deal with and at the same time you can earn some for a long holiday with your family somewhere ?..
Now what about barcode ? What the beauty of it ? One of the project that I’m currently working on is using a PDA with Barcode Reader, unfortunately I cannot disclose the company and device specification now. Although it looks like small project, the implementation goes everywhere. It will deployed in 8 remote area, ones will have a portable notebook (’station’) with GPRS to verify and publish transactions or download necessary information from my server somewhere in the internet. Each station will responsible to disseminate information for 2-3 PDA, and consolidate all the transactions that was collected by operators using the PDA. Every single transaction that was collected by operator will build a number of figure in my Pivot Table template that will be use by my client to analyze several things, the successful rate of the marketing campaign his running, sales report by location by product category by partner, etc.
Working on this project make me realize barcode is one of the language that are bridging between our worlds with machine. Look around, barcode is everywhere.. When I was testing my code to work with the scanner, it was way to easy to found a sample of barcode. From my CD Case, Cell Phone, Credit Card Bill of Statement, Charger, Lamp (even my deodorant case ;P) all has their own barcode. It’s the universal digital language that differentiate physical manufactured stuff. According to wiki, the first item that had their barcode identity was a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum.
Btw, above is my name encoded in Code 128, verified by my PDA Barcode reader as well.. Cool ? Hmm, it looks like old fashioned for me.. Actually, we do have the other version of ‘barcode’, this is my name, encoded in DataMatrix 2D Barcode 
