Dangerus fun

Once you get animated it’s hard to stop. I’ve been tinkering with transition in the Employee Profile Diagram and you get easily carried away. The diagram now rearranges itself when you click on employee name and opens up a side-window with some details, including a picture. The page has now been polyfilled to run in IE, just select the Demo button on the ‘Sign In’ box. The side-window will always show the same employee in Demo mode (my WTF-it-works! expression).
The danger with this tinkering is the mesmerising effect of the animation and the temptation to continue tinkering. The what-if effect.
I’ve been reading some of Mike Bostock’s blog which gives a good inside into the principle behind D3 and data visualisation. On the purpose of visualisation he quotes Ben Shneiderman:

The purpose of visualisation is insight, not pictures.

It’s easy to get lost in the pictures, just like software’s focus often magically shifts from function to features – the bells and whistles conundrum. Nobody remembers why a feature is needed or who asked for it – just that it is needed.
With this in mind, lets move on to what I really wanted to try-out, which is taking an employee picture and upload it to JDE.

It’s not often a programming task surprises you by how easy it is. You’re much more likely to trivialise something only for it to hit back with a vengeance – anything to do with date-time logic comes to mind. But turning on the webcam and capture a still image is really trivial (while date-time logic can still bite you)!
This works in the Demo mode but obviously without the JDE upload, just click on the camera icon. The idea is to toggle the play/pause by clicking the image and then use the Capture button to upload the image (you can only capture when the streaming is paused).

Once the image is tagged as the Default Image in JDE, it will show up for the Employee.

A quick and easy way to upload employee pictures is not a functionality that I’ve seen being in big demand – or in any demand at all. But this is as a very practical functionality that’s easy to implement. Because it’s browser based and only needs a camera, it can run on a tablet or iPad (the slide control used is not recommended for phones). The page uses the Employee Information form to extract employee list which means that it can be limited by standard JDE home business unit security. The responsibility of of uploading employee pictures can therefore be delegated to relevant management. This can be useful in industries that rely heavily on sub-contractors and consultants, like IT for example where workers don’t necessarily pass through maze of a HR department.
A face is still our best who’s-who identification and I did explore a little what’s out there in the open for software face-recognition. Unsurprisingly, this is a fertile ground with all the usual suspects offering this service. But that’s another rabbit hole.