Joe Lawton

Information Technology

Custom PCSince 1993, I have been involved in computers and information technology in some form or fashion. My start was back in DOS 5 & Windows 3.1, learning the basics and doing some light BASIC & QBASIC programming. From there I started doing minor repairs and upgrades for family and friends. The rest is history from doing freelance housecalls to starting and operating a computer services business and ending with the title of IT Director for Lost Valley Lake Resort.

 

Random-ish History Factoid

After my initial classes on IBM-PCs and BASIC, I got my first computer; a Commodore 64 with 64K RAM and a 5.25" Floppy Drive. A far cry from the MS-DOS & Windows environment, it did give me an appreciation for command line programming fundamentals and a lot of patience!


Mixed Bag

With the constant changes and improvements made in modern Operating Systems, I still come across occasions that still call for things to be written in the original BASIC to perform simple operations.

Craziest Project to Date

In late 2014, to meet the need of efficently attaching scanned documents to a large, database-driven software product, I planned, tested, developed and implemented a unique automated scanning system based on available hardware and freeware software. In a nutshell...

  • Barcode is printed on a label or the document
  • Document is scanned on a specific network scanner with a preset that saves to a specific folder
  • Scheduled task runs every 20 minutes, searching for new scans
  • If scans are detected, command line program is launched to decode the barcodes
  • Barcode & Filename data is saved to a file
  • Internal webpage is launched to perform the database insertion
  • Files are copied to the specific locations

After some tweaks and a few alterations to the process, the system is scanning at or above 90% accuracy, taking what was originally a 15 minute process down to less than 60 seconds per file on average.