February 28th, 2011 — Random Observation
The Problems
Small and growing charities have many operational and communications needs that would be well served with custom Django apps. At the same time there are many budding developers who are looking for real projects, not contrived tutorials to learn with. There are also a number of busy experienced developers who still have a bit a spare time and have a strong moral core.
A Possible solution
A site that connects worthy organizations with willing developers.
Charities/Groups put together proposals about what they need – clarity counts.
They must provide a contact/liason.
Developers can register, but their contact info is not shared with charities. This is developer centric.
Everything must be open source (is license type specified?)
Can stipulate that some form of credit banner for project be placed on final
result such a credit would list this project (the broker project) and hosting
co, and would link to a project page listing all contributors
Provide github organization repo page utilyze issue tracker and read-the-docs what other collaboration tools could be used? a donated basecamp? could leverage donated deployment options (with advertising credit)
- Roles of people helping out:
- developer python/django
- front end designer
- mentor
- project manager
Can look at the GSOC mentor model
Could have developers and community members vote for most worthy
Could have sprints for charities
How to verify groups/501c3 (can search IRS pub 78)
Limit this to smaller groups initially, based on cashflows? # employees?
Initially limit this to US Domestic agencies (even if they have international
projects)
The Challenges
Would there be anything approaching equilibrium in supply and demand – or would the demand swamp the process? Could filters/voting systems fix this?
How to ensure that organizations that CAN afford to hire developrs do, and not take advantage.
How to ensure that code quality is reasonable?
How to follow up with improvements, changes, and training?
Discuss Here
November 4th, 2010 — Random Observation
As a follow on the previous post – I wanted to demonstrate how the individual lights (with all their own features) can not only be grouped into a simple synchronized group – but they can be added into a “sequence” container which will operate a chase. This also shows the type of interactive control provided by MIDI hardware.
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November 2nd, 2010 — Random Observation
There is a large hobbiest community out there of people putting together light shows synchronized to music. These are mostly around xmas string lights during the holidays.
The lights are controlled via a hardware board that takes signals from a computer and operates multiple dimmers to control the brightness of the lights. These dimmers range in the number of channels, but can be connected together to add more channel capacity. It is not unusual to have hundreds of channels in a residential size show.
The sequencing of these dimmer channels is generally done with software that divides the show into a set of time chunks represented as columns, with each channel being a row – resulting in a grid. To sequence a show, a light intensity level needs to be set for each chunk of time, usually many per second, for many channels. This grid can be huge and time consuming to fill, and doesn’t seem an intuitive canvas to experiment with creativity in response to the music. I thought there should be a better way.
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May 10th, 2010 — Random Observation
In a old, but still relevant post James Bennet argues for a way of handling the choice tuples used by Django. One of the reasons I haven’t always followed that advice was that it was just a lot of extra mundane keystrokes, and I’m lazy. It was well suited for a quick Python hack, and I now use the script below as a TextMate bundle so that I can just type in a list and have it converted to “the right way”.
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March 12th, 2010 — Random Observation
Have a lab of Macs – need to burn a bunch of CD or DVDs? Harness those monkeys!
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March 12th, 2010 — Random Observation
A few of the tools I use have spent some time working up bash completing. django-admin and virtualenvwrapper to name two. As a Mac sysadmin I use a number of CLI tools for stuff, and was interested in working up some bash completion for these.
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March 8th, 2010 — Random Observation
There are several procedural things at work that still involve a signature, or hand written note on a piece of paper. This reality has made it hard to digitize these practices. While much of the process could be replace with a web app, with plenty of benefits. The reality is that because the paper step is required, the process would become disjointed. One way to reconcile the paper with the digital record, is to scan in the signed document and attach it to the digital record. However this doesn’t pass my “ugh” test in that even with ajax, manually attaching scanned documents to the correct record is still a tedious process. That is where qrcode comes in.
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February 15th, 2010 — Random Observation
The Django Advent site is proving to be some great writing. The recent piece by Kevin Fricovsky hits the nail on the head in so many ways.
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February 11th, 2010 — Random Observation
Not much to say other than I’ve been using this for a while and want to pass it on.
This post has a great tool for randomizing terminal colors.
If you have a lot of terminal windows open – this can make expose very handy (I don’t really use tabs).
I have this bound to CMD-Shift-C
January 13th, 2010 — Random Observation
I have the occasional need to resize a set of images. I used to use Photoshop batch actions, then I used some droplets, and recently I’ve been using a simple python script with PIL (Python Image Library)
We recently got an 8 core Mac Pro, and I wanted to see if I could take more advantage of all those cores when resizing images.
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November 20th, 2009 — Random Observation
Been using hg, and like to use hg diff to help me make better commit notes – but been spoiled by bitbuckets HTML view of diffs
So here is a quick script that I keep on my path for viewing hg diff, formated with pygments – I’m sure it would be very easy to adopt this to git.
here is the gist
October 29th, 2009 — Technology
using apache, mysql, mod_wsgi, and virtualenv
Dreamhost provides free hosting to nonprofits, and for now they seem to have thrown in a virtual private server. This is hard not to take advantage of, and I’m hoping that the VPS is better performing than the shared hosting – but my concern is that they all share the same mysql servers. So here is how I got pinax up and running in its comfy and modern Python web stack.
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October 28th, 2009 — Technology
At work we needed to have a standard local account that would work off campus, but not on campus. Here was my solution.
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October 22nd, 2009 — Random Observation
Installing the mysql-python package on Leopard is relatively easy if you’ve installed MySQL from the mysql.org distribution – but installing on Leopard Server is a bit more problematic.
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October 15th, 2009 — Random Observation
So found this buried under some dust. I had forgotten that I had ever set this up, but in adding some stuff to a .bash_profile on an older server found some code that I’ve spruced up bit for this post that lets you locally edit a remote file initiated via command in a remote SSH session.
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