30 Nov 2006
I always thought the script.aculo.us drag’n’drop-shop demo was stupid. It seemed illogical and only really practical for stupid puncy little shops with five or ten products – certainly, with everything listed on the same page.
Then it hit me — this is perfect for shuffling documents around. CYIADA (see-uh-da), is (partially) about selling documents and resources electronically — and it does that with pre-paid credits. This, of course, means that there doesn’t have to be any cumbersome checkout stage. Better than Shopify (excellent though that is), potentially.
Drag documents you like when browsing into a floating “My Resources” bin on the side of the page, AJAX is used to throw up a “confirm purchase” DIV which presents simple “yes”/”oops” options, and keep moving. It’d be trivial to modify the confirm view to have a “purchase for my whole group” checkbox (which would, of course, change the cost), too. Anything beyond that might be too complex.
Of course, there would be graceful degradation for those without JavaScript turned on… because someone has to ruin the party :P
30 Nov 2006
You can run Django in IronPython under .Net. Awesome. A Windows-based server is suddenly a choice again, which is… fantastic. Mostly for piping documents through MS Office products for indexing and PDF generation, because OO.o is great with Word docs but not so great — font sizing issues, etc. — with other things, especially PowerPoint, which could account for up to a quarter of the content contributed by users, I’d say. So I can run native MS Office -> PostScript export -> ps2pdf processes, and MS Office -> Horrible XML -> Scrub markup filters -> Search index, without having to battle with Wine, etc.
Of course, the second process would probably benefit from using OO.o as a processing environment, but that’s equally achievable on a Windows or *nix platform.
So many fears about platform (OS and language) have been sufficiently allayed. Which is kind of annoying, because, all of a sudden, .Net is actually an option. I’m still confused over databases though, so there’s plenty of befuddlement to go around. Ultimately it doesn’t matter a great deal if we find the right developer (for whatever language… except obscure things like Smalltalk and Ruby … oh did I say that? … doo be doo — just for future-proofing/maintenance reasons), which, hopefully, we will. Another meeting about money for this thing is happening on December 13th, so prayer is very welcome for that! I want $35,000 to spend over about two and a half months to pay one other developer and outsource design, as well as myself, of course (the front-end dude). By the end of that time we’ll hopefully have an absolutely fantastic solution that will magically propel (not that I really want to use Propel, because that’s for PHP ;-)) itself forever… yeah, right.
We’ve got a half-baked business plan for this thing (by half-baked, I mean it’s all stuff I’ve written and the real gurus haven’t had anything to do with the numbers, etc., so it’s not really authorative) that should get it out of the red by a couple of months in (which is ridiculously quick… another reason to think it’s half-baked) and allow for cleaning up all the bits we missed in the hectic two and a bit months it was originally thrown together in, but, at the same time, it’s going to be partially dependent on licensed, published (dead tree) content (i.e. not just user-contributed stuff, which, longer term, will hopefully account for the bulk of sales — the profit margin is lower, but it’s also easier to move more units because of the sheer scope of content we’re hoping will be available) — so because we’re licensing that revenue is going to be eaten into by publishing division and other content sources.
All of that is, of course, dependent on people wanting to use these things (they do, but from there it’s a question of making the product known to them and making adoption easy) and being okay with sharing stuff they’ve written. Some knee-jerk reactions have been negative to that, but the objections were accompanied by acknowledgement of a need to think more about what sharing content is doing — that is, why we’re bothering to create this site anyway.
Which, I have realised, I have not shared here yet. I want to write it another time because I think I’m getting clearer at explaining what we’re trying to do every time I try, so it’s no bad thing repeating myself. Here’s a brief overview of what Josh does (or, is trying to do) at Youthworks.
28 Nov 2006
Just for kicks I decided to walk in to work today (my weekly bus ticket ran out and that’s as good an excuse as any). Took me pretty much dead on an hour to get here, which is quite a decent time spent in transit. I’d be half an hour to 40 minutes were I to catch a bus (once you count waiting time, etc.) so it’s really not that bad at all. Might try and make this a regular occurrence.
27 Nov 2006
Spotted this thing cruisin’ through the streets of Newtown a week or so back. I want one. For those who can’t see great, it’s a vehicle with two big mumma antennas hooked up to a guy with a laptop sitting inside (yes, hooked up to the guy, the laptop is just so he can play CS… what do you think I meant?), whilst the sign on the back reads “CAUTION: Slow moving vehicle, Radio coverage testing”.
In other words, All Your WEP/WPA Are Belong To Us. Classy.
Later: When writing this post I spelt “Antenna” as “Umbrella”. Apologies for any other gaping mistakes — clearly, I’m not quite with it.
27 Nov 2006
It was a great success on Friday night, praise God. We had a couple of kids who don’t usually come to TACKLES come along, and they all loved it … and we (the leaders, that is) all loved it! Haha. I’ve got a couple of photos but won’t post them here… sigh. Pretty sure we’re cleared to use them but… whatever.
Anyway, here’s a massive (it’s like 3x2m/10×6.5′) painting they all did over the course of the evening:
Awesome, huh?