Software
I’m a software developer by profession at this point, and I belong to the camp that dabbles in code beyond the 9-7 (sic). Plus my job allows me time to write things that are rather fun and expand my reach, so I’ve written a variety of stuff. Here’s a list of supported, semi-supported, and ancient projects, in no particular order:
- SlingshotSMS is a Python ‘modem server’ which uses pygsm as its core. You plug in a GSM modem via USB, boot up SlingshotSMS, and you can then use a webapp or any other app to interact with the modem via RSS and HTTP POST
- I’ve written a CMS or two from scratch, but wouldn’t recommend doing it now. AMP is running a system called “Helm”, based on CodeIgniter, which is optimized for the bizarre read-only web environment offered by W&M.
- OpenLayerer is a binding of the OpenLayers build tools to the web. It’s open source and built around improvements to the core code instead of hacks. With it, you can bake your own OpenLayers mapping library, which weighs far less than the 800KB original.
- Mapsona is the core of maps-on-a-stick mapping projects, and has dabbled in some interesting areas of the web – the ‘extreme offline,’ so to speak. It is a needs-based solution, so IE6 support, for instance, is a big deal, and sexiness isn’t. That doesn’t mean it’s not cute.
- Uke I wrote a ukulele website and released the source recently. It uses Sinatra, a very lovable Ruby web framework, and includes a chord rendering library which I’ve been meaning to generalize for a while now.
- Other bits – fragments of code that don’t fit into other heaps. Stuff like connecting to Amazon EC2 instances, formatting LaTeX documents, and the like.
- The Swem Signal was a super-simple idea, realized in HTML, Javascript, and PHP, which helps students at William & Mary (my alma mater) find each other in a moderately cavernous library. Now there’s a version at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Claire T. Carney Library as well. Source is available at request (it’s open source, just not polished), but the team at Swem built on it and released facebook-athenaeum, which is a Facebook application including the functionality.
- Habiter is a CLI frontend to a system that’s like the don’t break the chain method. I wrote it so that I’d keep doing the dishes and showing up to work on time, and I think other productivity-minded people will find it very worthwhile as well.
- A while back I wrote a Textile Preview System for Gedit, since I was running Ubuntu on a T42. Apparently people actually use it, even though my T42 bit the dust hard that summer, and I have since switched to vim.
- In the distant past, I also made a redundancy checker which worked as a Greasemonkey script. A bunch of people used it, and it got written up somewhere, and then I stopped using it, used a different browser, decided that there were better ways to do it, and abandoned the project. Nowadays you’d be better off using deadweight, an excellent tool from Seth Fitzsimmons.
I also use some great software that others have written, and a list might be useful for those looking to spice up their setups.
- Homebrew is a far superior alternative to DarwinPorts / Fink, that moves at a rapid pace and is human enough for low-level dorks like myself to make contributions.
- MacVim is the best implementation of Vim for the Mac. Vim is a wonderful text editor, because anything you need from a text editor, one can find in Vim by either reading the documentation or writing it yourself. PCKeyboardHack is a small bit of software that does the dirty job of remapping Caps Lock to Escape, which is the golden key to making Vim worthwhile.
- Ack is golden for searching through files, and with a little snippet, lets me search just for Drupal-related files, etc.
- Things, which sadly isn’t open source, is still the best todo list I’ve found. I switched at least 10 times before deciding on Things, and it has fit every need I have thought of.
- Notational Velocity is a shockingly-great notetaking application for the Mac which is also open-source and very fast.