20 Jul 2009
The white MacBook was doing a decent job of replacing my HP laptop. Actually what was the HP is now a VMware virtual machine.
Jacob inherited the white MacBook.
I got a new aluminum unibody MacBook Pro 13″ at the Apple Store. Once I got it home transferring my stuff took about an hour using Apple’s tool. That was a pretty good experience.
01 Jun 2009
It is good to hear from folks I hadn’t seen in decades.
There are too many ways to keep up with Facebook. Like IM Facebook could become a big distraction. Things are pretty rough at work right now so I’m taking a break from Facebook.
22 May 2009
So here are the first steps…
- Register wallacedeermanagement.com
- Setup web hosting on DreamHost.
- Create a couple static web pages to give visitors something to see.
ASP
- I’m most familiar with Microsoft’s Active Server Pages for data driven websites. I have created dozens of internal ASP web apps using both the legacy ASP and the newer ASP.net frameworks.
- The shared web hosting plan is not using Microsoft technology though.
- Over the last few years most of my programming has been in Python. Python is a very productive language to work in so I looked at web frameworks using Python. Django is a web framework like Ruby on Rails – but using Python.
- Most of my Python programming was system administration. The only web related stuff was just kicking the tires with the Python technologies.
- Ruby is a scripting language much like Python.
- Ruby on Rails is a programming framework optimized for productivity. RoR makes it easy to follow Agile Development practices that is customer focused.
- Having read several books from The Pragmatic Bookshelf I knew there was good help available. I was going to need the help. Even though I had more experience with the other technologies the RoR documentation helped make this the choice.
Setup the development environment
Programming editor
- The choice came down to TextMate and Vim . TextMate is the editor of choice for the Ruby on Rails creators. There’s lots of productivity features as well as documentation and tutorials. The main downside is TextMate is only available for Mac OSX. I have a Mac but need to work from Windows also. Vim is an old but powerful editor. Vim is difficult to learn but rewards those with patience. Because Vim is available for most operating systems it is my choice.
Source code management
- Source code management software keeps track of all the changes made to programming code. With hundreds of files and thousands of lines of code across many version SCM software tracks the changes.
- Subversion is the choice because it is reliable and I have a lot of experience with it. Git and Mercurial are new and interesting tools but I haven’t gotten comfortable with distributed version control yet.
Project management software
- Redmine keeps track of the programming tasks, the feature requests as well as bugs. I have it set up on the web so this information is available from most anywhere.
Staging development
- Most of the coding is on the Local computer. That is one of my Windows or my Mac PCs. Two of my Windows PCs died recently so the flexibility came in handy. Changes are often saved to the Subversion source code management.
- The Staging site is on DreamHost like the Live site. The DreamHost web environment allows me to catch some issues before going live. Using a Ruby on Rails tool called Capistrano makes it fairly simple to stage multiple sites for testing.
- I removed the static pages once I could deploy an application that worked to the Live site.
01 May 2009
Coordinating use of stands for a group of hunters is time-consuming
- I helped Randy Caspersen with brochures for his archery group over the last year or so. The Wallace Deer Management Association is a group of archery hunters who work closely with home owners to harvest deer that have become pests.
- The Wallace Deer Management Association is a group of responsible hunters. They meet with landowners who have a problem with white-tailed deer and discuss hunting responsibly on the property. Members hunt from existing tree stands. The stands help the landowners to know where hunters will be. The stands are safer for hunting because they direct shooting down towards the ground.
- The membership of the WDMA has grown. The number of landowners and stands grew. Once archery season started the task of coordinating the hunters and the stands grew as well. The effort needed by WDMA’s officers for coordinating was becoming a problem. The officers were spending time coordinating instead of hunting.
- MS Word and Excel were among the tools used to manage the information.
We looked at alternatives to Word & Excel
Google Apps was one of the first alternatives we looked at.
- Google Apps are web-based applications like MS Office.
- Google calendar allows sharing calendars with other people. After 5 or 6 events in a day it became hard to tell the events apart. Given the number of members and stands Google Calendar is not a good solution.
- With Google Sites a table layout could be made for tracking use of the stands. While Sites is easier than working with HTML many of the WDMA members are not technical enough to work with it.
- Most of the Google Apps are free of charge.
- Google Apps allow you to restrict who has access.
A few Open Source apps might have worked
- The Open Source apps had a higher learning curve than WDMA could work with.
- Hunters make up the WDMA group. Many of these folks do not use PCs much. We didn’t find a good fit in the time we took.
Manually edited web page
- There are a few web editing programs that make it as simple as working with MS Word or Excel.
- Protecting potentially sensitive information gets cumbersome.
- These alternatives only worked well when there was only one or two people updating the reservations while everyone else could only read.
Develop a custom website
- Throughout our search for alternatives the WDMA folks asked about a custom website solution.
- I knew that a simple site wouldn’t be much more efficient than the other alternatives.
- It was Randy’s hand sketches that convinced me. We basically came up with a storyboard showing how the thing would have to work in order for hunters to work with it.
26 Apr 2009
A few folks asked about privacy issues. I figure the the best way is to look around.