I’m a pretty frequent contributor to various Open Source projects, either when I’m starting them myself, or getting involved in someone else’s project. I thought, as I’m probably stretching myself a bit thin with these projects right now, I’d list off what I’m doing, so I can find out whether anyone’s interested in getting involved in any of them.
- CampFireManager – This is what I’ve been most involved in over the last 8-or-so months. It’s an unconference scheduling and timetabling tool. There’s a few requests that could do with being looked at, mostly around getting the API doing more useful stuff than just showing the timetable and around being able to create some entries in advance of the event.
- Fon-NG – I’ve just started raising tickets against the FON project as I’m finding areas that I’d like changes to be made in. As I recently moved my dad on to Linux, I’m mostly using the in-built OpenVPN server on the Fon 2.0n router firmware so that I don’t need to open up ports on his router. The default OpenVPN server has a few issues that I think should be pretty straightforward to fix, but for me to fix them means I’d need to learn a whole new programming language – something I’m not really prepared to do right now.
- WebFS – I really like DropBox, but I really don’t like that it’s A) not Free Software, and B) that it’s not being run on a server I control. Accordingly, I started to write my own version, but it’s not really got anywhere yet, and in fact, it was mostly used so far to create the API code in CampFireManager!
- Social Services Finder (for the Freedom Box Project). This is a peer-to-peer style directory service for finding other social web applications. It currently hasn’t been started at all, but I know what I want it to do. It’s making “Focus on me” noises in my head, but that pesky CampFireManager keeps shouting “No, ME FIRST”. Grrr. It’s designed so that your web service has a seed list that it knows about, but when you publish to one of the directories, that also farms out your details to a number of the other services. When you search for someone, you search a few of these directories directly, but if they don’t reply with anything, you get a list of the other directories those directories know about, and you then poll the other ones. It’s not exactly clear how it’s all going to work right now, but the idea seems good in my head! :)
- The “Bring my dad to Linux” project – Last weekend, I migrated my Dad’s ageing desktop machine to Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition. He had a couple of Windows applications (which mostly seem to just work under Wine) and a Scanner/Printer, which doesn’t really. Obviously, I can’t ask any of you guys to deal with this one for me, so for now, I’m doing this one by myself. Interestingly, I’m using OpenVPN, OpenSSH and Vino (for VNC) to perform all the remote support of his machine.
So yehr, that’s a short list of the things which are drawing my attention right now. There’s more to come, but I just wanted to write it down and get it out there!
