Some Project Ideas#

(Don't steal muh project ideas, yo. If you do, give me credit.)

• First National Bank of Dad
  • Revolving credit (charge) account
• Points system: Every hour: On Task, Speaks Nicely, Follows Directions
  • Simple status display for kid (today, this week, totals so far, nice colored grid)
  • Similar display for parent/administrator, with ability to toggle a particular cell to earned, unearned, unknown [, unavailable?]
  • Ability to log free-text why a point was unearned.
• Math Drill 2
• Diaspora cluster generator
  • Clickable image generated with dot (or D3)
  • Ability to add notes for each system
  • Done! https://diaspora.netlify.com
• Haskell: world generator based on the algorithm in the paper "Planet Map Generation by Tetrahedral Subdivision", by Mogensen. The C program he provides on his site (http://www.diku.dk/~torbenm/Planet/) truncates elevation data at some max, which makes coloring desert world elevations problematic (since they start with a positive elevation bias, and wind up with a lot of max-elevation values))
• Hakyll, source = org-mode or TWiki markup, dest = differential upload to Amazon S3.
• 2-D surface with arbitrary positioning and rotation of arbitrary rectangular pieces of "paper" (with arbitrary text & icons).
• Software idea: length of voting line with reputation of data source
• Project idea: post-it style task board
• JSPWiki improvements
  • new: JSPWiki renderer for org-mode. (Note that you can run emacs server as a daemon (--daemon) and get quicker (and less resource-intensive, I suspect) execution via emacsclient.)
  • bug: new pages stay in "not-found/non-existent" mode for a very long time (until session timeout?) after they've been saved. Once they're saved, the link should take users to the newly-created page, not the "new page" (oh, and you can't log in because it's not a public wiki) dialog, and not the "edit page" dialog if you do happen to be logged in and have edit privileges. At least the content isn't lost.
  • Add OpenJML http://www.openjml.org/
• XML tools like http://www.utilities-online.info/
  • Subscription model
    • Users pay for account
    • Some sort of metered access? Need to balance heavy users and casual one -- don't want casuals to starve.
• Family Grocery List PWA for multi-member households
  • Floating Action Button (FAB): "add item"
  • Deep links to actions that can be shortcutted
  • Recipe database, w/ability to fix a meal w/known ingredients on hand, or with one or two missing ingredients, or with only one ingredient known to be on hand (i.e., something we'd like to use up). Can print out shopping list for pickup on the way home that evening.
  • Features for roommate/housemate situations?
• Microscope tabletop
  • animate card rotation & movement
• Something like http://pork.io that:
  • Chops up prose better, on more natural breaks
  • Allows posting tweetstorm as a reply to another tweet
  • Allows different numbering schemes
• Wealth distribution curve interpolated with draggable spline control points and high-value display cutoffs that show the pile-up effect on the right.
  • Ability to select different taxation rates for different income brackets to see what revenue is generated. (Area-under-curve, basically.)
• Mastodon plugin for generic recommendations with reputation & federation
• Where's my car at? PWA to let users specify where they parked, for finding cars in parking garages
  • Floor color (palette); Letter-number (B4)
  • Freehand sketch parking deck, average w/other users' sketches
  • Filter out dumb sketches, so nobody draws dicks or boobies
    • Can't do that algorithmically, need users to be able to flag bad sketches
      • Need reputation ratings for users, so we don't get griefers flagging everything** GPS-aware
  • MINIMAL INPUT GESTURES REQUIRED; should be able to update while walking away from car with hands full (say, only one hand available).
• Something something GIS
• Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) Cast Vote Record (CVR) generator. Can be tablulated with Universal Ranked Choice Vote Tabulator (https://github.com/BrightSpots/rcv). CVR generator would send email to recipients with URL with unique id (or make a single URL for public consumption but maybe only allow one vote per IP address and election), and collect responses into a CVR file.
• Pot-luck signup -- who's bringing what? Real-time (-ish) updates with visual cues to all concurrent users. I thought of this during a departmental potluck signup that had technical difficulties with a spreadsheet. (How do multiple people simultaneously edit an excel spreadsheet? What happens if somebody forgets to unlock it/check it in?)
• Fix journal.el (https://github.com/JohnL4/Journal-el):
  • Prompt w/most-recent phase when ending an entry (should be easy to determine with a backward regexp search from end of buffer)
  • Handle missing end-of-day entries with a reasonable (configurable) default (e.g., 6 pm? Maybe also handle missing beginning-of-day entries the same way?
  • Hourly pop-up "watcha been up to?" prompts.
    • Free text field w/focus, so nothing bad happens if popup comes up under some other user activity
    • ESC and Enter keys don't dismiss or auto-submit dialog
    • Configurable output line format (date/time, some text, description).
    • Simplest behavior is just to append new line to (configured) journal file, but could also parse existing journal lines to get date/time to figure out where to *insert* new line, chronologically.
• Find a way to use a calculate-business-days-between-dates-excluding-holidays-and-weekends function from the web. Maybe use API from timeanddate.com?
  • Find a way to repackage this API for public consumption. Requires all kinds of legalities, like reading the timeanddate.com legalese to see if it's legal, and making sure users understand I make no warranty as to accuracy, etc., etc. ("Indemnifying myself", I guess, is the legal phrase?) Also, will probably require issuing tokens to users and metering their requests so they don't soak up the available requests.
• Google Plus archive expander and searcher (Lucene? Some other search engine?)
• Run Apache Solr (this is kind a cross-environment project, both personal and corporate, since I have more notes files compiled at work).
• In org-mode, put a blank line after the closing note for a TODO item.
• Bullshit Antidote / Nonsense Antidote -- social debunking (see this article: «“Flood the zone with shit”: How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy»)
  • Needs reputation system, recommendation (?) system, dedicated moderators
  • Link to facts, studies, US gov't income & expenditures (budget?) data
  • Subscription, not ad-supported
  • Moderators apply, not self-appoointed?
  • Regular face-to-face meetings of moderators?
  • U.S. only, since that's where the voters are. Maybe other countries can use the same software, but the orgs would be different because the electorates are different. (Although... there could be overlap for things like climate change. Hmm....)
  • Link with similar orgs, share data/effort? (E.g., Sunlight Foundation.)
• Something like www.komplish.com but can parse separate to-do files in various formats (text? Ms-word, somehow?) dumped into a web site.
• Make my emacs highlight mode (github) play nice with enriched text, so highlights can be saved.
• Twitter automation:
  • Who should I report & block, among my followers?
• org-mode journal analysis
  • Find the best set of tags to cover journal entries, where "best" is defined as "gives widest coverage of all entries with minimal overlap". Overlap arises because tags are not mutually exclusive. The idea is to partition work into projects, insofar as possible, for year-end reporting.

Corporate Life#

• "Coffee's Up!" app. Also, "pizza's here!" and "ping-pong table free! (or in-use)". So, needs event status (what/when was the last event for the thing?). Conference room in use. That seems like it might be impinging on some existing enterprise system, like Outlook. This app would be intended to be a lightweight adjunct to the existing system, not a replacement.
• Ad-hoc conference room finder
  • Map of conference rooms indicating present status (free, in-use (and by whom))
  • In-use status status expires (configurable) on the hour or half-hour.
    • Or maybe when declared in-use, user specifies for how long, but app pings user on half-hour or hour whether it's still in use.
  • NOT a reservation system
  • Although... it could be? Need some sort of data-sharing interface w/other services
  • Must check in within 10 (configurable) minutes of start time or conf. rm. is freed
• Workgroup thermostat setting poll -- let co-workers vote on temperature, with notifications and recommendations for setting changes
  • Record of when last adjusted and by how much (from what to what)
  • Seating map?
    • (Optional) Weight by proximity to thermostat?
• Language Parsing tools, in Haskell, for VB.NET
  • Transform 'If' stmts in export pgm into config data (xml? d/b? .ini?)
• Language-parsing DependencyChecker
• UnitTestDatabaseLogic
• Diff annotator. The idea is to generate/annotate diff output with explanatory text (and also highlight diffs by word) for code reviews, but without using any existing systems (e.g., TFS, GitHub). The idea is to generate a standalone file (or collection of files), maybe in HTML or Pandoc markdown that can shipped around in email outside of said systems, which might not be available for various reasons (technical, organizational, procedural, etc.) Note that some of these annotations might better live as real comments in the code.
• Search plug-in for SharePoint, whose search just... is terrible. Boolean (including NOT operator and parenthesization), words NEAR each other, soundex (if possible), common misspellings, common suffixes (and maybe suffixization, the rules by which words are turned into their suffixed versions), etc. Maybe use Lucene?