List of projects

4 ^AM October 4, 2006

I seem to have been flat out these last few months, and it’s time to re-evaluate and re-prioritise my list of hobby projects. The ones on my mind are:

This year’s OSDC talk. Plenty to do on this, but it’s out for review at the moment.
Rewrite this weblog’s software in Django, fixing up a couple of rough edges in the process. I’m guessing this would come to about 20 or 30 hours work, including data conversion and deploying Django to the server for the first time.
I’ve had a C implementation of the Dancing Links algorithm kind of working for a few months now. I’d love to get it in a form where I could compile it as a library, then build it into a Python module. Again, about 20 or 30 hours.
An accommodation directory to be used by charities and health services finding housing for vulnerable people. There’s probably a hundred hours technical work, plus a similar amount of talking to real live case workers. Perfect application for Django there.

Hmmm. Looking at this list, I’d say the Django blog rewrite is next.

By alang | # | Comments (3)

(Posted to Stuff and Java)

Comments

At 15:30, 04 Oct 2006 Joe Grossberg wrote:

2) Do it soon; there is a Server Error on this entry: http://bright-green.com/blog/2006_10_04/how_cheap.html

NameMapper.NotFound: cannot find 'comments' while searching for 'blogEntry.comments'

Incidentally, do you want to expose that to the world? Why not restrict it based on IP and show nosy people (like me) a generic error page?

3) What do you mean by "Dancing Links"?

4) I would like to lend a hand on this one, since Django is on my "to learn, but need to find a worthwhile project" list.

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At 21:03, 04 Oct 2006 Alan Green wrote:

Thanks Joe. Yep, you've put your finger on two of the things I'd call "rough edges" right there.

Dancing Links is described on Wikipedia. If you'd like to know more, Knuth's (pdf) paper is quite accessible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_links
http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/cs/pdf/0011/0011047.pdf

And, finally, it'd be a pleasure to work with you on the accomodation directory.

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At 00:39, 05 Oct 2006 Richard Jones wrote:

#3 don't forget that in the age of ctypes you don't necessarily have to write a fully-fledged python extension module. You can just load up the C object and a little bit of ctypes boiler-plate and you're done.

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