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| Clarifying my own thoughts about what I want to do now by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 02/07/2015, 3:10am PST | ||||
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| I have been bothered a bit because there are about a half-dozen things I want to do but not sure which to go with, or, perhaps, set a little time for each of them, like assign an hour a day to four or five items and if I go over on one, credit its time the next day to a different project and in that way I can get a little bite of this elephant done daily and maybe get some things accomplished.
So I want to clarify my own thoughts so I'm going to expose to anyone who reads this an idea of what's rattling around inside the vacuum sphere that sits on top of my neck, and describe the stuff I want to accomplish. Maybe I can make it something like a "new years resolution" to get something accomplished on these projects. So let's go down the list of stuff I've put off or set aside that I've been wanting to do. * Design specs and implementation targets for City of Zenith. Additional code to improve functionality and fill-in gaps. * Work on moving my ideas and stories into comic strips for the web comic Tales of Zenith. * Work on implementing a System 370 and z/System Mainframe cross-compiler target for the Free Pascal Compiler * Complete the improved cross-reference and listing program for Object Pascal programs. * Finish the Cetka game * Finish the other books I'm writing: (a) The Takeover Man; (b) The Locust; (c) Release for publication The Gatekeeper: The Gate Contracts, a book that's been sitting on the shelf since I essentially finished it in 1995; (d) The Gatekeeper: The Gatekeeper Admits; (e) The Gatekeeper:The Gatekeeper's Small Change; (f) the book between Small Change and Instrument; (g) Release for publication In the Matter of: Instrument of God, which has been sitting since 2012 and took five years to write; (h) In the Matter of: Willis and Friends; (i) book after Instrument and Willis which continues past Small Change. * The applications from Mitt Software that I created a Vaporware ad for (originally as a joke) here on Caltrops. Discussion: * City of Zenith is a workplace integration project targeted at municipalities, counties and state agencies for automating workflow and citizen services. It will be a combination of a number of existing open-source applications written in PHP that I am going to combine as well as add new code I need to write to handle the parts that are not present that are not normally found in, say, a CRM tool, an ERP tool, a payroll and/or accountsreceivable/accounts payable package. It's also going to be big, at least as big as Wikimedia, Wordpress, or some other large applications, probably in the 200-300,000 line application size. I don't have to write all of this, most of the pieces have already been done, it's gluing them together and filling in the gaps that will take a while. You can look at the 2 page PDF of the sample brochure to get an idea of some of the things the application suite is intended to be able to do. There are two major things I think need to be fixed. Implementation of a(n) HTML/XFORMS form builder, if for no other reason than that each locality will have their own data, fields and information that has to be collected and/or added to their database and they'll need a way to revise existing forms to do this. Plus I don't relish having to manually code several hundred data entry forms by hand. I have a tool for this and I like what it does as far as being able to create forms, except it needs work and needs to be better set up to create forms which can be inserted into a web page as opposed to a form solicitation application. The second thing is implementing some report designer. I have a set of Open Source PHP classes to generate PDF files that was so good I gave the developer a $20 donation because his solution provided me with exactly what I needed, a way for a program to be abke to create reports and forms including checks, bills and invoices. But there needs to be a way to design how to implement the reports. I can think of at least one way NOT to do it, and that's the way they did it in a horribly execrable report building package originally written for Windows: Crystal Reports. Creating report templates with CR was about as pleasant as getting root canal surgery without anesthesia. * Mainframe Pascal Compiler Cross-compiler. Biggest problem is I'm not getting much help from the Free Pascal team as to how the compiler calls the particular modules as far as what is done when it gets to the point that a variable or piece of code is generated. Basically I need to take an existing compiler and discover when and how code gets created and then use that as a starting point. Biggest problem is, it's big. Not counting run-time libraries the compiler itself is about 260,000 lines of code and uses upwards of 75 modules. I've been sitting on this for probably a couple-three years. * Pascal Cross Reference. It was the Pascal Compiler Cross Compiler project that spurred me into creating a cross-reference because trying to discover all of the variables and procedures being used and where was a huge undertaking for a program as large and as compilcated as Free Pascal. I've been sitting on his at least 16 months, and worked on it off-and-on for almost a year, restarting it at least once as I got better ideas. A big chunk is done I just have a problem with getting conditional statements to work. * Tales of Zenith. I have a huge back-story and more all done in my head, I just have to sit down and draw and write it. I host my web comic using a program called Comikaze but the developer quit supporting it back in 2010 supposedly because he wanted to go on to a better tool for supporting web comic strips, but I think nothing ever came of it. I was considering adding additional features because I liked the program, but I thought I'd see what came up from the supposed new project, but nothing ever came of it. I mean, I'd like to see places for adding keywords, transcripts, a means to monetize a comic via inserted ads, and maybe a few other things. Perhaps I'll just fork the code or start a new release since the old developer more-or-less abandoned it. * Cetka. I put it on the back burner also because someone here more-or-less said that it didn't matter that I put out a game with a demo version that included some free levels and only priced the entire full game, with 100 levels and a level editor so people could write their own levels, at $1.99 it would never sell. It just didn't seem to be worth the effort if I didn't get something back, and by "something" I exclude the intellectual challenge of the development of the application. This has been sitting for several months. ---- Obviously, by any measurement the one item that has the highest probability of being completable in any reasonable time frame - say by this time 2016 - is City of Zenith and if I do implement it, also has the potential to be a significant money maker. Way too many places are doing way too many things on a manual basis and/or inadequately automated fashion, and the products that are out there are exceedingly expensive, far to much for most smaller towns and cities that could use a means to automate workflow and move more services to accessibility through mobile web applications, only they can't afford to spend $50-$100,000 to a software vendor for a solution to do so. So I'll do some thinking about this and if anyone wants to make some constructive comments related to the above I'd love to hear them. But at least I've clarified my thoughts about it since I had more-or-less slacked off on everything and wasn't really bothering. |
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Clarifying my own thoughts about what I want to do now by 02/07/2015, 3:10am PST  The one thing people really enjoy from you didn't make the list. by 02/07/2015, 6:11am PST I say he needs leisure time, saw none listed. Somebody needs to buy him Elite. NT by 02/07/2015, 7:50am PST I don't know what any of those things are, but they sound fucking boring dude by 02/07/2015, 11:02am PST Re: Clarifying my own thoughts about what I want to eat now by 02/07/2015, 5:45pm PST Pick one or two projects and focus. by 02/07/2015, 10:08pm PST ^correct^ by 02/08/2015, 1:49am PST Brian DON'T!! by 02/08/2015, 7:31am PST Commander, are you on GitHub? by 02/08/2015, 7:38am PST Answer the goddamn question you wheeled toad. NT by 02/12/2015, 6:14pm PST |
