Software

This is some software I've coded.

Multiple Time Sheets - time tracking, invoicing, recordkeeping webapp

Update: I had some ambitions to make this project more complete, and recode it so it just worked nicer, but never really found the time or motivation. When I use it, I'm basically happy with it. After trying the better commercial solutions, I come back to my own. So you can have it and do with it as you wish.

About MTS

MTS is a PHP web app I use to manage my timesheets, invoicing, and some recordkeeping. It's not intended for multiple users or an "enterprise" -- it's intended for one person working on multiple projects, and juggling multiple time sheets. Progress is slow, and not very steady. The latest addition is a tool to help you write daily status reports, and send them to your clients. Some other new features were promised, but they haven't materialized. Despite this slow pace of development, it's pretty decent at what it does. (I personally use it almost daily.)

There are two versions posted to this page. mts-4.zip is the old version. mts-5.zip is the new version (obviously).

Demo

MTS Demo

Features

Timesheets with freeform data entry.
Simple to-do list (that doubles as an outliner).
Prepares and emails invoices.
Prepares and emails daily status reports.
Keeps a record of invoices.
Regex-like text-linking feature.
CSV export.

Screenshot

Other Projects Like This

TaskFreak

Download

MTS version 5

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Participate: Social Networking Software

This is a social network that was written back around 2004. My friends were doing a distributed anti-war protest. It was basically not that well attended, because people weren't really aware that the President was a liar, and that he would eventually suspend habeas corpus. On top of that, it was in competition with another demo, and that really killed it. The software did so-so, but it got taken down after the demos, because I got paranoid about the cops subpoenaing the entire database.

Also, the software was kind of hard to use. A lot of features were basically implicit, and you had to be pretty savvy to "get" it. Still, a lot of Friendster features were ripped off, and a couple features, like the double-blind email-based contact system were cool.

This software is provided for study. If you want to run it, you'll have to dig into the classes/ directory, and change the db passwords. You'll also have to load up setupdb.mysql into your database. It wasn't ever packaged up for distro.

The old site is still up for perusal at longforgotten.info.

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Social Flower: Social Networking Software Idea

The original vision of BFJ5's Participate system was an idea I'll call Social Flower (it never had a name). The idea was to create a game where you go around collecting petals to complete a flower. Each "friend" you add gives you another petal. When you complete a flower, you get an animated flower on your profile, that displays your friends' photos when you touch the flower. Maybe it would become a virtual group photo of sorts. The idea was that there was an aesthetic reward for completing the flower.

I liked, and still like, this idea because there is a start and end, and it's not that hard to achieve the end. Moreover, the number of slots is a limited resource, so you have to think a little harder about who will be on the flower, and who will be left out. (Maybe let people have multiple flowers?)

The aesthetics are nice, too. Everyone likes flowers, even guys. The flower shape is like a mandala, and it's natural to contemplate and meditate over flower-shaped things. Flowers are sexual (they are sex organs) and also signify life, death, and rebirth. Religions and myths often use flower-based symbolism.

The flowers would be in a garden, of course. The garden wouldn't be a network or anything; it would just be a way to see the progression of flower growth.

With the proliferation of social network sites, I expected someone else to have the same idea, and for sites to try out something like the social flower, but it didn't happen. Judging by how they all work like myspace, one may surmise that they didn't like the idea of finite goals.

TXTMOB for Web Hosts (project)

This is a hack of txtmob that's being developed to run on cheap web hosts.

So far, it'll let you send to the group via the web form, so it's suitable for a one-way, moderated list. Good for news.

The sms forwarding feature doesn't work, so, it's not able to do "real" txtmob yet. Maybe it will one day... This code is very alpha, and based on code from SourceForge, that was at version 0.14, so you know what you're getting :-)

I'm not forking the project. This is just a personal fork for personal use.

Fun Details, and Some Roadmapping

Cheap web hosts give you only one database, so you need to prefix the table names. This was done by altering the DDL, and by adding a wrapper function to mangle the SQL statements. Icky, but a pretty quick and flexible solution.

To make this work, it'll require some downgrading, like rewriting the multithreaded, java-based mailer into something in PHP, or as a cron that a web host (that allows crons) would run. Also, the system might be able to use POP3 email boxes to get replies. Overall, an uncool way to do things, but one which works with commodity hosting.

It wouldn't scale up, but, if you just want to host a dozen groups, it's no big deal.

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