domenica 26 agosto 2012

And finally time's up...

... for the vacation. In the end the two weeks passed incredibly fast. I sincerely would need one more week to end some of the things I have begun, but time is limited, so we'll see.
The balance is overall very positive:

  • VivaCity project for DjangoDash (single-developer) got top votes for the innovation/programming parts, while being a bit penalized for the lack (or almost) of UI. I'm very happy about that. Based on the data in VivaCity I made a small app for WP7 to find the BikeRacks anywhere in the world based on the open data exposed by the city governance
  • SWPatterns was a sideproject which exploded to become a main project of one of the days and got a pleasant companion app for WP7
  • GentleNerds will become the core for all the social apps coming to Android soon enough (HYMD and Loco)
  • Nerderie already had plans and will soon get the code behind it and some action will start.
  • CineCit (which is at the moment under Nerderie) is going to grow with Lorenzo
  • Signage Studio is growing fast and strong and will soon be in private beta. At the moment there is some fighting going on with Canvas events causing ajax operations to be called.
  • SemBase and FlowLy are going to become parts of the other instruments (SemBase is the back-end part of VivaCity) and are going to be re-launched in a more "web-oriented" manner
Things I learned from these two weeks: 
  • asmack, smack, asmackservice for Android... Most of them are in part a PITA, but in the end, using a sometimes "violent" approach Android DOES talk to an ejabberd server
  • ejabberd is a memory hog, which is tragic when you have only one VPS for many domains and apps.
  • Linux hard limit for open files is a PITA in a server where you have lots of apps running but there's always a solution (ulimit -Sn 2048)
  • OpenVZ does not like SwapFiles..... (ejabberd + apache2 ==> TOO much memory used)
  • Considering I only use WSGI apps, there must be a way to avoid the many thousands of plugins of apache2 in favor of a Virtualhost-aware wsgi-only webserver... I'm considering making something with Twisted, but who knows...
  • Time and space ARE a problem... the unsolvable kind...
New things that will be in next to-do lists
  • With the arrival of Open Data, GreenIsland can be once again very interesting. 
  • In an optic of data-driven information, even the old WildLife project can be cool...
So, that's about it.
From tomorrow it's usual job again! 
[Cross-posted on TheITGuys.biz]