Prelude Interactive

I finally figured out what that weird, high strung, can’t sleep, anxious feeling is that I’ve had for a few days.  Stress!  It’s been so long without deadlines and related technical problems beyond my control that I almost forgot what it was like.

So much for blogging every day, but there’s a demo due tomorrow around 11am CST that now, about 12 hours before I plan to give it, is finally and smoothly providing about 80% of the features I had planned for it.  One of the roadblocks is actually a bug, reported a few months ago, with SalesForce so I don’t feel so bad about that one.

I have been very impressed with the SalesForce platform.  I did not expect to be saying that after a handful of professional experiences with closed-source universes that are supposed to provide all the tools you’ll ever need…but provide only pain, suffering, and expense instead.

“Oh hey, Miva, how’s it going?  Great..great…still really shitty?  Oh, you’re re-launching your platform, how nice.  You still suck.  Say Hi to your mom for me.”

Everything that I expected to need to hand-code in Javascript vis a vis VisualForce has been available as a feature of APEX – with a learning curve of course, don’t get me wrong.  I was just getting cocky about sailing through their certification exams, but they actually look hard to fake.

Since March I’ve been reading nonprofit blogs, going to meetings, scoping RSS feeds, reading Twitter messages, emails, and all kinds of stuff to educate myself.  I think it’s working!  Today I feel able to have a fluent conversation with someone who knows what they’re talking about in the nonprofit technology space, and only minorly expose my lack of familiarity.

Tonight I went to the Austin 501c Tech Club and…holy cow, the last time I went apparently I posted about it on the Causeway blog and that’s the first hit on Google.  Zounds!  Oh, it’s actually the Austin 501 Tech Club, that’s why.  I misspelled crystal as “chrystal” (don’t ask) once and it was one of the higher hits for “chrystal meth” back in the day.

Anyway, it was a really good small discussion, led by Mike Chapman, wide ranging.  We talked about political activism and social media, Mike described structurally what the Obama Campaign did and didn’t do, and provided very solid timeline context.  This guy was there too, and I have a feeling our interests overlap quite a bit.

This morning I was pleased to find a second nugget from the Social Actions Blog, this time relating to FrontlineSMS, which I hadn’t heard of before, or I have heard of and I’ve forgotten about it and e-mailed the link to the people who told me about it, which is kind of embarassing in a very internet kind of way.  There is a community of people out there, I’d lump TxtEagle in with them, who are out there polishing their cell phones on the very bleeding edge of technology while helping bridge the widest of economic gaps – highly commendable.

There were some other things I set aside to share with you, the zero people or possibly Jake (and Amanda, who was offended last time she wasn’t mentioned personally) who read this blog, but my usually trusty XP x64 cratered this afternoon while I was unloading 1,100 lbs of gravel into the front yard along with a 305 gallon rainwater tank.

In case anyone is wondering the weight limit for safe operation of a 1986 Ford Ranger is substantially less than 1,100 lbs of cargo.  She swims to and fro all over the road!

I stumbled across an interesting RSS feed a week or two ago (thanks to Google Reader, not Stumble Upon, despite the fact that I stumbled upon it).  It’s called Social Actions, and it might be trying to dragging the nonprofit/NGO/volunteer technology and data marketplace into the Web 2.0 era.  In particular, I think the “Change the Web” contest sounds like something the legions of unemployed web developers can have some fun with in 2009.

I sent Joe Solomon an email and he responded, gleeful that they were attracting the attention of technical people.

I wonder how similar it is to a project I proposed to Smart Volunteer earlier this year, to create an open data interchange format for social actions, giving, and volunteering, both skilled and unskilled, in person and remote.  I’m absolutely not trying to claim credit for the idea, which I found has existed for a long time despite nobody big altering their business plans so they can push it (eh-hem, Volunteer Match and Guidestar?)

The term “Social Actions” is pretty good – I tried to think of something more informative that’s also short and punchy and I couldn’t.   They have also elected, apparently, to largely piggyback on other services like Facebook and Twitter, which is much smarter than trying to build yet another database from scratch.  The only thing I would add, someday, with infinite time and development resources, is a distributed hosting system where the RackSpaces and Amazon EC3′s of the world can donate a few idle virtual servers here and there to run the data backbone for the world’s NGO’s, kind of like the World Community Grid.

Maybe I’m putting too much on their shoulders…but at least someone’s trying, and at least Google was able to find them for me, which means that I’m not the only one reading their feed.

I’ve been looking for open source address validation code for an application I’m working on.  I’ve learned a bit about how the data is structured, including that there are a set of companies which are ‘CASS Certified’ to offer these services.

For $35, you get a script designed to work with the USPS WebTools API.  Unfortunately, you can only use the API if you are actively involved in shipping packages, which is not my application.  If you are going this route, I found this apparently free script to use as well.

At around $100, this database and Windows software package is attractively priced, especially when you consider the licensing costs of the source data, but again, not the kind of thing I can use.

The best place to start if you’re really digging deep is definitely the Rapid Information Bulletin Board System (RIBBS), based in the USPS’ Memphis office.  The RIBBS name might be some kind of ancient throwback to how they used to distribute the data, which in some cases is still available on tape drives.