Chris J. Karr, August 13th, 2010

While I spent the bulk of the space here writing about Shion, I figured that it might be useful to describe some of the client work that I currently have underway that is funding the work on your friendly neighborhood home automation app. I run Audacious Software as both a products and services company, and while it receives fewer mentions on this weblog, the services side of the company is much more mature than the products side. Fortunately, I’ve been able to find client projects that strongly compliment the product work I do as well, so there’s a nice virtuous circle at work here.

So, in terms of what’s keeping me busy this month, here are a few descriptions (provided with permission) of some of the other work underway:

SMSBot (not a final name): I’m currently building for a national research organization and university researcher a system for social workers to interact with their clients using SMS text messaging. The basic idea is that this system allows social workers to send appointment reminders, share educational content, and administer surveys using SMS text-messaging as the primary medium.

On the technology side, I’ve created a VoiceXML parser that reads interactions encoded in that format and generates state machines that provide for stateful interactions with multiple sessions being managed simultaneously. This system consists of two major components: a server that provides social workers (& researchers) a user interface for constructing and administering interactions, and a native Android 1.5 application that serves as a bidirectional gateway (both sends & receives texts) between the server and the outside mobile networks.

This system is scheduled to enter beta testing at the end of the month, and deployment a month later (Oct. 1).

Roxy Proxy: I’m assisting Ericka Menchen-Trevino with her dissertation research by building an HTTP proxy server designed to collect information about readers’ online news consumption. Roxy is a custom-crafted HTTP proxy server written using the Twisted framework that provides session management, a variety of logging & privacy options, and integration with Solr search technology for later data extraction & analysis.

Since this proxy server is being used in a research setting and must meet the requirements of the local institutional review boards for the protection of human subjects, Roxy allows researchers to collect information about online web usage while providing users a rich set of options to manage their private information while helping both advance the cause of science.

Crop Tool: A local university library hired me last month to implement an image viewing & annotation component that can be used to markup very high-resolution images provided by tiling image servers and digital repositories. This tool is being entirely written in using standard HTML technologies, allowing it to be reused in a variety of environments across a variety of devices (including mobile environments without Flash and other proprietary plugins).

CropTool uses the Raphaël Javascript library for lower-level image operations and can display images stored in Fedora digital repositories (with the proper object profiles) and the Djatoka JPEG2000 image server. This work is underway and scheduled to begin beta testing at the end of the month.

Other Work: In terms of smaller projects, I am currently managing the migration of The Oyez Project from traditional dedicated server hosting to the Amazon EC2 cloud. This project will migrate not only the production server to the cloud, but also the supporting development & staging servers as well. I am also assisting some family members with launching an online presence for their new business using the WordPress platform. That project includes not only traditional web design elements, but also creating a coherent strategy for incorporating mobile elements as well.

Needless to say, having simultaneous multiple projects going full steam is keeping me busy this month, so Shion development will be impacted as a result. However, since the bulk of the work will be finished by the end of the month, September will be my chance to take a step back from outside projects and focus on a handful of internal projects. This includes the web & Android interfaces to Shion, as well as some unrelated research projects that I’ll be sharing at a later date.

If you have a project of your own that uses any of the technologies mentioned above (Twisted, Android & iOS native apps, Raphaël, etc.), or is trying to solve a similar or related problem, I will be looking to take on more outside work beginning in October. If you are interested in learning more about my services and how I might be of service, please send me an e-mail.