Re: Stock simulator, other project ideas

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

In message <35FF64A0.3138A581@cyberis.net>, lyoder@cyberis.net writes:
>Who else is interested in the stock market simulator idea?  I think I
>could work on it more any time now, but if I'm the only one working on
>it it probably won't get done for a while.  :-)  Plus, I want to work
>out a good design so that parts can be black boxed to different people. 
>Teamwork is necessary here if this will be worth anything.

Agreed. However, I don't think seul has very many application-writers
currently. The correct thing to do if you want to get more people working
is to go find them. :) (see below)

>Other things I'm thinking of working on:
>
> - A data control for GTK.  Would "connect" widgets to database fields
>and add another widget to let the user browse the database with little
>programming.  Very common in the 'Doze world, and is one reason why it's
>so easy to build database apps with VB.  I don't think it would be all
>that hard to write, but I'd need to correspond with a GTK guru to get a
>good design.
>
> - A Crystal Reports like program.  This would need a team of 3-5 people
>I think.  Perl would be an effective langauge for this, for several
>reasons: You could embed Perl code in the report for conditional
>operations (which would blow away Crystal's BASIC like language), it
>could be modularized to produce code for Postscript or HTML, the Perl/Tk
>canvas widget rocks and is easy to produce Postscript from.

Interesting ideas. In order to implement them though, we need to find some
more programmers who have free time. There are many people looking at the
seul website each day; I think one way of starting to solve this would be
to make it more clear that we need programmers for specific tasks. I've
gotten on the order of 5 mails over the past week volunteering to be the
seul webmaster. We should be able to move some of those people over to other
seul tasks. I'm going to bring this up on seul-pub in a couple days; if
you want to ponder the labor-issue further, subscribe there.

>Well, I hope people are thinking more about end user apps.  It's been
>quiet here for a while!  Enough babbling, I need to get to bed......
>
>Micah

[and regarding the earlier code you posted]
>There is currently no indication of when the game is over, but it's
>pretty easy to tell by looking.

I think this could be a good way to start getting more people interested
in working on games. I recommend you polish the game up a little bit, and
then package it nicely with some docs, and tell freshmeat about it.

This will get you enough feedback and comments to be able to do a better
version of it, and repeat the cycle, maybe including more announcement
channels (eg linux-news-sw@threepoint.com and linux-announce). At the
same time, you might run across some other people interested in working
with you to make similar programs. You can branch out from games to
stock market simulator software, and wherever else you can manage to go.

As for packaging, I've cc'ed this to Donovan from project independence --
I'm sure that if you asked him nicely, he would either tell you how to
package (that is, make an rpm for it) your app, or package it himself.

Then you could hand out rpm's that installed easily, so people didn't
have to compile things themselves. This is probably considered 
"required" these days for end-user-friendly apps.

If you want help drafting any sort of announcements, mail specifics to
seul-pub@seul.org.

Sorry for the delay in response. My classes tried to drown me over
the past week, and I've just now found the surface.
Thanks,
--Roger