Progress

Heyas,

So now I've created the "environment" page (not the final name). It's intended to give you an idea of how much it costs to run the devices in your house.

So I have the hairdryer there - with 4000Watts - and you can start the timer - and watch the cost in your currency slowly (or rapidly in the case of the hair dryer) increasing. It's interesting to watch - and just compare (you can run two things at the same time). The clothes dryer is crazy expensive!

I'd also like to add how much it costs to do a full charge of your phone.

It would also be nice to somehow visualise the amount of carbon dioxide that using that device is actually producing. Visualising it - like a cloud spreading across the ground - out from your house. That might be an interesting thing to do.

I've also added a section that you can use to help you work out how many watts the device is REALLY using. So for example - a hairdryer only uses 4000Watts when it is at MAXIMUM power. So this little calculator allows you to record the amount of kWh (kiloWatt hours) on your electricity meter in your house. You record it then start a stopwatch (most people have a built in stopwatch in their mobile phone...) then after 60 seconds you stop it - and check the kWhs again. Then you switch the device on and use it while your flatmate checks the electricity meter again.

So then you have 4 readings. These can then be used to calculate how much EXTRA that deviced used in that 60 seconds time period - and you can work out how many Watts it is actually using. I'm sure that this just gives an approximate idea (and you'd want to make sure that your refrigerator doesn't switch on while you are testing your device..) but it's an interesting little bit of the application. We'll see how it goes.

I'm off travelling tomorrow - so no more work for a few days!

Yahoo!

Catchya later!


Swendawg.

The Battle

Okay!

So... finally here I am - in linux. It took a long time. I started the project on windows and I thought - yeah no problem I can switch it over to linux.. Ruby on Rails will probably run BETTER on linux...

Yeah...

So the first day it was a strange postgresql error. Then it was a rake problem then the... etc etc..

But NOW! I am back on track and actually doing programming again - instead of just hacking gem modules.

Actually that's not 100% true... I've found this thing called RadRails - I've never used it before - I usually just use SciTe to edit my ruby - but now I'm moving up to the next level - RadRails integrated into eclipse. However the people who write rad rails seem reluctant to let you know what you can install radrails on eclipse. If you ever wanted to know - the install URL for Radrails on eclipse is:

http://update.aptana.com/install/rails/3.2/site.xml

The other thing I did yesterday - was watch a movie called "The day the earth stood still". You know - the one with Nenanu? Yeah it was actually really good - I was impressed. I watched it in German actually - being currently in the south of germany. I even understood almost all of it. But the message was pretty simple. We are stuffing up our earth - really really badly - so badly that we are to be erradicated by an alien species who wants to rescue the earth (but not us along with it... as we are the CAUSE of the earth starting to die).

Good movie - and it inspired me and got me thinking about an environmental edge to sharehouser. It was always in the pipelines but yesterday I wrote down a few ideas. One of them was that you could help people to do "what-if" analysis of their household expenditures - and how much energy they use. For example - "what if I decreased my home heating system by 1 degrees celcius and put on a jumper instead (or would you even notice...) how much CO2 would this prevent from being put into the atmosphere?"

The other idea was that I could do a mashup with google earth that would allow people to get a visual idea of really HOW MUCH CO2 they are using. I would do this visualisation - as either cubes (grey transparent cubes) stacked on top of and layed next to each other on the google earth map that positions their sharehouse. The other thing you could do of course - would be plot how much CO2 they are reducing (depending on how many plants they have). The thing is those that all of these calculations would be really rough. All it would do it give people some idea of what is their impact really. Some visual idea of how much CO2 we are emitting with our everyday lives.

Interesting. We'll see right now I just want to concerntrate on the basics.

Alright more coding!


Swendawg

Progress

Good progress today

I can now add new flatmates - and they appear in the "divide bills" screen.

I can also add new bill items - and they appear in the divide bills screen as well.

So now you can divide new bill items - amongst flatmates.

Very cool.

Still continues to look bad - bad colours are the main problem.

I was thinking of using many different shades of grey

with an off white base...

Either that - or something that looks like accounting book keeping - but that might scare off people.

Anyways - at least some work - in between hectic project work - almost all the time - now we've finally released - some pressure is off.


Swendawg

Blogger and new idea

Bad usability points of Blogger:
1) doesn't set autofocus on the logical element (or even at all!)
2) doesn't recognise (bleh! I hate the recognize with a z
so horrible... - german influences on the US?)
3) You should login - and then be able to hit the ENTER key - and BOOM you're writing your blog.... why not do that? it's so simple?

Okay new idea
Perhaps I can make "milestones" (which are actually features that I will finish)
then I take a screen recording of that milestone (they have from-screen recording software for free...) then upload this to youtube... as "proof" that this feature works...
That's an interesting idea... even to use it for the testing at work? instead of a picture - a video!

Demo

Okay

so the first thing is - what IS sharehouser?

I was thinking of creating a demo - a quick (4 step) walk though

showing screens of what the end application would look like.

This creates a motivation and also a way to show people what you are doing.

Then we could also have an email sign up form - so that people could register to get emails

and a notification when it finally goes live.


What would the steps through the demo be?

The main motto: "Your personal book keeper on a students budget"

Shows the first page - the bill entry page with the header "enter your bills" (show phone bill,
rent bill and "re-occuring" bill options - how often it reoccurs and on which day..)

another dialog with "add your purchases"

- "divide them up" - show the divide dialog - with an active session - and someone dragging
the bills to a flatmate

- "email the flatmates" - shows the email dialog - and "EMAIL ALL" or individual emails
from each flatmate - then on this same dialog - is the "confirm payment" that you click
when they've paid their bill.


Hmmm

More to follow....

Progress

Okay - so there has been some progress - must mostly just been working for freedom dot com.

Lots hours - late at night - lots of problems solved - lots of new things learned..

I think one of the things I've learned most is - to try and get some distance from the problem

before I start trying to solve it. Think it over - walk around - MOVE - get some new ideas

rest your eyes.

I t hink I need to do the things that the anti-RSI application ("workrave" for ubuntu) tells me to do. It might really help relieve arm and hand pain.

Relax - or TRY and relax.

So I got my first "bills - to - users" relationship to work - I have a db:migrate task and everything.

Quite nice running on Webrick - but I want to deploy on Mongrel.

It would be cool - if someone could edit this page - and automatically link all entries - to their

respective company web sites.

How can we work out a way to "mark up" other people's ideas?

Help them out

by doing all the linking for example.

anyways - back to work - ohh you I just worked out how to use "<<" in doing ActionRecord

has_and_belongs_to_many relation ships to add to the join table.

d

out

First Post

Hi guys,

Well this is the first post on the sharehouser official blog.
Started work on sharehouser in earnest last weekend.
I got the latest version of rails installed and created the first sharehouser layout.
The colours at the moment are terrible. That's the first thing I think I'll fix.

I think there is something psychological in that if you have a web site that looks "professional" and like it COULD be a real product that people would use - you feel more confident about it and encouraged to work on it.

We'll see how that theory goes!

So hop on over and checkout www.sharehouser.com (and see if it's up yet!)


d

out