June 2008 Archives

freefood4free.org was built as an experiment, and a gift. 


The Experiment 
     Two important things are being explored here.  

• How cheap can you make a website?      
  
• Answer: this site costs $10 a year to maintain, no matter how many people use it.  
  
• How's that possible, you ask? 

Google debuted their new "App Engine" framework recently.  Yes I finally learned Python.  Yes I really love Python. 
App Engine is free, for now, and they also made their "Google Apps For Domains" service available for free as well. Any hosting that needs to be done, and any images, assets, or anything up to 500mb is free. 
    The one thing you can't do is daemonize a program and run it as a service. 
    
    The effect of that, is that the telephone based component of this service has to be run on a separate computer.  That's ok, because as an ITP student, that's free until it starts becoming a problem (large scale use), but as 37signals said better than I could in their "Getting Real" philosophy "It's a problem when it's a problem".

• Within a close-knit community, that gets closer as the school year passes, will people give each other a gift if the gift costs nothing?

   I shouldn't say it costs nothing:  it's costs an email, text message, phone call, or submission to the website.  But given that low low cost, will people "give" each other this gift?  I don't know.  I hope so.

     It's up now, and I'm continuing to work on it, and so is my friend Alberto Tafoya.  The google maps content ALMOST works, but you can easily subscribe to free food events via email or RSS, and you can say with reasonable certainty that spam won't come down the feed, because it's protected by Google authentication.

The Gift

 When the ITP First Years show up at school in the fall, hopefully they can tell each other where free food is with a greater degree of efficiency than we did.  By the time we had a chance to tell each other where the food was, it was gone.  Hopefully they can also tell me where they find free food.

 
     

I found this here.

It's summer time, and it's always fun to have extra projects.  I have a weird gangly space between my kitchen and living room, and I'm thinking of building a counter/bar for myself there. 

This is the first draft of that sketch. (viewed from the bottom) The L bars are just metal L's made out of sheet metal with holes in them for affixing them to the floor, wall, legs, and surface, like the ones I used  affixing the cloud to the ceiling.

I'm still up in the air about materials.  I'm planning to go the lumber yard this week to make some choices.