I’ve recently started playing with radios again and I’ve been looking mainly at packet radio. APRS is a system which uses amateur radio to transmit position reports, weather reports, and messages between users. There is an Internet backbone for APRS called APRS-IS that can be used to access a filtered feed of APRS broadcasts. I thought it would be nice if such a feed were also available via XMPP so set about building a gateway.
CodeTheCity is an event that I was loosely involved in organising that we’re now half way through. It’s all about rapid prototyping of services for the community. While the event is structured as a hackathon, many of those invited were not coders at all and a few times I heard mix ups like confusing Windows with Office and anti-virus software with a firewall. You would think that at an event where the aim is to produce a prototype these people might hold hacks back but it became apparent quickly that the domain knowledge they had could help jumpstart a project. The developers in the teams seemed to code with more confidence knowing they’d got the requirements directly from the person that would be using the system.
Last weekend, I attended the Debian Med Sprint for 2014 in Stonehaven, Aberdeen. The event was essentially an unconference hackathon with a few untalks.
On the Saturday, I participated in Andreas‘ live packaging session where we packaged seqtk and dnaclust. I found the documentation for dnaclust and produced a man page for inclusion in the package.
With my new Debian packaging knowledge, I packaged a personal project python-fitbitscraper as python3-fitbitscraper in Debian. This effort ran to the end of the sprint.