Application list

A note here that I should create a more detailed application list for Beverley that better captures the extent of what I do than “three programs” (WEP, WGFA, BPC). No more clever condensed brevity/humility.

Let’s try some of the start of this list here.

WEP Web Server

• Content Management System for WEP web pages
• WEP Blog aggregator/RSS.
• Get It Started newsletter – CMS, RSS, and newsletter emailing system, plus user interface to signup for email copies or opt out.
• Entrepreneur-in-Residence application: administrative interface to set up appointment signups, student interface for the actual signing up, printable schedules, resume submission, confirmation and reminder emails.
• Venture Initiation Program application: apply to the VIP. Administrative interface for setting up admissions cycles, multiple-document upload of attachments.
• WEP Resume Book and Career Posts – student upload of resume, administrative approval of students signups/download of resumes for “book” creation, creation of “opportunity” posting.
• WEP Working Paper library – simple interface for upload, search, cross-referencing of working papers by WEP faculty and visiting scholars
• WEP Video -WEP-branded Flash Video player, database of Alumni Impact videos – integrated into Content management system for embedding into WEP website pages, and into Get It Started for multimedia content.
• WEP Pressroom – database of appearances of WEP programs, alums, students, faculty, and staff in the media, plus posting of press releases. Integrated into CMS to allow easy direct embedding of subject-specific press appearance lists (i.e. Venture Initiation Program in the News) in pages.
• VIP Alumni list- simple interface for entering and viewing past student members of VIP program, with current company they’re at and a logo.
• Venture a Guess -Online Trivia contest that runs in the Fall for Penn Undergrads. PennName login, running leaderboard point tally, weekly updates with new questions and content.

BPC Website

• “GeeWiki” content management – Wiki-style page editing, with easy tag-based embedding of links, images, video content, or full RSS feeds from blogs. Administrative interface with permission controls, account management, reserved URLs, etc.
• BPC submission and judging interface – a very big application for the management of a multi-phase Business Plan Competition – administrative interface for setting parameters (deadlines, etc.), a student interface for registering and submitting PDFs (and viewing feedback) and generating status reports and general reports about student participation, a complex random algorithm for assigning judges to submissions blindly while also giving weight to having judges judging plans that match their areas of expertise, judging interface for viewing submissions, rating, and providing feedback.

WGFA Website

• Main site (HTML content)
• Press room (same code as WEP press room – database driven record of press mentions)
• Newswire (monthly newsletter)
• Single Family Office Survey – six-page survey for family offices, with measures to mask identity from collected survey data. Available online in English, Spanish, Italian, and Chinese, displaying monetary amounts in dollars, Euros, Yen, and Yuan. Heavy data validation upon entry to ensure data is usable in analysis. Basic adminstrative interface to track responses and download data as a CSV.

Other applications adminsitrated/managed

* ACT! – contact database

* WEP-AV antivirus server (Symantec AV Corporate Edition 10)

* WEP-ISPACE – development server for research programmers working for MacMillan

* SIZATOLA – ten desktops working in tandem (low-key distributed computing) to do data analysis on patent library information and google

* WEP-MEDIA – Hosts WMV files used on BPC site (we’re moving to FLV, but still have some windows media stuff)

Presentation DVDs

This is hopefully a small project, but… well, I’ve hoped that before.

In any case, it’s the latest small step in a gargantuan ongoing thing.

I need to produce ten copies of the WEP 10-year review movie on DVD. Step one is rendering the PPT into video. Step two is getting to our old dvd project and replacing the ppt bit with the new one, and the old video montage part with the newer one, and then rendering the whole thing as an ISO and burning it. Meanwhile I need to set up the machine with the Epson inkjet printer that prints on discs so we can make them all pretty.

UPDATE- Completed.  Well, all but the last one printed, and that’s going now.  Here comes my new “Stuff that is done” category.

New computer!

Some projects are more “fulfilling” than others. After years on a very old mediocre machine, I’m finally upgrading to a medium-high up-to-date Dell.

Of course, that means I need to set the dang thing up. And the old one will probably have to live for a while just so I can consult anything left I need.

Applications I haven’t set up yet:

- EditPlus – while VS2005 can obviously handle anything Edit+ can, having a very low-overhead text editor for html work is still vital or I’ll go crazy

- Illustrator? I mean… I -have- it, even if I never really have cause to use it

- CutePDF/GhostScript – all I need on the PDF front.

… if that’s all I should be swapped over today!

UPDATE 1:

Ahahaha. It’s never that easy, now is it? SOMETHING along the way of very normal system building managed to result in a machine that will not boot. It hangs between the WindowsXP loading bar screen and the login prompt… frozen enough for caps lock not to toggle. Safe Mode works, and I have it system restoring back to before times when I had no problem booting (already tried one such restore and it did not fix the problem, disturbingly). This is highly annoying with a brand new machine on which I hadn’t installed anything more wonky than VS2005.

Update 2: Ok, it’s all back together, about to the point of the OP… no Edit+ yet, and so on. Only downside is my ergonomic keyboard is PS2… ack! Typing anything on the little USB board that came with this thing really hurts. Some chair adjustment may help, but… ack.

Update 3: Call it <b>done</b>.

Entrepreneur-in-Residence

Ok, this is my first post, but let’s get right to business! Each post here, the plan goes, is a project I’m working on. Many will be programming tasks, since that’s kinda what I like to do a lot of.

So: here’s a task.

I have an existing web (.NET 2.0+ MSSQLServer2000) application, which I wrote long ago, which is several Big Things all at once. It supports the EIR (Entrepreneur in Residence) program here, and lets administrators enter in information about a guest coming to the campus for a day, including setting up time slots, which can then be registered for by students, who have basic information plus a CV to submit. It does little extra things like producing a printable schedule, handling waitlists, sending email reminders. It’s pretty slick for one of my first .NET apps, but the administrative side isn’t the greatest UI ever, and performance is mediocre because I didn’t bother to think about it.

I’ve been asked to adapt it to accommodate some new features, and will be taking the opportunity to also go over the existing code to tighten some bolts where appropriate. My hope is to get this in working shape, in its new form, by early January at the lastest.

The new features requested/my plans:

- Add a “location” field to each residency, allowing distinction between EIRs in two different places

- Update the admin UI to allow management by location.

- Update registration UI to be location-specific.

- For those in the second location, there needs to be an option to attend the residency via teleconf. That’s an extra data field for the signup itself.

- Admin: better menu-driven approach and UI.

- Both views: examine the way the page loads; chances are it’s requiring extra database hits (i.e. loading the same data object multiple times).

UPDATE 12/20-

The phone-in feature has been de-prioritized by the client. They think it’d be difficult to manage during the sessions.

The database has been updated to include the new fields, and methods on the database have also been updated so things run with either set of code. I’ve built the HTML/ASP.NET markup for the admin page, but need to connect all the wires, and then work on the East coast signup page to make sure it only deals with the East and create a new West signup page. The hope is that it gets cleared up this week.

Update 2 (12/21)

Everything’s up now on the production server. There’s a chance we’ll need to do minor updates here and there, but most of the code is the old code so there’s not a lot of new stuff to worry about.

Update 3

Well, maybe I should open this as a new task, but there are updates to make to the code, in order to fix some of how it works.  (update to the update.  That bug fix is done.  Future ones will be a new task in the list).

Venture a Guess – the dormant version

This is an interesting one.

The goal is to find an “off-season” way to perpetuate the existence of “Venture a Guess” – an online trivia contest we did for students this past semester. I made the mistake of piping up during a meeting with a good idea, and now I have to do right by it!

The result should be roughly static, but should feature a few questions from this year’s contest, with immediate feedback on the answers, and maybe a simple cheesy score at the end.

So I need to decide the best low-hit mechanism for this (probably session vars, keyed from a cookie?) and design the look of it. I had some with the live part making liberal use of portraits of Penn and Franklin as our… well, it’s ambiguous if they’re hosts or contestants… so it’d be nice to keep that style and make a fun little quirky area.

No set deadline; this isn’t high priority, but if I don’t knock it out it could easily sit around forever.

Update a zillion years later – It’s done!  http://wep.wharton.upenn.edu/contest