More Youtubing

Some more heavily-produced content for YouTube, from the BPC finals. All shot, edited, produced, encoded, etc. by yours truly, which was fun but time-consuming… when you start getting into these rapid-edit sorts of productions, you realize how much work it takes.

YouTube

To go with our push to FaceBook, we’re also on YouTube now. Wharton itself is looking for a more unified overall approach to that, so we’re not building a big presence, but to provide video for a post on the Wall Street Journal blog, we posted it on YouTube. Here’s the WSJ link with the embedded video.

http://blogs.wsj.com/independentstreet/

Or, actually…. heck, I want it linked more. Here’s the direct embedded video.

BPC NY

The Wharton Alumni club of New York is planning to hold its own Business Plan Competition later this year, and like we did for the Knowledge@Wharton India Launch contest and for PennVention here at the Weiss Tech House at Penn, we’re sharing our home-grown BPC application.

For now, this is almost done- I just need to package it up with some documentation, clean out any passwords in the code (done), and ship the zip to the techie who will be hosting things on that side. Hopefully they have enough local ASP.NET know-how to run with it (PennVention certainly did; the India thing was hosted here).

(I wanna test the more thing…)

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).