WinterRoot

Vision Tech for Counter Tech

Together with the Omnicorp Detroit Hackerspace and Alley Culture’s Seed Exchange in Detroit, WinterRoot is excited to announce our first ever kickstarter project!  A community technology project to explore and catalog wild plants growing in Detroit’s open spaces.  Full Description follows, or link to Kickstarter and consider backing our project!  We have some great rewards planned for backers, so check it out!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterroot/wildflowers-of-detroi

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

Wildflowers of Detroit ??

One pervasive vision of Detroit is it’s ruins - the monolithic hulks of an industrial era gone by, documented in striking photographs and tales of urban exploration. What has gone missing in this narrative is the other side of the coin. In the open spaces left behind, a monumental resurgence of wild-ness is occurring: plots filled with wildflowers and wildlife. After knowing Detroit’s secret gardens and hidden blooms, we feel this is a story that needs to be told - appreciating this resource is crucial, otherwise it may merely be swept away. Wildflowers of Detroit is a community technology project for cataloging wild plants growing in Detroit, an effort which can enable people’s appreciation of Detroit’s reawakened ecology.  Our technologies collaborative WinterRoot is teaming up with Detroit’s Omnicorp Hackerspace and Alley Culture’s Seed Exchange to bring this vision into being.

An iPhone App?

And even more, we hope! We aim to create iPhone, Android, MMS, and email interfaces (all free) for posting geo-tagged photos of wildflowers, and logging their location and salient details for future study and appreciation. When you spot a great specimen or view of one of Detroit’s varied wild plants, you’ll be able to whip out your mobile device, snap a picture, and instantly upload to our website along with automatic longitude and latitude coordinates, adding your find to an interactive map. Sometimes it’s called “citizen science”, we call it community ecology - residents participating in the study of their own area. There is great value to be found in a community understanding it’s own natural process. An incredible phenomenon is afoot in Detroit, lets come together and begin its study!

Want to see it in action??

We already have an alpha version online demonstrating a proof of concept, but we need your help for the full build out. In order for this project to reach it’s full potential, we need to integrate all mobile devices, provide an interactive map showing the locations of the flowers, solve some technical details like caching of photos in areas of bad 3G reception for later upload, allow comments on each photo for identification and discussion, improve the site layout, integrate with social media, acquire substantial hosting, and get going on some advanced features like searching by species or habitat or providing a good interface for crowdsourced identifications.  It’s a big list, and it just keeps getting bigger, but we think that this project can help us transform our impressions of grand old Detroit’s wild spaces. After backing this project, hop over to http://www.wildflowersofdetroit.org/ and start getting involved!!

If overfunded…

We plan to construct a small community herbarium in Detroit, creating a physical record of what grew where and when. Linking this with the website and database will create a dynamic and growing resource for children, students, and researchers interested in the incredible urban flora of Detroit. The ultimate tool for understanding the history and fate of the spaces these organisms occupy. We are still working out the details of where and how this will manifest, so check back here or our facebook page for updates!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterroot/wildflowers-of-detroi

Perhaps one of WinterRoot’s least ‘fun’ projects, but an excellent experience in real world implementation.  Detroit area media company NTVB needed a large suite of custom subscription management tools to support a new effort in their business.  We leveraged object oriented programming strategies to support a wide variety of business logic, business information flows, and ever expanding needs of this new startup effort.  Responsibilities have included the creation and training of a development team, design of complex testing strategies for application logic, distillation of company needs, and implementation of tailored tools.  WinterRoot Technology Services, a sub-project of WinterRoot, has supported the growth of this business to 200,000+ customers in little over a year and maintains on ongoing retainer with NTVB.  The application’s extensive tools are built on top of Kohana and our open source MoPCMS libraries.

The United Nations Project on Extrajudicial Executions needed to improve their media dissemination and dynamic content capabilities through their website, as it is the main point of contact from their international efforts to reporters and lawyers working in the field.  We expanded their capabilities with our MoPCMS framework and an in depth analysis of their data architecture needs.  What has resulted is a much smoother and more cleanly organized site, making documents, reports, and images more fully accessible to interested parties.

Git is a powerful version control tool, so powerful, even more so than with subversion, you yourself define the strategy that you use to employ it’s features.  There are myraid ways of doing things and what’s best really depends on what you are doing.  In my opinion two of the most important features of git are the ability to easily track incremental commits during development without breaking the entire build for all users and it’s support for sharing commits between branches.  Both of these features solve major problems with subversion, in which there is no way to commit changes that aren’t ready for primetime while still retaining a readable revision history in the repository.

Beyond these features though, I have found a few capabilities within git that are ideally suited to web programming.  One is the use of the rebase option to update live sites while keeping those sites on version control.  Often, once a site is live either the installation environment or extensive use will uncover latent bugs in the build.  Sometimes it’s quickest to just fix these on the live site, and move them back into the repository trunk from there.  If the site is not on version control, copying of files is the only option, thereby losing detailed commit history.  On the other hand, a live site has different database and server settings, sometimes intermixed in settings file that have configurations that are global to both development and live installations.   Git rebase can be used to solve this in a slick way.

(more…)

One of my big projects through this year has been putting a lot of energy behind redesigning and rebuilding the Content Management System we routinely deploy at Made Of People, the interactive media collective started by my close collaborator Thiago deMello Bueno.  Over the years we’d created a collection of software for building out user editable websites in a highly customized way, but as our libraries grew it became more and more obvious that a low level rebuild of the entire system was going to be necessary.  We’ve moved the php core to Kohana and the Javascript to mootools, and created our custom tools on top of those libraries, giving us a fully Object Oriented Design paradigm and really opening up what we can do with the system.  As this development has proceeded this year, we’ve been very pleased to see our system deployed on a variety of sites.  Soon a demo will be available but in the meantime we’re happy to announce a few slick sites that have gone live on top of our framework:

Cartwheel IT:  http://cartwheelit.com/ - collaboration with Objective Subject

Toy.  : http://www.toyny.com/

Detroit Garden Works:  http://www.detroitgardenworks.com/ - collaboration with Motor City Publishing

One of my long standing clients, I have been heavily involved in the online side of this organization since the very beginning, and continue on a maintenance and consulting retainer to this day.  The MPHTC started around 2001 with the goal of making high quality, continuing education courses more available to the public.  The website thus began as a content portal for reaching the public audience.  Later, MPHTC would combine forces with MiCPHP (Michigan Center for Public Health Preparedness) where we heavily extended the site to support online learning management.  As the organization has evolved WinterRoot’s challenge has been to create systems with the flexibility to change over time.  Notable work on this project has included full online certificate generation and management, increased portal usability, and ongoing management of the support team for a 3 site system including MPHTC, MiCPHP, and OPHP.  The site has currently about 7000 users.

One of the more annoying features of doing web development is tracking changes made to the database alongside revisions to the code that runs the site. I’ve been getting into subversion post-commit hooks lately, and my currently solution to this problem is to create a hook which dumps the database structure and commits it to a git repository, with a comment which can be used to link that database structure to the revision in subversion it corresponds to. You can then use git to generate patch files that are easy to follow for making updates to database structure.

my post commit hook looks like this

#!/bin/sh 
mysqldump --defaults-extra-file=/home/deepwinter/svn/newframework/hooks/db.cnf -d -h dev2.madeofpeople.org -u madeofpeople11 newframework > /home/deepwinter/sites_sql/newframework/dump.sql 
cd /home/deepwinter/sites_sql/newframework/ 
MESSAGE="SQL committed for build revision $2 in $1" 
git commit -a -m"$MESSAGE"

post-commit itself, the file called by subversion looks like this:

#!/bin/sh

REPOS="$1"
REV="$2"

/home/deepwinter/svn/newframework/hooks/sqldump.sh "$REPOS" "$REV"

A good further development of this will be a way for patches to generate database structure update code automatically off a patch.