Posts tagged with open-source

Debian have released the next stable version code named “BookWorm”, and so it is time to look at upgrading some of my servers. Now I have form here for things going smoothly. So I started with the server that I use to host a nextcloud instance. I mean what’s the worst that could happen? I’ve only set that server to hold my contacts, my calendar, to sync important files, to automatically backup any photos I take with my phone. It’s not like there is anything important I couldn’t afford to lose.

I always intended to give the app an open-source license. Now that it’s in a state that I feel is functional I asked my employer who sponsored about 10% of the code if they would allow me to apply an open source license, and as the code is unrelated to my job, or their core business, they said yes. So I’ve applied an MIT license. The code is available here.

So in my previous blog post I said I was going to try and build a web app to find someone’s location using their smartphone’s location services. The first step in this is choosing a language and/or framework to build it in. I’ve decided to use Go, which a former collegue of mine tells me makes me a hipster.

So I have been hearing lately about What3Words and how the emergency services in the UK are using it to locate people. This, and other information I have read about recently has got me thinking. What3Words is a proprietary service, that the emergency services will be paying to use. Now a number of mountain rescue teams in the UK use a service developed by one of their volunteers called SARLOC which appears to have a similar set of requirements, but from what I have read appears much more useful for the mountain rescue teams that use it. Now what I have been thinking, these services both rely on the person that needs to be located to have a smartphone, with location services, and an internet connection. They both require the person to receive a link, and allow the opened web page to see their location. So with these assumptions, how hard is it to build a service that allows an operator to send a personalised link to someone, have that use the smartphone’s location services to get a current location for the user, and share that automatically with the operator?

So I have an unusual workflow for my blog. There are a number of instructions on the web for deploying a jekyll based site template to a server from a git repo, and having the content auto built into the web root. Although I do store my jekyll blog in a git repo, and have my webhosts set up to receive files automatically from git, I do not do this.

A colleague of mine started to work on a planet feed of blogs from people we both work with. The planet feed takes an rss or atom feed from each blog and sorts the posts from all of these together. My issue with that for my blog is that not all the posts I make are applicable to the work that I do. So I wanted to generate a feed that is more work related. I already use the jekyll-feed plugin to generate the feed for my blog so it shouldn’t be too hard right?