It's been an eternity since I posted anything here or over on Sourceforge. The Triumvirate project lost its incentive when the client who was asking for it closed his service business. I don't know how much this interactive web functionality would be useful for other projects, so I haven't really had a mind to work on it any more. Also, there just doesn't seem to be any kind of demand for this level of interoperability in recurring service industries, which surprises me not a little. Hmm.

Now I'm working on some web applications using data concentration and information mining. The application of intelligent filters and detectors is what a client is willing to pay for, and that's the kind of work that requires brains to pull off regardless of what kind of software is behind the decisions to act. If I can contribute to the open source community with this stuff then so much the better. We'll see.

There's nothing wrong with the C2 Wiki and there never was. My ISP had been blocked in a group with other IPs that Ward Cunningham had discovered were huge spam sources.

The Triumvirate project is plodding right along at a snail's pace. I have settled on a mechanism for doing the PHP interaction with the user, at any rate. Now I have a scheme by which I create a before script, an after script, and an HTML page to present to the user. The before script sets up all the data access and looks up everything that the HTML page needs to show the user. The HTML page formats everything and puts it into a source form that is easily understood by even the script challenged. (Yes, I know the HTML could go right into the PHP setup script, but I wanted to separate things for a variety of reasons -- modularity being one of them.) The after-action script processes and publishes the results of the decisions the user makes on the HTML page. If there is a complicated format to the results then all that can go on to a second HTML page containing all the formatting.

The Triumvirate code itself hasn't gone anywhere because I am still in discovery about how the simplest user operations are going to happen. It would be nice if I had some help here, but I don't know anybody who deals with this web application junk and nobody I know is interested in farting around with it. [sigh] Oh, well.

I have been too busy with the specific code related to the prototype site to enter any files in the Triumvirate code base. Everything is too specific to the current project. I am refactoring the PHP code as I go along and am finding that the HTML needs to be refactored right along with it. Surprise, surprise. Anyway, it's coming along slowly.

In other news, the C2 Wiki is still off the air. I was intending to get a hold of Ward Cunningham to see if he intends to ever put the thing back up again. There is lots of useful, valuable content there that I'd like to see made available again.

One of the page threads on the C2 Wiki is (was?) about electronic voting machines. We were working on putting together a specification for electronic voting machines that could be Open Sourced. I wonder if there is such a project here? How would one find such as thing?

Well, Triumvirate is a legit project at Sourceforge now. You can check it at

http://sourceforge.net/projects/triumvirate/

Let me know if this project interests you.

Good grief, Charlie Brown! Do I actually have a client who is willing to pay for the development of an Open Source project that anydamnbody can grab for free afterwards? Yepper, doodle!

A buddy of mine created a startup commercial cleaning service. He did a couple of years' worth of research and then started buying equipment and making other investments. One of the investments he is making is an interactive web site with a communications facility (Connection) for his customers, cleaners, and account managers to all share info on what's happening. There were some existing commercial software solutions that were either too expensive or insufficient to the cause. So, he came to me to build him a new system.

I am doing all the PHP and MySQL work to get this Connection thing built. My local graphics design partner is doing all the look and feel stuff to make the site more pleasing to the eye. The real breakthrough here is that the end user just wants a system that meets his needs and is configured for him to use it without grief. He doesn't want to own the code or sell the service; he just wants to use it his own bad sef. I can put the code in the public domain as Open Source and maybe get other geeks to contribute.

The cool part of all this is offering the service of installing and configuring the Connection service to other businesses. Unless these end users are hip to installing and whatnot they will pay to have the Connection service hosted on somebody else's server with just a login or a link on their own site. Eh? Profit through ignorance. I love it.