If all goes well, I will be graduating at the end of the spring 2009 semester. As it stands right now, I only have two more classes I need to take, so I am going to take the opportunity to drop to part time student status, and take on working full time.
What this means is that after all the time I've been here, I can actually stop killing myself with work on a weekly basis. Because my two remaining courses are history courses (Film History II and Latin America in the National Period), I won't have much to do outside of class time, barring a reading here and there. What I'm really excited about is that I finally get my weekends back. No longer will I have to do group projects, or work tirelessly editing or doing pre-production on films outside of class time. What does this mean, though? What will I do with all that free time?
As faithful readers of this blog already know, I always have one or two hair-brained projects up my sleeve, waiting to be done. Most of the time I think up projects to do, but I never get around to doing them due to lack of time. However, now I do plan on getting at least one or two done, as I will need something to do now that I don't have an overwhelming amount of schoolwork to worry about. I have a few projects that I really want to do, and most of them involve programming.
I know that sounds rather generic, but there is logic to it. My goal is to learn Python (both desktop and web), and I have a couple of possible projects to throw at it.
For a long while now, I've been wanting to make a digital picture frame out of a laptop with my very own slideshow application that would download photos from flickr and go through them. It's a project that would involve both code and hardware hacking, so it's right up my alley. The application would have three parts to it: the actual slideshow, a method for downloading and caching photos for offline use, and a back end web interface for configuring how the show would be presented. On the hardware side, I would hack up a laptop so that it could fit inside of a picture frame, and add a smaller LCD with buttons for general interface, such as advancing forward or back. Of course the whole contraption would be Linux powered.
I've said I would code the app many times before, but now I have the advantage of having a virtual machine that I can configure to my exact specifications to test it out before I actually do any hardware hacking.
For this one I want to use Django or some other Python framework. It's still a vague idea, but it falls under the Python category.
After years of Mac usage, I finally want to take the plunge and learn to code applications in its native language, on the desktop. This would be a radical departure from my normal projects, and a good challenge, I think.
While it might sound ludicrous to suggest a desktop application for a web based learning management system, hear me out. Moodle 1.9 and forward has an API that is designed originally so that Moodle instances can talk to each other across servers. All it really is, though, is an XML-RPC interface that could hypothetically be used outside of a browser, a la Marsedit for blogs.
The reasoning behind this would be to have the ability for users of a Moodle with this functionality enabled to be able to check things all in one place without having to open a browser. It would potentially allow for forum posts (I think I saw that API somewhere in the developer docs), check their Moodle calendars, and see upcoming events.
This would basically be the iPhone version of the same application as above. Working where I do, I've heard loads of people asking when Moodle would be iPhone compatible, so I figured it might be a good place to start with an application for the iPhone/iPod Touch environment.
This one is pretty much a given, as I have a track record of changing the look and feel of my site every other month or so, but I really want to start from scratch with a new focus, and go for a more professional feel. I really want my site to be an example of what I am capable of designing. I may even drift back into freelance design work again. Who knows?
I think that's it for now. It's a lot of stuff I want to do, but hopefully after this semester is over I will finally be out of school and will have time to focus on these sort of pet projects. I'm the type of person that I can't sit still for too long, so I will always need to find some project or other to work on to keep me occupied.
We'll see how many things on this list I will actually finish, though.
Some nice goals. Can't wait
Some nice goals. Can't wait to see how they turn out.
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