Crazy Or Genius?: Dal Gazette Article - The Real Deal

Dal Gazette Article - The Real Deal

Sean — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 11:34:00 +0100

Last week, Oliver and I were interviewed by the Dalhouse Gazette regarding TigerEvents, my.dsu.ca and Dal-ACM related items. The original plan, at least to my understanding, was that there would be a small blurb this week, with a larger article in the new year. I was not, however, expecting the article that actually was produced. Unfortunatly, I have to agree with several individuals that felt that it was poorly written and misleading. I don’t have any explanations, but thought that I would try to rewrite things so that they were clearer.

Local Students’ Software More Popular Than Expected

The “extracurricular hobby�? of two of Dalhousie Universities’ Computer Science students, Sean Smith and Oliver Baltzer, has taken off on both Sourceforge and Rubyforge, which contain thousands of open source projects. TigerEvents, the software powering the my.dsu.ca website, has achived a small measure of success over the past three months since its public debut, being downloaded roughly 150 times, and being propelled into the top five percent of active projects on both sites.

“It was a little unexpected,�? says undergrad student Sean Smith.

Smith and PhD candidate Oliver Baltzer released the program as open source software in September after spending the summer developing it with several other computer science students at the request of the DSU. However, after its public release, other users started looking at it for real world usage, including individuals as far away as the Netherlands.

Open source, for those who don’t know, is free software that can be downloaded not only for free use, but for modification as well. “Think of it as software made by the community for the community. It’s all about giving something back to the community,” explains Oliver Baltzer.

Baltzer and Smith say the feedback they receive from users also helps them improve the program. They expect the number of people downloading and using the program will increase over the next few months as they continue to make improvements. “We have a lot of ideas,” states Smith, “and if we are lucky, not only will we get people using the software, but actively helping with improvements as well.” They try to make new releases and updates to the program, as well as the my.dsu.ca site, every few weeks.

Smith and Baltzer are members of a society called the Dal-ACM, which is a student chapter of the worldwide Association for Computing Machinery. The Dal-ACM, in conjunction with the DSU, is currently discussing a number of online programs, including online society ratification, grants applications and an improved version of Tiger Books, the DSU’s online textbook exchange.

All the software for those projects would be released as an open source software package called Tiger Suite, says Baltzer, which could be used by other universities for their own purposes.

"Dal Gazette Article - The Real Deal" by mike

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 12:53:37 +0100

I’ve never sold yourVote – all I ever sell are my services.

I still remember with great fondness the time that a student union at a university in Alberta (possibly the University of Alberta) paid $10,000 for an online voting package.

And then it didn’t work – it was filled with security holes because they authors had never dealt with voting online and had no idea how to protect against voting fraud. People could vote twice for the same candidate, or for the same position; people could vote twice; people could vote online and at the paper ballot stations… the DSU has paid me less than 20% of that in 4 years, only for my services as tech support during elections, and there hasn’t been a single security problem.

Knock on wood.

"Dal Gazette Article - The Real Deal" by Sean

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 15:02:08 +0100

Funny you should mention that, as the idea did occur to me that with all of these that people are all ready going to, you could write a module that handles society elections and such.

Of course, once we actually have bunch of items to actually make a ‘suite’ I am hoping to branch out to other universities and do ‘service contracts’. We can do hosting, customization, and feature upgrades for a small fee. Hey, services sell these days.

"Dal Gazette Article - The Real Deal" by mike

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 14:55:01 +0100

Nice rewrite.

If you are releasing a ‘Tiger Suite’, you should consider releasing an online voting suite with it – like yourVote, the package currently in use by the DSU.

It’s not open source, because I learned long ago that you can buy things with money, but I am sure that some day it will be.