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The vision is so large, with so many nuances that it seems like we will never figure it all out. I am sure that is what Clay fears. We discuss, design, write on the backs of envelopes, redesign and discuss some more. It is not that we cannot create a design, it is that we have created ten!

I installed the Wordpress blog, another place-holder until our web application is running. The last time I mucked with HTML was in middle school; things have clearly changed since. Learning CSS has been easy; learning how to get the layout Clay wants is hard. I have to remember to keep things simple, otherwise the unexpected obstacles are overwhelming. At least I will not have to write in the blog.

[EDIT: Now you know the truth! I did not start writing in the blog until May, 2007, at which point I wrote the dev history up to the present and back-dated those posts. Why? Until then the blog had been a formal front for presenting news. Then we decided to make things more personal, and hopefully more interesting. What do you think?]

Relying heavily on google, which in turn relies heavily on manuals, blogs and forums, I have set up an SVN repository. It is served with Apache. Marcos has turned into a wonderful consultant. Every so often he chimes in on our email list to answer tough questions, and today he hooked up automatic emails when someone commits to the repo.

I did not get django (or a web application of any form) after walking through the tutorial. A few months ago I took over the bills chore for the coop. I had redesigned the spreadsheet to be have records of transactions, like in a database. Maybe I was subconsciously preparing the data structures so that I could turn it into a django web application. I finally took the time to do so. Now I get it. Word.

I met with Peddie tonight. We got started on the firefox extension that inserts ratings from our database next to advertisements as users browse. The hard part is detecting advertisements and extracting company names to lookup in the database. Oh, and the fact that we lack a database of companies right now.

The wiki is a sprawl of coherent clusters of pages. I have added one more page to the chaos, this one covering a burst of research into raw data. What assumptions can we make about UPCs (EANs)? What databases are available? How fast is text messaging? How can computers receive and send text messages? What barcode gizmos are being used? Is there software we can use for decoding barcodes? How many late nights before we have a prototype?

You can check out these ponderings on the wiki, username: raven, password: upc

[EDIT: The above wiki is out of date. We moved to the trac dev nest in September, 2007.]

Today the team brainstormed the underlying data structures, then Marcos took the lead on database design.

I keep wanting to think in terms of data structures instead of these foreign keys and foreign structures. Why do I have to remember IDs instead of using pointers? Can a record have a set of values for a particular field? Will studying atomic transactions and writing specifications in relational algebra, as I have done in school, help me pick up practical skills any faster or better?

It is exciting to be learning so much, though it would be better for the project if I had more wisdom and experience. Marcos pointed us towards django. I am going through the tutorial application now.