fifty nine: updates, crawlers

Ahoy There!

Thanks to the new connections, I have found some new links. Check out the end of the list on the top for anything new.

I also looked back in my blog and there seems to be some links in my old blog posts that I haven't put up top.

I was looking for my first poll about a "freespaceships" like project. I am doing a course about Startups and at the end of the first "lecture" the "homework" is to talk to potential customers to learn about the "market".

I already did something like that last year during my spamming spree. I had some description of what I am doing or what the general idea of this project was, and just had a poll up on the blog:

How much do you want to get involved? Fuck off, this is the stupidest idea ever.	3 (8%)
I am curious about how it will turn out, but i don't want part of it.	4 (11%)
I am willing to help occasionally but I don't want to put money towards this.	12 (35%)
I want to help with anything I have, including money. Sign me up!	15 (44%)

Votes so far: 34
Now these votes came in after around 800 or so views. It shows some distribution amongst the people who bothered to answer the question, but if we put the rest of the people who visited the site but didn't answer the poll in their own category "I am not even going to bother to answer this stupid question." then the market looks pretty tough. :)

Though I should probably use a better way to sample the spacecrazies out there, and possibly write up a better questionnaire to learn more about these people. This is on my current agenda.

Another thing on my agenda is writing my own web crawler to build a database and try map the network of spacecrazies out there. All the blogs, websites, groups, forums, projects etc...
The reason for this is twofold. Still studying programming and the Udacity course I am taking is about building a web crawler, the other one is simply my curiosity and also exploring the "market" itself. If I ever hope to "sell" or make something useful to us all, I need to know who we are. I know what I want, but I have not much idea about what other people want.

That should be all for now. I hope you enjoyed the consistent quality of lame here at my blog, and will come back for another dose later on. I am adding new links as I find them, I won't bother with boring you with comments about them. 

If you find or know about a site just shove the link in a comment and I will put it on the top. Once my crawler is done I will try and let it lose on this blog and see what happens. Thanks for the help.

Fifty-Eight: OAO, networks

Open Aerospace.org just made my list.

I got lucky. Through Mach30 and them going to Space Up, I might be making contact with a project in Europe called Resolution Mars. I got a mail from Mach30 introducing somebody from Resolution Mars, and they asked if we could organise a hangout to see if we could help eachother out.

The network is growing, or maybe I should see it the other way around. I am being more and more incorporated into the network.

Open Aerospace is another clear example that I am not the only lunatic around. There might just be enough of us around to make this happen. 

Fifty-Seven: programming, spamming

Hello there.

Programming:
I was watching more TED videos as usual and came across this one.
http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_cutts_try_something_new_for_30_days.html

It motivated me to stop being lame and crank up the programming I do. So I am doing my 30 day of programming every day. So far great success this is the third day. I managed to figure out the bug in my breakout clone. So that tutorial is dusted. Today I will work on my pong clone and completely redo my lame implementation from half a year ago. It works, but has an extremely buggy collision detection.

Spamming:
In the facebook group of SpaceGAMBIT someone posted a link to this blogpost.
http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/space-hackers-colonize-solar-system/

It was awsome to read "freespaceships" popping up again in someone else's head
It gives me a lot of hope. Maybe when it pops up in enough heads someone will succeed at making it happen and then I won't have to waste my time on this. :) 

So I left a comment there and the address to this blog. It might attract some comments or help, or long awaited link to an awsome project that will suck me right in.

Speaking of spamming. I don't know what happened but on the 18th of April there was a spike in the views to this blog. Around 80-90 views, and I have no idea what caused it. It does coincide with the night when Steph was away. I was just watching periodictable,  and sixtysymbols videos, and also some spacevidcast, but I don't remember doing anything spamlike.

Maybe someone out there has the answer. Maybe the bots went nuts over my page.

Anyway, I am off to Eclipse and writing up some proper classes for my pong.

Fifty-Six: vidcast, TMI

Today I watched the latest Spacevidcast which made me check out The Mars Initiative.

Check out how they show the bank statements and key information about how the organisation and the fund is growing.


Also note the comments about crowd funding space exploration at the end of the vidcast. :) Extremely relevant for my pet project.

Fifty-Five: STOTT space

Was reading a space ref article and found them there.

Stott space

I like their connect the dots section.

Fifty-Four: SpaceGambit

I have just found out about this today and put it straight on my list.

SpaceGAMBIT

So an organisation that got money from DARPA to spend on supporting small makerspace projects and the likes related to human space activities and ambitions.

It seems the playing field for opensource space flight development is changing quite fast. It's only a matter of time before a "freespaceships" type organisation level is reached and we will be spending the current yearly budget of SpaceGAMBIT in a day on relevant science and engineering.

I am hopeful.

Fifty-Three: past, present

So just to put things up here, I did actually manage to achieve a couple of things in the past couple of inactive months.

I managed to get to the local Hackerspace in October or November, I can't remember exactly. It was quite interesting, I got shown around and was given a short intro into what's happening there. I would love to go there and work on my projects, I just need to get them going first.

I also had an interesting chat with a friend on google+ last year. He basically suggested to write a space flight simulator of a sort, and we discussed it a little bit, but it hasn't got far because of life stepping in the way and making both of us quite busy. This was still a great thing for me, it showed at least another person thought about this project for some time. :)

Present:
I managed to get back into my tutorials, working through them so hopefully this year I can roll out my first lame app for android. Something simple, something I can do myself, and hopefully if I get some people buy it, I can move some money towards the projects I like.

Deep Space Industries:
I added them to my list after reading about them for the first time today. Maybe I am way behind hearing about them, but this seems extremely exciting because it means Planetary Resources are not alone anymore in their ambitions. 

So my plans at the moment:
-learn to write simple 2D games
-write one for android
-make some money /even if it's just me buying it for my phone :P/
-give money to projects that are cool
-see where this takes me