Tegu in Action

During part of my presentation at "URUG":http://groups.google.com/group/urug the other night, I mentioned ideas about how our Ruby/Rails/Machine Learning/Analytic skills can be leveraged to make a difference in the world. I mentioned that I would donate my development skills and time to companies wanting to make contributions to the "Asayo's Wish Foundation":http://asayoswish.com/. It looks like two or three engagements will come of those conversations, and I'm really excited about that. I found "this link":http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HehMDlMY5ug today that talks about the foundation and a training organization, Impact Trainings. It's a great video.

Also, if anyone else is interested in incorporating the ideas of Tegu in their projects, I will extend my offer. Basically:

• I'll donate time to create a valuable service for you or your firm.
• You'll donate some money to Asayo's Wish Foundation, a 501 c 3 organization (read tax writeoff).
• Asayo's Wish Foundation will contribute 100% of the money gathered to the children in Uganda. In our case, buying laptops for 155 students in their school there. (see "laptop.org":http://laptop.org)

So, it's a win for everybody.

I have this wild and crazy idea that I just may do if someone else wants to pair program with me. Maybe you can tell from this blog that I can get quite scatter-brained, working on a lot of projects, improving each incrementally. This isn't a project I'd start without some real commitment to following through and finishing what I started.

The idea is to grease the skids a little in my brain regarding Erlang and put together a file system management tool that would really inform the user about the kind of content he has on his system in a pragmatic way. I thought I'd have these general elements in place:

• A full-text search engine that is fast and concurrent
• A dictionary of meta information on each file
• A classification system that adds semantic meaning to files, like project name, language, development project, installed library, active project, active when, downloaded?, original URI, etc.

It's kind of a combination of several machine learning skills with Erlang. Why Erlang? Because I want to see how portable I can make it, and how integratable it can be to other systems. I also want to demonstrate how quickly and non-intrusively I can make a heavy-lifting app work with Erlang. It would be fun, useful, and maybe not too much work.

I think we can use Joe Armstrong's full-text search engine as a starting point. Also, the command-line command, lsof, is a very powerful way to see what's happening on a system, possibly files being downloaded, etc.

Anyway, this is an open invitation, if it sounds good to anyone.