PICnet Blog

What happens when politically inspired young people get their hands on a bio-fueled bus? An amazing revival of hope and energy in Washington state politics takes place before your eyes. The Washington Bus recently launched their new Non-Profit Soapbox site, and we’re extremely pleased with the results.

“Put yourself on a bus full of young people and experience first-hand the revival of hope and energy in Washington politics. It’s not just any bus, of course. It’s the Washington Bus. And on any given Saturday it rolls into a town somewhere in our state, full of volunteers eager to work for positive change.”

Many thanks to Nica Lorber for her fantastic design skills, and our friends at Democracy In Action for their tools to empower the Bus.

Some of you might know about N-TEN’s call for chapter proposals for their upcoming Tech for Good Guide. Ben and I couldn’t resist an opportunity to share our thoughts, and recently submitted a few chapter ideas to our N-TEN friends.

Two areas we find we’re unique apt to providing good advice on include the ability to best utilize Web 2.0 software and managing an effective online presence. We had thought about focusing on a chapter regarding open source technology, but we figured that folks like Michelle Murrain and others would probably take up that important chapter.

While we’re not sure our writings will stay off the cutting room floor at N-TEN, we commend N-TEN for the great idea of putting this book together. We’ll keep you posted as we learn if our names will be in print!

In our country’s current military involvement around the world, there are more than a few opinions. For those proud Navy, Marine, and Coast Guard reservists, the Naval Enlisted Reserve Association has stood by their side for more than 50 years, representing their best interests.

“In more than 50 years, NERA has been responsible many of the pay and benefits gains reservists enjoy today and take for granted. Why NERA? Today, more than at any other time, Reserve Enlisted members are called upon more often to mobilize frequently to serve our nation.”

Congratulations to the team at NERA for building a terrific online resource for those men and women in uniform.

I must admit, when it comes to development processes, I’m an old fashioned pseudo waterfall procedure kind of guy. I know what you’re thinking: this guy needs to drink the agile programming, extreme programming, pair programming Kool-Aid.

Well, with the help of our development department, I’m in full test-driven development therapy (thanks Chris and Mark). Even better, I’m dragging one of our project managers, Pradeep, along for the ride.

From our friends at Wikipedia: “Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a software development technique consisting of short iterations where new test cases covering the desired improvement or new functionality are written first, then the production code necessary to pass the tests is implemented, and finally the software is refactored to accommodate changes.”

Gulp. Can management and test-driven development live in harmony?
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With our roots in international policy, we’re excited at the opportunity to work with groups focusing on US international relations. We’re pleased to announce the launch of the USA*Engage Web site, an organization representing individuals across the US who are concerned about the proliferation of unilateral foreign policy sanctions at the federal, state, and local levels.

“Ten years ago, U.S. foreign policy seemed to turn frequently to unilateral sanctions,” said USA*Engage Co-Chair Bill Reinsch. “Today, the pendulum seems to be swinging back in the same direction. This new Web site will be an excellent tool as we seek to reinforce the benefits of U.S. engagement and diplomacy in the world.”

Many thanks go out to our design partner Free Range Studios on their design work on this new Web site.

As Non-Profit Soapbox continues to grow in popularity, our hours spent doing invoicing each month continues to grow as well. Our joy of working with QuickBooks seems to decrease proportionally with the swelling number of clients.

Being a company steeped in the Web, I began wondering recently if there’s a better way of managing our invoices. Currently, we have to manually use QuickBooks to create invoices and receipts, then PDF them, then email them. This ends up adding up to about 5 hours a month, which I’d rather have spent on new Soapbox innovations.

About 6 months ago I signed us up for Freshbooks, an online invoicing system well accepted by the Web 2.0 world. Freshbooks seems made for people just starting out with invoicing, and those that might not already be using QuickBooks. For instance, QuickBooks is our master accounting records, and where we record active clients. With Freshbooks, it seems like we’d need to duplicate our efforts by posting invoices in both our QuickBooks and Freshbooks.
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Over 7 million people, or one in every 32 American adults, are behind bars, on probation or on parole. Thousand Kites is a national dialogue project by Appalshop addressing the criminal justice system.

With assistance from our design partner Free Range Studios, the Thousand Kites site launched with links to a variety of social networks that the project connects individuals, video and audio, and other multimedia links.

It’s early in the morning here in NYC, and just as I’m getting to board the train back to PICnet for my annual address to the company, I see the following good news on the Joomla! Web site:  Joomla 1.5 is stable!

What an effort it’s been.  With a complete rewrite of the code base, making it sleeker and more elegant for developers and users alike, Joomla! 1.5 comes out of the door with a bang today.

While I’ve got to run to the train station this morning, I’m expecting a long day of celebrations ahead for everyone in the community.  Congratulations everyone, especially Louis and Johan, whose vision helped propel the code base to be what it is today.  Also, big thanks to PICnetter Kevin Devine, who’s work in the past few months in bug squashing has lead to many great strides forward in the 1.5 trunk.
More details coming soon!

As the sun sets on most of the bug squashing locations this afternoon, we in San Francisco are also winding down on what has been a tremendous community effort. In less than 48 hours, developers and testers around the globe have squashed more Joomla 1.5 bugs than we ever could have imagined.

What some thought would normally take 4 weeks was completed in just two days.

In San Francisco, we had a blast. Today brought us two additional community members, including Steve Reichgut (all the way from Tracy) and Ron Severdia. Their efforts brought our daily total of seven SF community members doing their best to help get 1.5 out the door. Helped by a good dosage of snacks provided graciously by Debbie, freshly brewed coffee, and a nice view of the SF bay from the PICnet SF corner window, developers went to town slaying the bugs.

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It’s been a whirlwind on our first day of Joomla Pizza, Bugs, and Fun here. We’ve got three US cities connected, including San Francisco, Washington DC, and New York all bringing their best to join the Joomla fun. I had the joy of flying cross-country last night, and now am blogging for you live from the PICnet SF office where we’re hosting 6 of us Joomla bug crunchers.The day started off very smoothly, with DC and NY going online at 10am. Cold weather ain’t stopping us! We setup an IRC room for the main chat, and a secondary Skype chat room for us IRC delinquents. After realizing that we had the power to kick out the jams, we figured out that we needed to have a plan of attack for squashing these suckers effectively.

Wilco stepped up to the mic and called from the NY location to the DC location, and gave us some marching orders. In general, our goal was to make sure that we weren’t duplicating efforts on the patches. So, we created a Google doc, which allowed people to post which bug artefact they were working on, and then notify Wilco of the start of their work.

So far, things have gone much more smoothly than I had ever imagined. Big thanks to the likes of Wilco, Elin, Rob, Kenneth, and Louis for their long travels to be on the scene to give guidance to the community as we patch away. Even bigger props to the 39 community members around the world that have taken time from their Saturdays to make this a reality. And finally, to my fellow PICnetters, thank you for the donation of your time to make sure we’re rocking smoothly here.

More updates coming throughout the day! Photos after the jump.

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