Well my winter break from school work is coming to a close. Monday I start my “Advanced Algorithms” and “Ethics in IT” courses through Regis University’s College of Computer Science and Information Sciences online program. My goal has always been to work on projects when I have a break from school work and I’m excited to see that I’ve actually been doing it! Here’s what I’ve been working on…
Follow Sweeper
As most people reading this probably know, I’m a big fan of Twitter. Unfortunately, Twitter has a crazy rule that unless your follower:following ratio is over some super secret ratio then you can’t follow more than 2000 people. With my interest in Colorado Tech, I am constantly at that limit, which means I end up unable to follow new people. I knew that there were some Twitter accounts that I was following that were inactive, but there is no easy way to find which accounts were inactive, so Follow Sweeper was created.
It’s written in Ruby and gives me a way to play with Ruby and the Twitter API without worrying too much abou Rails or any other framework although Rails is likely in Follow Sweeper’s future. I have a project page for Follow Sweeper but the best way to follow its progress is on the Follow Sweeper GitHub page.
Streamlining Police Officer Paperwork with Word and Visual Basic
I work as a police dispatcher for a small department in the Denver, Colorado metro area. When I heard that officers were annoyed with some of the duplication they encountered when doing paperwork I started looking into their process to see if there was a way I could help. Officers are required to submit a “Statement in Support of Warrantless Arrest” (Warrantless Arrest) and a “Determination of Probable Cause” (PC) to the courts when arresting someone on new charges. Much of the same information on the Warrantless Arrest such as the subject’s name, the subject’s date of birth, date and time of arrest and crimes charged, etc. are also required on the PC. I wanted to find a way to allow officers to only enter that information once.
The only thing that bothers me about this project is that I couldn’t come up with a short, catchy name for it and an acronym is completely out of the question (SPOPWVB is very un-catchy). I stumbled into a solution using Visual Basic in Microsoft Word. You can check out the project on the Streamlining Police Officer Paperwork with Word and Visual Basic project page.
You can see all my projects on my aptly named Projects page. Any feedback, assistance and advice on any of my projects is always appreciated!
