I’ve had a bunch of ideas lately that are sitting on a post-it on my desk, so thought this would be the better place to dump them:

• Twitterbot to show traveler updates: The idea is that you’d add the bot as a friend, and send it a tweet asking it to track your trip, and it would pull the itinerary and send tweets to your account with the progress of your trip. This way your followers (which i’m hoping are family) can keep up with where you are, and if you reached on time.
• Ruby Route for Tax Software: This is the idea that I use Route to create an open source tax prep software that mimics the manual forms
• AST Editor: already expanded on in previous posts. Look at IntelliJ’s MPS as a potential solution that already exists. But not quite - I’m interested in maintainability, they’re interested in creating a DSL ecosystem.
• Map reduce for code comprehension and static analysis: This comes from my efforts to get XRadar to work for Novo codebase, which it balked on. So the idea is to use map-reduce to break the problem down into manageable size, and still be able to do static analysis of large codebases.
• PIM based on Chandler: This is the new incarnation of my long-standing PIM idea: I recently went back to see how Chandler is getting along, and it seems like they have some great ideas, which seem even greater in the light of my recently drinking the GTD koolaid. But its slllllooooowww as hell - not good for a productivity tool, and it still doesnt do mail. So my idea is to create a PIM tool that does mail, and has all of Chandler’s goodness. Chandler itself is not an option because its slow. So I looked for existing open source java mail clients that I can convert, and found Columba which seems to be really mature, but the source seems really impenetrable. Plus it still didnt do Outlook, which is on the top of my list of required integrations. Why have a GTD PIM, if you still have to import/export from the most used email client in the world? So now I’m investigating writing the thing in Ruby. I’m tentatively calling it Joey, as in we already have Chandler, so why not Joey :)?