poll and www pages (was: coordinating efforts..)

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

Pat Wendorf wrote:
> Ok, this is a message to all Tunes and related members:
> 
>         1)      What are you working on.

Merlin, a reflective, persistent, object oriented operating system
based on the Self programming language.

>         2)      How serious are you about your project.

I've been working full time on it and even had two trainees paid
by the local university from 1997 to mid 1998. I just spent US$5000
to get a Sparcstation just to work on this. But I can no longer
continue like this and am looking for something to do to help
balance my budget while I finish this project.

> Why not take a vote right now:  Those of you who wish for the
> page to change
> over to the new format, please say so.
> 
> The new format is located at:
> http://www2.tunes.org/~bineng/tunes.html

It looks great.

> Even if everyone says yes, we still need some people to help with
> the web page (finishing).  I try to do some, but find I have
> little time to get to any web authoring (even the UniOS project
> is not being updated enough).  So if anyone knows anything about
> making web pages (it's not hard), maybe some of you lurkers?  It
> can help us greatly.

Here is an idea I wanted to do in my own web pages, but was unable
to due to the local www administrator not letting users deploy their
own CGI scripts. It shouldn't be hard to build in Perl or Python.

The basic idea is a 2D table: OS projects on one axis and features
on the other. There would be the following pages:

  main - introduction plus two lists: projects and features. Clicking
         on an item of a list takes you to one of the following pages.
         A special "new" item in each list lets you add a project or
         a feature

  project - a short comment about the project is followed by a list
            of all features with summaries for this project. Clicking
            on a feature takes you to the last kind of page.

  feature - a short comment about the idea of this feature is followed
            by the summary for this feature for all different projects.
            Clicking on a project takes you to the last kind of page.

  project feature - a short summary of this feature for this project
                    is followed by a much longer description and
                    possibly even a discussion.

I would first try it without any security - anyone could create
these pages (by clicking "new" in main) or edit them (wiki style).
This way nobody would have to be resposible for keeping these pages
updated - each interested person (probably someone from the project
being described) could just take care of their particular pages.

This is very easy for me to do, if there is interest and a site
that accepts custom CGI scripts.

-- Jecel Mattos de Assumpcao Jr -- mailto: jecel@lsi.usp.br
          http://www.lsi.usp.br/~jecel/merlin.html