In the year 367, a star 1,533 light years from Earth, explodes in a nova. The first light from the star is seen on Earth on February 21, 01901. See you in 1533 weeknotes!

This week share’s its name with 367 Amicitia, a main belt asteroid of the Flora Family, which means it is an S-type astroid. Only about 4-5% of astroids are similar and their origins are poorly understood. This week also share’s its name with the Minuscule 367 Greek manuscript of the New Testament and the Boeing 367-80 or Dash 80. It was a four-engine prototype aircraft built to demonstrate the advantages of jet propulsion for commercial aviation.

Material Conference

This week we moved from Blind-bird tickets, where we had not yet published any speakers, to Early-bird tickets and published our first two speakers. We’re excited to announce Matt Jones and Charlotte Dann. We’re getting more and more excited about the event and to tell you more about who’s next-up to be announced.

Be sure to get your ticket today!

iOS applications

This week we’ve continued to putter on two iOS projects. They are more internal to scratch an itch, but they eventually will make their way out into the real world. Now, we’re always big fans of the web, and when ever we can, we’d prefer to simply make this a webpage. That’s partly why the only apps we’re interested in working on are ones that are still in those corners where the web hasn’t fully reached yet. Our first app that we’ve been playing with for a long time now is called “How Far: Iceland”. We’ve taken several well known places in Iceland and are comparing their distances and heights to information we can access via the Health.app. As you move, your phone is tracking your steps and altitude changes, go ahead, open Health.app and you’ll see you have data in there. Our little How Far app takes that data, does some very simple division to tell you how many times you climbed the equivalent of the highest mountain in Iceland compared to the flights of stairs you take. It is fun, but requires it to be an app to access the HealthKit DataStore.

The other app, called Daycrement, is a calendaring app which also taps into the device’s event database. This means we only need to handle the display logic and not complicate ourselves with storing or managing events. We love calendars, and Daycrement is an attempt to try to visualise events as a timeline of things X days into the future. This is still early days and it is mostly scratching our own itch, but might be useful to someone else in the future too.

Projects

This week we focused mostly on two projects. Our survey tool continues to be enhanced with some tweaks and features from our customers. We’ve been migrating between servers and continuing to sort out any bugs and compartmentalise all the 3rd party plugins. After May, when the GDPR comes into affect, we will need to move ourselves from managing and collecting the data on their behalf, to simply their 3rd party contractor for software development. Therefore, we’re moving the servers and all the additional utilities, like email and SMS providers under their name. Since they are the ones collecting and processing the personal information, they are the legal entity and therefore need to be responsible for all the infrastructure. We certainly could be responsible, but that’s not our business model.

We’ve also been helping out with a small CRM project for collecting and managing power stations worldwide. The CRM tool is not complicated, but getting it setup seems to be harder than expected. After contacting the hosting company and fiddling around with some DNS settings, we’re now in a place where we can actually start to set things up and install what’s missing.

Bric-à-brac

As we go through our endless sea of open tabs, this article jumped out: The Bad Hair, Incorrect Feathering, and Missing Skin Flaps of Dinosaur Art. It is a great look at how we might have been representing Dinosaurs wrong all along. If we took the skeletons of other animals today and applied the same dinosaur design logic, they look nothing like the real thing. So maybe we’re wrong about the dinosaurs too?