Week #707

As one project wanes another waxes. The amount of time we’ve been spending on the Miami project has decreased. They’re in good shape; onboarding customers and prepping for raising a round of investment. The features, bugs and tasks are at a minimum as they want to be stable and get customer feedback. Which means we have more time for some VR projects. The video team has handed over the rough spatial videos and we’ve been putting them into an app for review. Then our client has the opportunity to look at the footage in an Apple Vision Pro and approve which clips they want to clean-up further. (By cleaning-up this means removing any tripods, drone rotors, color grading, blending two different shots for indoor and outdoor lighting, etc.)

A very old, pre-COVID project is coming out of mothballs. We worked on a health survey starting back in 02018 (or maybe even earlier?). It was making use of Iceland’s single-sign-on service. Now that is closed, they are working with another company on auðkenni login. We got dragged along to help get that working with the health survey. We’re recommending to use the other company and remove us from the development loop altogether. We are happy to continue to consult on data and visualizations, but we don’t have the time for new development or maintenance.

With the end of the Single Sign-on Service (island.is), our other survey tools have moved to TOTP (time-based One-Time Passwords). These are the additional 6 digits you enter from your authenticator app when you login. We rolled this out at the start of the summer and have our customers several months to migrate over before we made it mandatory. We’ve also been taking things in steps. At the start of the summer you could always login without 2FA, but you would not see any results until you enabled it. Next week, we’ll turn this on for everyone who needs manage surveys, not just see results. At this point, all sensitive data will be behind 2FA.

Our mastodon instance is back up and running. You can follow some of the team here: https://lodfill.is/@briansuda

We’re waiting for an NDA for a big new project, or we think it’s big, they can’t tell us much until we sign, and after we do, we can’t talk about it. 🤷🏻‍♂️

We’re also waiting for another big contract to be signed before we potentially get pulled into more work. This is via another team that we’ve done some analytics stuff in the past with, but this new project might not need a lot of data work, but we’re on call if needed.

Week #708

Monday started with a PETALS sync. There are two upcoming events where PETALS is being discussed, so today we went over loose-ends, the staging server and tasks for the next 3 weeks.

Monday is also Labor Day in the USA, so it is quiet – no meetings, no project movement.

Our Student Surveys also started today, Monday September 1st. They run for 9 months, so this is our longest running survey. We do update the survey with big fixes through out the year, but we do our best to free development as to not break anything or make any big changes mid-survey. 🎉

We continue to explore more generative mazes for our Adventure Mazes Books. This time we tried to generate mazes using hexagons instead of squares. In a normal square gird maze, from any spot you have 4 potential directions the maze could branch, but with hexagons, you have 6 ways it could branch. You’d think this additional paths would create for a harder maze, but given you don’t want to be able to loop back into the main path to the exit, we feel it makes things easier to solve? Some testing will help.

Miami is back to the forefront getting invoicing and rates included into the backend logic. Each customer can set various contracts in place with their clients. When the job is done, we created a scheduled task to roll-up on an hourly, weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis all the jobs and the total costs to create an invoice.

We’re getting back some sample Spatial Videos to preview in the VR headsets. We’re getting that workflow in place for client review. The way you shoot and compose videos and stories for an immersive experience is completely different than you do for a flat screen. It’s been a great learning experience.

We’re STILL waiting for an NDA for a big new project, or we think it’s big, they can’t tell us much until we sign, and after we do, we can’t talk about it. 🤷🏻‍♂️