be good to contact. Feel free to get in touch if something sounds
interesting or you want advice getting started.
+A [[list from 2008-2009|/doc/project-ideas]] may also have some relevant ideas.
+
+[[!toc]]
+
## "add me to this list" button
If I'm a webmaster for some group with an announcement list, it would be
easily indicate whether the bug was resolved or someone just commented
on it. It also doesn't know how to receive e-mail, so we can't reply to
the e-mails it generates and have our comments go back into the bug
-tracker, and we can't (make bugs@mit.edu create Trac
-tickets)[http://debathena.mit.edu/trac/ticket/216]. There are one or two
+tracker, and we can't [make bugs@mit.edu create Trac
+tickets](http://debathena.mit.edu/trac/ticket/216). There are one or two
alleged plugins to do this, but they create a new ticket on every
e-mail, rather than doing something intelligent with replies; a better
plugin in both directions would be extremely helpful.
_Contact: geofft_
+## Cluster and printer viewer for the iPhone
+
+You might have seen the xcluster displays (in the SIPB office, near the
+four building 11 quickstations, and in the building 12 cluster) that
+show you which clusters aren't in use and which printers aren't hosed.
+This would be immensely more useful as an iPhone application.
+
+_Contact: ccpost_
+
## Snapshotted virtual machines for all popular Linux distributions
A common need for people writing Linux software is to check that their
_Contact: nelhage_
-## inotify logger for scripts and Debathena
-
-On both our [web hosting platform](http://scripts.mit.edu/) and Athena
-cluster machines, we have way more software packages installed than we
-suspect people use, but no good way of determining this. There's a Linux
-interface called [inotify](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inotify) that
-lets you get notifications when another user accesses the filesystem: it
-would be pretty simple to use this to collect aggregate (anonymous)
-statistics of what programs and packages are used frequently or even at
-all.
-
-_Contact: geofft_
-
## SIPB PostgreSQL server
A lot of people prefer Postgres to MySQL, so having a community Postgres
or if there are changes in /etc, other than hostname and such, that we
haven't committed to the scripts Subversion repository.
+## SIPB Library
+
+SIPB has a bunch of books in its library. It'd be nice if a list of
+the library books also existed online in some sort of sane, searchable
+database. One possible platform is the [Exhibit](http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/) project (which originates from a collaboration between the Haystack group in CSAIL and the MIT Libraries). This would require mostly just making a spreadsheet of the information.
+
+_Contact: pbaranay, fawkes_
+
+## Improve the Setup and UI for new users of Zephyr
+
+Currently, it is a pain to get someone else set up using zephyr
+within screen on Linerva with automatically-renewing tickets.
+We should write scripts to set them up so that that all they
+have to do is enter a command or click an icon, type their kerberos
+password, and then know how to use Barnowl.
+
+_Contact: afarrell_
+
+## MITeX
+
+Not a fully formed thought, yet, but the basic idea is to have a web app that lets users create a document, and then it texs the document nicely for them, based on some template that they've selected, and gives them a PDF. They should have the ability to edit the source or just use the WYSIWYG editor.
+
+_Contact: jhamrick_
+
+## Build a web client providing full control to the user
+
+Create a web browser extension (or possibly a stand-alone browser) that is "web-developer antagonistic". It essentially takes full advantage of the
+immense power of a web client, ignoring the wishes of the web developer and server while letting the user take full control. Every JavaScript event (ideally variable, function, etc.), every rendering decision, every cookie setting, every HTTP request, if the user so desires, etc. is not only made visible but easily changeable. When making a request, every aspect of the
+transaction can be completely fiddled with.
+
+There are several extensions that allow you to do stuff sort of like
+this (Firebug, Web Developer Toolbar, Chrome's web developer tools). But they're hard to use and really mostly just debuggers. Our goal here is to build something that goes out of its way to give you complete control via a nice UI.
+
+_Contact: leonidg_
+
+## Improve git with shared checkouts
+
+Around SIPB we're kind of [big](http://sipb.mit.edu/iap/git/) [fans](http://web.mit.edu/cluedumps/slides/understanding-git-2008.pdf) [of](http://blog.nelhage.com/2010/01/on-git-and-usability/) [git](http://negativespace.mit.edu/2010/03/08/gitionary-the-graphical-game-of-git-guessing/). But there is an area that git comes up short. We have a lot of common directories where people really just want to edit files in place (instead of wanting to clone/checkout, edit, commit, push...), but git doesn't support that well. It would be cool if there was a way to work with non-bare repositories in shared directories.
+
+One idea might be using FUSE to present a separate checkout to each person using the directory.
+
+_Contact: broder_
+
+## Scripts Pony Improvements
+
+[Scripts Pony](http://pony.scripts.mit.edu) is scripts.mit.edu's new hostname management system. It was just released recently, and has lots of bite-sized improvements remaining to be implemented. Particularly good ideas include adding the ability to show and edit hostname aliases, checking whether hostname paths exist and giving appropriate feedback, creating a zephyrbot to allow people to approve tickets easily, and adding the ability to check hostnames in Moira automatically.
+
+See [the project TODO file](http://web.mit.edu/pony/TODO) for more ideas.
+
+_Contact: xavid_
+
+## Bazki
+
+[Bazki](http://bazki.mit.edu/) is a wiki written in Python designed around several principles: structured data with object-oriented inheritance; using a wiki language with powerful macros that can be compiled into either HTML or PDF (via LaTeX); and making the content editable offline using a VCS. Bazki works enough to to be useful, but it has lots of room for improvement and probably would benefit from some major design changes.
+
+_Contact: xavid_
+
+## Fix AFS support in IcedTea
+
+The [IcedTea](http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/Main_Page) open-source Java plugin currently [doesn't support having users with AFS homedirs](http://icedtea.classpath.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=166). The plugin creates a pair of sockets in your homedir that are used to communicate between the applet viewer and the browser plugin. Since AFS doesn't support FIFOs, this fails.
+
+It should be relatively simple to patch both the applet viewer and the browser plugin to simply use `/tmp`, or possibly fall back on `/tmp` if opening the FIFO in `$HOME` doesn't work - just find all the places in the code those paths get used.
+
+(See also [the bug we filed](http://icedtea.classpath.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=312), which lists a couple more paths to look for)
+
+_Contact: broder, debathena_
+
## Your Project Here
SIPB can help you out in terms of both computing resources and
sipb-www / wiki.git / blobdiff