Civic Nerdom

It’s the end of June, which means it is the end of my first month of working on TermsWatch. So what has happened in this first month?

Enter the EFF

The first few days of the month were spent settling in at Berkman and getting my new(ish) laptop ready for work. By Thursday I was ready to get down to business. Well, it just so happened that Thursday was launch day for the EFF‘s latest project, TOSBack. I spent Thursday afternoon playing around with TOSBack and finding out as much as I could about it. I then spent the next few days running around like a chicken with its head cut off; TOSBack does half of what I was going to do. I thought to myself, “well what do I do now?”

Fortunately there are cooler heads than I at Berkman, and they decided it was best to give the EFF a call. We had a few phone calls with Tim Jones, Activism & Technology Manager at the EFF and the man behind TOSBack. Turns out Berkman and the EFF have a lot of similar hopes and dreams regarding a service such as TOSBack. It also turns out that Tim was about to go on vacation for the summer, so nobody was going to be working on the project for a couple of months. All in all, this turned out to be a great opportunity for everybody involved and it was agreed that I would spend the summer working on the TOSBack code.

Symfony & Text Extraction

With the TOSBack code in hand I went to work. The first order of business was to port TOSBack over to Symfony, a web application framework. A framework such as Symfony has several advantages, including taking care of some tedious aspects of creating an application, such as checking input for security issues and generating administration pages. All in all this was a fairly painless process.

The latest, and current, problem that I have been tackling is how to extract the important information from a web page. Fortunately, as is becoming a common occurrence this summer, it turns out there are quite a few bright people in our small area who have done work like this, and they are all easy to talk to. I’ve spent nearly a week talking to these bright people, gaining insight into various approaches and understanding exactly what it is I need to do. I have a pretty good idea what it is I am going to do now (for those interested in the technical stuff, check out this summary of the extractor,) and with a new week on the horizon, I hope to get this thing working quickly.

Its Wednesday night and I have just finished my third day of being a Berkman intern. The last three days have been a whirlwind compared to my previous ten months of lounging around in New Paltz. I’m not sure where to begin, so I’ll ask the random number generator to give me a number (4.) Now I’ll feed that number into my where-to-begin function, and wait a bit (it is a surprisingly inefficient function,) aaaaaannnnddd, ahh, my project.

I think I am in the strangest position of all the interns. While most (all?) of the other interns are working for existing projects, I am basically starting my own. This means I am pretty independent and self-directed. A few of the interns have asked me the question ‘Where will you be working this summer?’ To be honest, I can basically work wherever I want. I’ve already been scoping out my potential work areas, weighing their pros and cons, and I think I like my options.

As far as actual progress on the project goes, today was the first day that I got real work done. You might be able to consider yesterday work; I spent the day setting up my new laptop to be my development environment. But today was really the first day I did work on the project itself. That work included creating a rough draft of a design document and looking through some code I wrote back in February when I first thought of this program. I look forward to showing both to a number of people at the center, getting feedback, and refining both.

I’ll wrap this post up the same way I wrapped up my day, with my fellow interns. At the end of the day we had our first ‘intern hour,’ a time when all of the interns get together to talk, or to present, or to be presented to. I’m not going to lie, in past experiences I have found these sorts of “intern activities” to be boring and forced. This activity, however, was surprisingly engaging. We were given control over the discussion, and we took the that control and ran. We went all over the place: planning a discussion on Twitter, talking about music, movies, books, future Google killers, and what else we can do to benefit both our academic community and our physical community. It was a great discussion, and I think it was a great reflection on the group. While I have only known the other interns for a few days (which basically means I don’t know them at all) this discussion did remind me that this is a special group of very bright, very motivated, and very moral people.

I’m glad I’m here. I am going to enjoy this summer.