technobabble & foodstamps

It's been a long time since I wrote a field report (I'm really going to try to be more attentive to this). There are a lot of projects that I'm currently working on. I'm trying to do a a complete redesign of my organization's website, in order to integrate a lot of project management and accounting stuff into a centralized location, since my organization's staff is a little far-flung. The current site is running Drupal 4.6.3. I spent a week trying to manually upgrade it in stages to Drupal 5.2, but ran into so many database errors that I eventually created a new test site in 5.2, with the intention of getting that stable and then porting the content. I highly recommend the module casetracker (http://www.drupal.org/projects/casetracker). Most ticketing systems are designed for software development, but casetracker is much more generalized, so you can have general tasks that have support tickets submitted against them. I'm trying to integrate that with Organic Groups and a wiki (wikitools+pearwiki+views), so that projects created in casetracker can have a group assigned to that project, and each task within the project can be associated with one or more pages in a documentation wiki. I'm also trying to integrate the ERP module, which does complete business management, so that tasks can be assigned hours and values that are automatically entered into the timesheet in the accounting software. If I can get this all to work I'll post a complete tutorial on the CTC VISTA wiki, if people are interested.

Besides that, I'm still trying to get the cool but somewhat buggy distributed monitoring software ZABBIX (http://www.zabbix.com) working with our datacenter. Partly I think it's our firewall setup, but I think it'll help once we get our new colocated server in place (the current virtual server where I'm setting it up is somewhat overloaded). Once that's setup, our servers will be able to alert us when there's a problem, rather than us having to go look for it.

I'm going to be writing a whitepaper soon on the ideal open-source wireless mesh solution, and I'll be doing some hands-on research with some state-of-the-art equipment to do it. I'm also going to be working on an application to ARIN for IPv6 address space allocated specifically for community networks (never too early).

There are three other especially big projects that I'm working on, one of which is probably going to take up the majority of my time during the next month. I'm not sure how much I'm supposed to say about these projects yet, unfortunately, because of the groups involved, but they'll be exciting to talk about once they're a little further along.

Also, I finally managed to get foodstamps. Apparently in Illinois, Americorps income is exempt from considerations as far as how much you get for foodstamps, so I got the maximum amount ($155/month). This will be a huge help, because besides rent, food is my number one expense. Things are busy but going pretty well, I'll try and post these much more regularly from here on out.