Following Vipul Naik’s, Peter Hurford’s1 and others’ example, I will be publishing reviews of my activities as blog posts on a monthly basis. This will help me track progress, compare against goals set in the past and try to measure overall impact.

For the most part, July was kind of a slow month because of the house remodeling being done at home, which probably will be finished in the next couple of weeks.

Contents:

ASP.NET 5 & ASPNET5CO

ASPNET5CO is a project that comprises my efforts to socially and technically advocate the ASP.NET 5 software framework. This month I worked on the following:

Android development and debugging

I did some Android development and debugging in order to troubleshoot an application a friend is developing. Because of the way his application is designed, it needs root/admin permissions to access some features of the device.

I don’t normally use a custom ROM neither do I root my device2, but on this occasion I temporarily installed Cyanogenmod on my Nexus 4 and obtained root permissions on the phone. The result of this is a guide to set up a debugging and development environment for Android on Linux.

Folding@Home Client as a systemd service unit

I fold on a regular basis on my desktop computer and my home server, both of which are running Fedora (see stats here and here). Systemd keeps gaining popularity among the major Linux distributions including Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian and ArchLinux, but Folding@Home packages still haven’t shipped with systemd support.

I created a systemd service unit file and a short guide to install it and use it. This makes it possible to control the Folding@Home client as a regular systemd service unit.

Dotfiles repository

I started a dotfiles repository at Github. I think one of the main reasons people maintain a personal dotfiles repository is to be able to easily synchronize their configuration files and directories across different hosts/machines. I haven’t had this need since I synchronize my files with Unison/rsync over SSH without using third-party services and also because I keep individual configurations as gists.

However it seems that it would be easier to maintain all configurations in a single Github repository as opposed to keeping each configuration as a separate Gist repository. Moreover, having all configuration files and directories together makes sharing and browsing easier.

Philanthropy/EA

As suggested by Tom Ash of Charity Science, I’ll be helping with the local Effective Altruism presence here at Monterrey. The point of this is to have at least one person other people interested in EA could talk to3. Be sure to contact me if you want to know more about effective altruism related ideas.

A mailing list and a Facebook group were set up, although for the time being we may organize all Spanish-speaking EAs in a single group instead, probably Altruismo Eficaz.

Folding@Home from June 15 to July 15, I scored 8,036 points and folded 17 work-units. Here’s a graph of total daily production history for July.

Finally, I made GiveWell my chosen charity at Amazon Smile.

Other

I performed minor improvements to the presentation and layout of my projects/repos at Github and at this website. See Projects and my Github repos.


  1. Peter Hurford posts his reviews on a quarterly basis instead. ↩

  2. I don’t usually require admin permissions and I feel rooting my main phone might inadvertently introduce security vulnerabilities to the system. ↩

  3. This didn’t really happened in July but in March, but I figured it’s the kind of activity I should include in my personal reviews. ↩