United TI Status End Of Year 2010

[NETWizz]

Good Evening.

I am NETWizz; I used to go by Jbirky if anyone even remembers me... I am one of the three Core Founders of United-TI: Jon Johnson, David Lindstrom, and Justin Birkhofer (me). You may not know me because I am more of a Steve Wazniak than a Steve Jobs.


Our History: United-TI sprung from a bunch of webmasters who sprung together to form a better, tighter knit website. We were all pretty much in High School doing our own things collaborating with people all over the world and hosting our own websites. This was of course, back in the early 2000's! Essentially, Jon Johnson, previous owner of redelf.net hosting, once hosted Prokul Interactive (webmaster Glenn). Jon also created AlienCC.com before MySpace and Facebook became a big hit i.e. he programmed his own blogging software and published his programs. David Lindstrom was hosting the Cirrus Programming Group and developed the Z-DOS shell for the z80 TI-Calculators for which I wrote a Z-DOS GUI and also hosted my own website calcbasic.org, which provided TI-BASIC tutorials. We also partnered with Alan Hamlett who had a calc83p website.

Essentially, we all combined forces and then most people dropped off the RADAR immediately, but Jon, David, and I stuck around, and we are now all still here. In fact, in just a couple of years many of us will be 30... where did all of our time go?

David Lindstrom was our best programmer. One of our community's biggest projects, Nimbus OS never got finished. Besides, it will never big king with MirageOS around anyway, and that is okay. In all honestly, Joe Wingbermuehle (creator of Ion), Dan Englender (Detached Solutions), and Michael Vincent (Ticalc.org, michaelv.org, and Detached Solutions) all helped provide info about the TI Calculators. It was tough because TI-OS was constantly changing with new updates, almost completely undocumented, and totally closed source. There was once a time when the average person could not even create his or her own Application for the TI-83+ due to the signing required (now easily done with freely available utilities). Really, our generation pushed and shoved hard, and we made a lot of progress.

It got to the point where life caught up with us though. Most of us never touch a TI Graphing calculator in our day-to-day lives. Not only did we finish High School, but we all finished higher, post-secondary education though some of us are still going back. Regardless, we have families, our own homes, and some of us are already married with children - much has changed including our interest in the TI Graphing calculator community. As you may expect, this website is much less meaningful to us now, but none of us want to see it go.

Here is what I can come up with. Here is what I would like to see happen.

1. I would like to see Nimbus OS (the Application) released and Open Sourced, so it can benefit the community. I am going to talk to David Lindstrom about this because he created it. I am also going to try very hard to find a copy of the code... It is probably backed up to an old Zip Disk... I will acquire a ZIP drive (probably from eBay)

2. I would like there to be one last programming contest this time in TI-BASIC; since, it is easier and more people can participate. There will obviously need to be a prize, but I cannot promise another TI Graphing Calculator though that is a possibility.

3. I would like to formerly transfer the ownership of the website to someone who can take full responsibility (ownership) of it including its financial responsibilities, decision making, updates, et cetera.

[wjbudd]

[Xeda112358]

I wish I could take on the responsibility, but I have no knowledge or experience about running a site. I believe there will always be a calculator community, no matter how much it dies down and I plan to be an active contributor to the community for another few years until life happens to me, too. It is kind of a happy/sad thing that the first generation now have to move on, but I would like to thank you all so very much for all of your contributions. When I entered the community, sites like this advanced my knowledge of programming very rapidly and it gave me a place to be (even if I was worried about how well received I would be ). Some of you may have families already, but you have helped raise a generation of programmers, too. This site is slowing down, true, but I personally want to see this site pick back up and I have been trying to contribute when I can (I don't have internet when I am away on break).

As for that contest... I need a break from assembly I might not take on the challenge because I am trying to pack in as much into my college schedule as possible, but if I have time, I'll give it a whirl.

[NETWizz]

Exactly! We just need some new blood in here. i.e. We have concluded we want to give the keys to the kingdom to other people who can perform the leadership tasks, so the UTI-Staff reviewed your profile & think you are ready for a position of true power & authority.

Welcome aboard. You are a UTI-Super Moderator (Global) now!

[Xeda112358]

Woooow. What does that mean? Coooool. I'll be glad to be a part of this new blood to keep UTI up! ^-^

[NETWizz]

Basically, it means you have oversight & full control of all content on this entire forum. You can edit/delete & see anything. You can warn people & even ban them! You are [essentially] in charge of the community as one of its stakeholders now.

The hierarchy is that the UTI-Staff are essentially the captains who together are supposed to come up with guidance and direction for the community, but historically we micro-managed, which worked fine but never gave many other good people the opportunity to be the community leaders they could have become, so we are fixing that now and you are petty much a first-officer i.e. you are in a collective group that is second in command. This is a very high rank one that until recently we have been too reserved to give out to hardly anyone whom we did not personally know or talk with directly because not only did we like hording the power (control), but we feared the damage one person could do. The reason is what we saw in people. For example, one person (one of our UTI Members and greatest contributors) has historically been so unstable as to branch off building his own community website then get all emotional/angry and have a total explosive outrage and delete the entire thing permanently trashing hundreds of hours or thousands of hours of work... then he would rebuild... (repeated several times). People also used to get in heated debates (flame wars). We were right out of High-School, so we were a bit inept as to how to best handle personnel issues. Basically, we could see that both sides were right and did not want to take sides or get too involved or curtail free speech. We also did not want to take action because we respected these otherwise productive members and they would PM us with their point-of-view, which although opposing was not wrong. Each time we would take action, people would get their feelings hurt, PM us saying rude things, then scream at us on other message boards. The good has far outweighed the bad.

Overall, it has been a lot of fun here, and a lot of great things have happened. We have also been very, very stable. We have been hosted by RedElf (a PC on the Internet), GlobalSolutions (a private Virtual Server), NoSolution (Private Physical Server), and now GoDaddy. The core members who set this up all have a background in IT & IS, so DNS, web development, operating systems, networking, databases, web-servers, and the Internet all make sense to us. Hence, this is why we have been this stable. We have been able to survive hardware failures, the market crunch, and moving hosting without loosing any data.

We look at things differently now. We look back and agree this community was built by the community for the community and we are just not active enough to provide for continued day-to-day operations. Instead we want to provide direction from experience because we know what needs to be done i.e. we know where we procrastinated, but we want other people like you to help us out...

TWe cannot run this place alone. We need help!

[Xeda112358]

Okay, cool! Um, I've never really had regular internet access until about six months, so I am still getting the hang of things, but I'm sure I can ask around if I need help. I can see the difficulties in handling objective issues, but I'll try to at least go about things in a logical and responsible matter (if all else fails, I will resort to using randInt( to make decisions ). I have internet while I am in college, too, so when I am about to leave for a while on break or whatnot, I'll try to give a heads up so that people don't think I've abandoned the site

[DJ Omnimaga]

I would like to see this site remain active. I saw many others slowly die with the time and revival attempts failed because it was too late. The thing is that it's not impossible to bring a site like this out of a lull: Cemetech had quite a huge one in 2008, following the Jatol hosting incident, yet today they're booming. UTI also had a small slump in early 2005 because of slow server issues. I remember logging in here back then and the today active topic list had like 3 topics sometimes, most of which were in the open discussion section. Yet a few months later it had 3 pages. It just takes time and dedication, first from the staff and secondly from the community.

I also think it would be nice to bring back the downloads section, although I understand it might take some work to convert the database to an IPB3-compatible format.

[NETWizz]

Welcome back... glad you are with us again. Do you know of any compatible solutions geared toward IP.Board that are not costly?

[DJ Omnimaga]

Thanks for the welcome. I am not sure how high my activity will be since I was busy lately and since I do not code a lot anymore, but hopefully I should be able to share some stuff or help a bit where/when I can.

As for IP.Board, I unfortunately do not know, though. I only used IPB 1.3.1 Final, the securized-but-limited version of it that Invisionfree used and staff on the free version of IPB 2.0 (before it went paid). The only site I know that had mods was http://www.invisionize.com/ . Not sure if they have a freeware/cheap download system, though.

Right now I use SimpleMachines (one of my site run on 2.0 RC4 and the other on 1.1.12), which is free, but it has much less features than IP.Board 3. My 1.1.12 site has about 25 mods installed, some of which were modified, and I use some custom templates.

For the download system, if you cannot find one, an alternative could be to simply split the Projects Release sub-forum into multiple sections and attach the downloads directly to the appropriate posts. My Invisionfree site was setup like that, although files were hotlinked.

EDIT: On an unrelated note, when were you guys planning to hold a contest approximately?

[alexrudd]

I'm not sure how I stumbled across this posting, since I haven't been here in a good long time.

I had been around a while, and didn't even know much of the info NetWizz gave. Informative for me too.

Glad to see the reins being passed on.