matt.gillooly (Matt Gillooly)

Interests

coffee, design, IPAs, irish whiskey, Martial Arts, music production, ruby, social software

Web Links

About Me

I like dynamic languages and well-designed interfaces. My favorite computer scientist is Alan Kay. When not actively hacking, I can be found Twittering on my iPhone from a barstool somewhere in Providence. My goal in life is to perfectly embody the three great virtues of a programmer.

Recent Content

Title: Your Wishlist (Forum) Submitted: January 10th, 2009 - 12:23am

There is an obnoxious amount of talent in the RI Nexus/Providence Geeks community. Don't deny it, or Jack Templin will cut you with a samurai sword.

There's also a ton of need in this state. ...Opportunity?

As someone on the engineering side of things, I know that we don't always know where the biggest needs are... but a lot of us want to help.

So, do-gooders and non-profiteers: This is your opportunity to post project ideas that will benefit the community, if executed. In fact, let's not even make that a requirement. This is your ultimate wishlist opportunity.

Best case: Someone builds your idea if you make a strong enough case.

Worst case: You're no worse off.

The upside outweighs the downside by a ridiculous proportion. So please make your requests and forward a link to anyone you know who might have some good proposals.

Title: BatchBlue written up in WebWorkerDaily (Forum) Submitted: June 12th, 2008 - 11:41am

Kudos to BatchBlue on a glowing writeup today on ReadWriteWeb!

http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/06/12/batchbook-adds-batchbox-email-forwarding/

Title: Demand OpenID! (Forum) Submitted: May 29th, 2008 - 2:41pm

Anyone out there using OpenID should take a look at http://demand.openid.net/, a new service that lets you publicly request that any given site implement support for OpenID. There's even a handy bookmarklet that you can use anytime you visit a site that you wish had OpenID support.

So far, I'm the only one to have requested RI Nexus, but you can keep track of the list of requestors at http://demand.openid.net/site/rinexus.com

Title: Werewolf (a.k.a. Mafia) (Forum) Submitted: April 10th, 2008 - 3:03pm

One of my favorite (and completely unexpected) experiences from SxSW was being exposed to the game Werewolf. Not only is it a lot of fun, but it turns out to be a great way to get a group of people talking and inadvertantly networking.

A number of folks I met there were from a group in Portland, OR that has monthly Werewolf meetups. Would anyone here be interested in meeting up in Providence for an occasional game?

Title: SxSW (Forum) Submitted: March 3rd, 2008 - 5:37pm

Anyone else planning to attend the SxSW Interactive Festival?

This will be my first time there... any hot tips from SxSW veterans?

Title: RI Has Fastest Broadband (Forum) Submitted: January 17th, 2008 - 2:43pm

The Communications Workers of American measured the median broadband access speeds in each state... RI wins!

Recent Comments

Source: For the Record (Forum) Submitted: July 22nd, 2009 - 1:47am link

Did the mayor announce this anywhere? I'm finding nothing on Google for "Providence Knowledge District".

Source: Announcing! The ALL NEW! 2009 Providence Design District! (Forum) Submitted: May 16th, 2009 - 1:37am link

I'll disagree with you on one point: I don't think this is a city government project. Rock on.

Source: Your Wishlist (Forum) Submitted: April 8th, 2009 - 10:01pm link

Thanks, Wayne. Additionally, for anyone who wants direct access to the data, there are XML and JSON feeds available at http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/services/mashablecity/xml and http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/services/mashablecity/json, respectively. Also, Jon Udell added an iCalendar feed to the aggregation software today. You can grab that at http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/services/mashablecity/ics for importing this monster feed of events into any of a variety of calendar tools. The point of aggregating this data is for people to use it, so please feel free to use these feeds whereever you see fit. And if you like, let me know where you use it, and eventually I'll put a page on http://mashablecity.org linking out to your sites.

Source: Your Wishlist (Forum) Submitted: March 31st, 2009 - 8:54am link

Re: submitting calendars: folks can also send me URLs via my RI Nexus contact form or to my email address, which is linked several times on the calendar page itself. This is subject to change, but I'll keep the sidebar of http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/services/mashablecity/html up to date with instructions for contributors. Re: organization: Per-event tagging would be awesome, but it's a bit beyond the scope of what Mashable City is doing right now. Our goal is not to build the perfect UI for this calendar, but instead to collect this information in a way that makes it easier for anyone to build their own UI. Any developer who wishes to build a tagging interface to this data is more than welcome to, and can post in the Mashable City forum for assistance and encouragement.

Source: Your Wishlist (Forum) Submitted: March 31st, 2009 - 12:08am link

An update on calendar aggregation: I've started collecting calendar URLs for events around Providence, to be included in a local branch of Jon Udell's elmcity project. Our calendar just went live at http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/services/mashablecity/html ...just in time to list tomorrow morning's Open Coffee :-) If you have any online calendars which you'd like to see included, please tell us in the Mashable City forum at http://groups.google.com/group/mashable-city/browse_thread/thread/3c6170dae4db6209 or simply shoot me a message through my RI Nexus contact form.

Source: Rhode Island Twitter "Sound Off" (Blog) Submitted: February 5th, 2009 - 1:58am link

Sean Ransom shared some Ruby code that parses the Twitter handles from this page, which you can grab at http://gist.github.com/55293. I made a fork of that code which creates an OPML file of the RSS feeds for all the Twitterers, which is available at http://gist.github.com/58478. You can grab my latest copy of the OPML file at http://mattgillooly.com/rinexus.opml. Hopefully this is useful for people who want to keep tabs on this huge (and growing!) local Twitter community via their RSS readers. Let me know if you have any questions or come up with any neat uses for it!

Source: Rhode Island Twitter "Sound Off" (Blog) Submitted: January 28th, 2009 - 5:03pm link

@mattgillooly in the house, y'all. My grandma (@grangee) and my car (@camry92) also rock the Twitter. Word.

Source: Your Wishlist (Forum) Submitted: January 21st, 2009 - 5:10pm link

I wanted to add that one immediate thing that local geeks can do to help out the local community is volunteer to lead a session at NewBCamp. It's not too late! More info at http://NewBCamp.com I also wanted to link up a recent call-to-action for volunteers in the Providence Daily Dose (http://providencedailydose.com/2009/01/14/most-rhode-islanders-fail-to-join-the-v-squad/ via http://freegeekpvd.org/fgpvd/?q=node/153) Lastly, I wanted to send a shout-out to my friends who ran the Geeks4Good food drive at last month's Providence Geek Dinner. Just one example of folks from our geeky community making real positive change... I'm looking forward to seeing much more like that!

Source: Your Wishlist (Forum) Submitted: January 21st, 2009 - 5:06pm link

Hi Ed and Dan, Thanks for your ideas. I'd definitely get behind better event aggregation and recording. And I'm really glad to see that Ed beat me to the punch on suggesting FuseCal for the event aggregation, as I used to work on FuseCal and I think that tool would make this kind of project much easier. I'm about to head over to the Providence Geek Dinner, and would be happy to brainstorm on these kinds of ideas there with whoever's in attendance. cheers, Matt

Source: Github.com's git training (Forum) Submitted: January 6th, 2009 - 8:55pm link

I'm sure the GitHub training is very high quality, but on a bang-for-buck level, it would be extremely hard to beat the $9 Git tutorial from PeepCode http://peepcode.com/products/git (even cheaper if you buy packs of PeepCode credits or Google for a coupon code.)