Monthly Archives: May 2015

SJAA Coders

CodeIgniter Code III

The SJAA is in the process of automating various aspects of club operations. Examples include subscribing (and unsubscribing) to email lists, renewing memberships, maintaining event calendars, creating and adapting an auction system, and lots more. We are forming a team whose mission will be to identify these needs, prioritize them, projectize them, and tackle them. These are essentially software development, implementation and integration projects.

A kickoff meeting has been scheduled to get this started.

Event: SJAA Coders Inaugural Meeting
Place: Houge Park, Bldg 1, San Jose, Calif
Date: Sunday May 17 2015
Time: 2-4pm

We’re looking for people with various skills including:

  • WordPress (to help with the sjaa.net website)
  • Python
  • Django
  • PyQt/PySide, Kivy
  • SQL
  • Apache
  • testing
  • technical writing

Our annual spring auction is our biggest single fundraiser of the year, and hence it’s very important to the club. It can get intense, so we’re looking to automate the bookkeeping and item/bidder/seller tracking. During this kickoff meeting, we’ll demo a prototype of a python-based auction manager that’s in the works. We’ll throw in a wrinkle into the demo to make things interesting, so bring your laptops/tablets!

Those who want to acquire new skills are also welcome. If you’re interested please join us at our inaugural meeting and/or join the new SJAA Coders Google group.

Hope to see you there!

Posted in Anouncements, Articles, Blog


Busy Day at Houge Park Hall 5/3

The Houge Park Hall was buzzing with activity today with several programs going on at the sametime. The SJAA Fixit Program, SJAA Library and SJAA Advanced Loaner program were all open today to serve our members and public. We had people coming for help with telescope collimation questions, eyepiece and lens cell questions. We also did collimation procedures on some scope being returned for the Advanced Loaner Program. We had people stopping by to check out scopes for the Advance Loaner Program too. Our wonderful Librarian Sukhada Palav was busy checking and cataloging books and evaluating future books for the Library.

We also had a bonus activity going on too. Question? How many astronomers does it take to setup a really big telescope? Answer: 4

Rob Jaworski, Phil Chambers, Teruo Utsumi and Vini Carter were busy assembling the 20 inch Obsession Telescope that was graciously donated to the club by our dear friend Dr. Robert Armstrong and his family. The intent was to learn how to setup the telescope so we can share some views with it with the public and club members soon. Looks like with the braintrust of the fabulous four they had it assemble and figured out in no time. Thanks for the effort guys. Can’t wait for the views to be seen. I documented the big event with photos

Enjoy,

Ed Wong

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Posted in Articles