ScreditCrunch

At Scred we were so inspired by the many people pitching in with the ongoing crisis in Haiti, that we decided to do our own little bit to help the many nonprofit organisations out there. It is now possibile to add the charity of your choice to your pools, and to donate your positive outstanding balance directly to that charity. Now you can support a cause with your friends!

This is how it works: Bill, Jill and Jane have a pool for sharing expenses at their apartment. They all love animals so would like to support an organisation helping them. Jill goes to the ‘Settings’ tab of their pool, and adds the charity, including a website link with information on how to pay to the charity. Jill has a positive balance, while Bill and Jane have a negative balance (they could settle by paying Jill). Jill decides to donate her balance and clicks ‘Donate!’, by her balance. Once she has donated that balance, she will have a zero balance and Bill and Jane will owe the charity money.

Bill can now settle his balance by clicking ‘Settle’ and going to the charity’s donation website and paying there. Once he’s done that, he can click ‘Done’ and his balance will be zeroed, and the charity will be grateful!

Give it a go, it is easy and fun.

You can also click on the charity in the pool member list to go to its Scred page. There you can see the total amount of donations it has received, from all the pools in Scred, as well as latest activity.

Go to Scred to start using the new features!

This is one of those ideas that just needed to be implemented. There’s a special smoke sauna in the yard of the Cable Factory which is going to be available until this Friday. We we are organising a special Night of Code on short notice which starts with a sauna in the yard at 18:00, followed by traditional NoC activities: coding at the Scred office, and any presentations, if people want to talk about something.

Bring your own towel if you want to try the sauna. Scred will provide some beer and refreshments.

Nights of Code are a chance to get together and exchange ideas, thoughts and enthusiasm for technology.

Sign up on Facebook, or add a comment to this thread.

It is now easier than ever to pay back debts and negative balances inside Scred. No fiddling around with bank account details and then manually creating transactions inside Scred. You can now do this with just a few clicks and the use of PayPal.

At the top of every pool you can see your balance. If you have a negative balance you can click on the ‘Settle’ button that appears. This will lead you to a page with a suggestion for how you could clear your debt. Now, by clicking the ‘Pay’ button by each person, you can easily pay that sum of money. The payment will be automatically tracked by Scred which will then update your balance. Dead simple.

This feature requires that the users have configured a PayPal account in their profile. Any payment details will only be shared with people in the same pool as you.

Other changes in this release (Beneath The Surface):

• Added Select All option on Scredding page for larger pools. Small pools have all members selected by default.
• Updated look of Scredding. Some Webkit specific detailing.
• Significant new core accounting model which will later offer more advanced types of transactions for pools.

We are still working on a more substantial major launch which will appear later, but a few more smaller updates may appear along the way.

Log into Scred to start using the new features.

Sorry for the short notice but Scred is organising a another Night of Code at the Cable Factory this Thursday 17:00->. Across the Ruoholahti bay Madonna will be playing a mega concert, so chances are we might see, or at least hear something from the Cable Factory roof.

If you are not familiar with our Nights of Code, they are small events where people can get together and code on their own projects, talk about new tech ideas, give presentations on things they are working on, or are interested in. They take place at our office in the Cable Factory (door E, 5th floor), Helsinki. We’ve had some fantastic presentations before, including a startup which was launched at the event!

If you are thinking about presenting on something you can decide at the event, or leave us a comment here. If you’re planning to come, comment here or mark attendance at the Facebook event.

So why is Madonna cool for startup entrepreneurs? Here’s a quote from Wikipedia:

An analysis of Madonna’s business acumen by academics at the London Business School presents her as a “dynamic entrepreneur” worth copying, identifying her vision of success, her understanding of the music industry, her ability to recognise her performance limits (and thus bring in help), her “sheer hard work” and her ability to change as key to why she has been a striking commercial success.

With the latest release (codenamed Bem) we are providing two important features which have been requested by our users:

• The ability to edit transactions.
• A list of direct balances is now present in the ‘Direct Scred’ screen,
  thus making that easier to manage.

Additionally a new version of the Java client for mobile phones has been released. With it you can now view transactions which have already been synchronised. Some usability issues on the website have also been fixed to provide more consistency. Finally the release contains several bugfixes.

How editing works

Unlike with some other unnamed services editing in Scred is non-destructive. Internally we keep a trail of all edits which have taken place with transactions. Currently the edit trail is not visible to users, but it will be available at a later date. The important thing for our users is that nothing is lost.

Scred running the ticket system for The Alternative Party

Continuing with last year’s successful pilot, Scred is behind the ticket
sales system used by Finland’s largest digital art festival, The Alternative Party. Scred automatically accounts items sold, provides users with tickets and manages payments. This year’s event is focusing on the interfaces between humans and machines and will again be showcasing some of the best digital talent around. Get your tickets here.

The Scred ticketing module will later be available to Scred MiniCorps.

Log into Scred to start using the new features.

TechCrunch Europe has nominated Scred as ‘Best Bootstrapped Startup’ for their Europas awards. The category is definitely appropriate. With no external funding and tight revenues we have managed to keep the company alive and developing. Being an entrepreneur is never easy, but we feel we must push on. MiniCorps are still in closed beta and there are so many things yet to be done before we can think of the service as even close to what we want it to be. So believe me, work is still being done, as much as possible … and nope, there will be no summer holidays for the Scred team!

Anyway, you can support our efforts by voting for us! And many thanks to everyone who already has.

We’re happy to announce another of our cool Night of Codes on Thursday starting at 18:00. The idea is for people to get together and talk about techie ideas they have (or pitch, if they want) and then also to work on their own projects. They can present if they want, or just listen. It will take place at the Scred office, at the Cable Factory in Helsinki, Door E, Room 565. Bring your laptop if you fancy working on stuff.

The guys from MahShelf have promised to announce something they call ‘amazing’. We’re definitely looking forwards to that.

I also have some interesting tech ideas I would like to run by my peers.

Some beer & refreshments will be provided. Do let us know if you’re planning to come (either by commenting here, to @Screditor on Twitter, or by emailing us). Remember: Thursday 18:00.

We’ve been talking to a good number of groups about how they would like to use Scred in a wide range activities. We have long held the belief that Scred would be great for managing the money for bands, code crews, indie film producers, indie developers, trip organisers and various other loosely formed groups. Indeed that is really the core idea at Scred: that there is nothing good available for communities and groups which are less formal than a business, but still actively deal with money issues. The groups which aren’t interesting to stiff and less flexible banks or accounting companies. We’ve been involved with several of those groups ourselves, and more and more are signing up every day.

Last week we got one more confirmation that this our assumption is true. I decided to repost part of it on or blog because the feedback hit the nail on the head for us:

I wanted to submit a request for a beta code for a Scred Minicorp. I recently switched all finance tracking for my band, Flaming Tusk, over to Scred. It’s worked great; not only can we track who paid for a van or the latest run of shirts—which we had previously been doing with Billmonk—but we can also track who got paid for last night’s gig or who sold a shirt, which Billmonk couldn’t do in the slightest.

So now we’ve got these shirts and these CDs, but selling them outside of gigs is still a huge pain. We have tried to insert a Google Checkout widget into our website, but it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Given that we’re already using Scred to manage all our finances, I think it would be a great bit of integration if we could participate in your beta program.

This is exactly the kind of use we have had in mind and so naturally they got their beta code!

You can check out their music from their website. Our local metalhead at the Scred office gave his thumbs up.

Kristoffer, one of Scred’s founders, will be talking about alternative economies and peer-funding in relation to Scred at this year’s Pixelache festival (a large event on digital cultures). Feel free to come by and check it out!

A week or so ago the last remnants of our old Perl version were banished from Scred. Last year, during summer, we spent quite some time porting Scred completely from Perl to Python and Django. Users did not really notice anything: the new version looked and acted identically to the old one. The reason for this switch was simple: our old self-baked framework was beginning to fray at at the edges and development was slow and painful.

We did evaluate moving Scred to Catalyst. However, Perl is a language which definitely splits opinions, both within Scred and beyond, and we needed to find something everyone would be at least semi-comfortable with. Now, as many know, my own personal favourite language is Tcl, for its wonderful simplicity and ultimate power. In fact it’s probably the most underrated language out there. For that reason we took a look at OpenACS which is reckoned to be extremely mature and scalable, but the learning curve at the time also felt very severe. It would also require running AOLWebServer. This has been built to be an extremely scalable web server, with Tcl at its scripting core, but everyone in the team had had at least some experience with Apache. Moving away from that did not feel appealing at all. There are Apache modules for Tcl on Apache, but nothing in the way of a full web framework (something for a summer project, perhaps?).

So Django it was, despite the pre-1.0 status, and overall it has mostly managed to do the job.

Everything was then ported, except one crucial part: the internal API used by the mobile Scred client. This was working perfectly well as it was so was never high up on the priority list to port. More importantly, Django/WSGI/mod_python have frankly no support for chunked HTTP encoding. This is an utterly inexplicable oversight as the HTTP standard quite clearly says chunked encoding MUST be supported, and one that has still not be satisfactorily remedied. Often browsers do not use chunked encoding but our friends the mobile platforms commonly do (both MIDP and the iPhone). Finally in January it was decided that this port really had to be done, as it was slowing the pace of our development to have to keep checking that the Perl based API would continue to work with new database changes.

After some amount of Googling we found a solution that was based on using Apache’s mod_proxy for dechunking. It was a hack, no doubt about it, but it seemed to be working right up until we tested with the MIDP emulator (ancient 1.0.3 as there’s nothing later for Macs and MIDP 1 was our target platform). API calls would regularly end up in an explicable “Network error” on the client. After some amount of debugging we could not find any reason for this. Once more the update to Python was put on the back burner to make way for several other important features which had to be pushed out.

Finally we dug up some time to continue to solve this issue. The confusing thing was that it worked on an actual device, but we could not be sure if that was just luck without pulling out tcpdump, netcat and similar tools. To cut a long story short we found that mod_proxy was closing the connection right after sending a response to each HTTP request. Now, this is perfectly fine, although usually web servers today keep connections open, at least for a time. Disconnecting after response was the HTTP 1.0 way. Unfortunately it seems like there is a bug in the 1.0.3 MIDP runtime. It did not react to this disconnect by then reconnecting with the next request. Instead it would just cause an IOException once a new request was sent (the details of the actual underlying socket are somewhat hidden in J2ME). That means that every other request works fine, every other one not.

At the end of the day we decided to push the update out. We tested on some phones and did not detect any problems so, with any luck, it’s only the emulator environment which does not handle this correctly. If you stumble across problems, do let us know!

Moral of the story: if you want to handle chunked encoding with Django, set up mod_proxy and be aware that the 1.0.3 MIDP environment has a potential bug in it!