Over the past couple years, I've been developing a Customer Relationship Management app (CRM) for hackerspaces, and it's now ready to release into the wild! Meet Seltzer CRM!

Seltzer CRM is an open source (GPL) CRM web app for hackerspaces. It's based on the LAMP stack, and has been in use at i3 Detroit for a couple years, growing with us to our current level of 75 members.

There are plenty of CRMs out there already, and even some open source ones, but all of the ones I've come across are rather complicated and have a learning curve before people can use them productively. Seltzer CRM is built around two goals: 1. Be significantly useful to the average hackerspace administrator without any training; 2. Be easy for a typical hackerspace web dev to hack on and extend.

The current features are:

• Track member contact info
• Track current and historical membership levels
• Track keycard info
• Provide attendance and voting sheets

You can try a demo here:
http://elplatt.com/seltzertest (user: admin, pass: beexcellent)

And the code is on github:
http://github.com/elplatt/seltzer

In January of 2005 I participated in the Snowflake-A-Thon hosted by the Simplicity group at the MIT Media Lab. The challenge was to write the simplest program that produced the most beautiful snowflake. You can see the gallery of all the snowflakes and a video of mine here.

My program created a hexagonal grid, and assigned a number to each hexagon. The center started as "1" and the rest started as "0". After every time step, the value of each hexagon was added to each of its neighbors, modulo 32. I ran the code for a few time steps and then mapped the numbers to a gradient from dark blue to white. I got the idea from playing around with 2d cellular automata on a hexagonal grid when I was in high school.

I thought the resulting snowflake was really nice. Apparently the Simplicity people thought I was a total weirdo for coding a snowflake in MATLAB, but I remain pleased with the results.