I was wondering if there is a way to search across community memories. I read several communities (nameley Northeastern’s and b0st0n’s) who do their best to archive and categorize great posts, but finding entries within the memories is very difficult.
There doesn’t seem to be anything out there currently that supports searching across memories. Livejournal appears to be mildly bot-friendly if you are not too taxing on their resources. Perhaps I could develop a tool of my own to search across a community’s memories for answers (via raw page crawling and scraping?) They do provide RSS and Atom feeds but that’s just not easily searchable (within post content as well).
Perhaps I’ll undertake this project soon and leave OpenTournament on the backburner. I’ve been playing way to much CS:S these days and I should be taking on these cool development projects ideas instead.
Ever get confused with Boston street maps not easily coinciding with bus routes and T stops?
Google maps can now show MBTA routes if you are willing to set this up:
1) Get Mozilla Firefox - here
2) Get Greasemonkey extension here.
3) Get the Google Greasemonkey MBTA mapper javascript here.
And now try doing a search for somewhere in Boston using Firefox on Google Maps. You’ll see a “MBTA”NEW! link near the satellite image link.
You’ll end up seeing a map overlay with all the MBTA lines just like this:
Note: tool does not provide any extra mapping of areas not covered by MBTA. Also does not work in conjunction with the Grasemonkey Google anonymizer script, so just stick to this one if you’re gonna try a greased up Googe Maps.
I think seeing the fruit of my own intellegence and experiencing life comme il est is enough of a motivator to ignore the intrinsic meaninglessness of existence in the universe.
So maybe I should look into making a good effort to develop my own wrestling tournament software. This article has some very convincing points made about startup companies.
Last Monday I was officially moved to the development team within Pyxis Mobile for the remainder of my coop period. They have me doing some research and proof of concept work right now for some new products that will be available in the near future. I couldn’t be more grateful for the switch, it will be a real resume booster.
In other news, the major implementation that I handled from configuration to integration and deployment at AGF in Canada went into production with mWholesaler on May 5th, 2005. There’s plenty of press that made it out there, too. I guess the marketing department has some real good newswire feed sources, or something. Google is here to make a big record of the press release for the implementation I did the majority of the implementation and integration work on while I was on PSG. How many other 20 year olds can say they implemented a mobile CRM solution for a top Canadian financial firm?
The development team culture, while only perhaps 10-15 paces from my old desk, seems worlds apart from PSG. It’s incredible how stressful it can be to keep customers happy on the professional services group. I was doing all kinds of multitasking, calling, emailing, configuring, troubleshooting, integrating, data mapping, all at the same time, all day. I still had a blast working on that team, though, they’re all great guys, and funny too. But there are many other cool things about the company that really do reflect on my hapiness there, and also the award it just recently won, “Best Places to Work in Boston, 2005″. So anyways, the development team seems like a little bit more laid back atmosphere. But it’s probably only temporary, as we’re currently at the beginning of a new version development cycle. Some side projects and proof of concept projects seem to be the name of the game for the next week or two. It could probably be just as stressful as PSG in a month or two on the development team, in time for the next release.
They happen to like me enough that they offerred to have me work full time through the summer on the quality assurance team. I glady took up the offer, since I really didn’t look forward to working landscaping stuff again this summer. My back is slowly getting better by the day, and I don’t even need to take the large amount of ibuprofen the doctor once told me I should take daily anymore. Most days I get by with none at all, but others I wake up having slept in the wrong position, sore as hell. I’d really like to be able to practice wrestling again by next winter, or even this summer. I miss it too damn much, but the thought of reinjuring and setting back any healing it’s gone through scares me away from the mat still. In the meantime, I still have masswrestling to mess with.
I’m considering developing a piece of software to compete with The Wrestling Tourney. While it may have a solid userbase, from what I hear from some coaches is that the writer of the software isn’t very open to adding new functionality to it. I think I could develop a solid application in a pretty short amount of time, perhaps in C# using visual studio, and a mysql database as a storage piece for tournament data. It would save me quite alot of work to store tournament information in a database, and would allow for quick and easy reports to be generated that could offer some advantages over the current standard software. Problem with this is that I would not have time to support users of the software very much. I could probably charge for support, though, to make it worth my time. Red Hat and many other open source projects survive on this business model. And besides, I wouldn’t be doing it for major profits unless I had full time to work on it. Anyway, it’s a lofty idea, and I’d have to do an independent study to work on it or do it as my own coop position in order to devote any kind of serious effort into it.
A long and interesting article in Fortune on the battle between Gates and Google. ‘Forced to watch Google’s stock soar the way Microsoft’s used to, and Brin and Page enjoy their roles as tech’s new rock stars, Gates brings to the fight a ferocity that nobody has seen since the Netscape war a decade ago. Their popularity gets under his skin. “There’s companies that are just so cool that you just can’t even deal with it,” he says sarcastically, suggesting that Google is nothing more than the latest fad, adding, “At least they know to wear black.”…Trying to build a Google killer, however, has turned out to be truly humbling for Microsoft. - From Slashdot
I really like reading about something that can make Microsoft so scared. On the other hand, I’m beginning to be slightly nervous at the amount of momentum Google is getting. At the same time, I love their products (Picasa, WebAccelerator, Desktop Search, Maps), so I can’t complain too much. The article is a really compelling article you’d never predict to be written in 2001 or 2002.
It’s boring here at home.
I ended up giving my mother a half hour lecture on what a compiler is, why code has to be compiled, why Java is interpreted as bytecode and isn’t machine code, and what CVS is (no, it’s not the drugstore). I also “shined a light on Marblehead” for her on what is OSS, and why in the hell anyone would want to write something that’s open source. I used the IBM funded Eclipse project to explain it best. I think she retained perhaps 5% of my entire narrative.
In other news, some of the most devoted users of MassWrestling.com have begun to campaign for others to make a donation. I couldn’t be happier. I was planning on paying for a MassWrestling.com banner to be printed out for next season’s tournaments with some of my own money, since I donated all of last quarter’s earnings from the site to the MA USAW organization to help defray the cost of two Oklahoma State National All Americans who are coming in July to Hudson, MA for a two-day clinic. It’s really a great feeling to know that people are willing to step up and butress my efforts in providing for the site.
That also underscores the movement I’ve been leaning towards for the site itself - I’m going to found the site legally as a non-profit organization, so that donations in the future can be tax-deductable. I think this kind of thing would help attract some large donations that I could easily delegate to the community to help improve the MassWrestling.com mission statement, which is a document that I’ve been working on for awhile now and plan on having it reviewed soon.
