* Coming up with ideas for a back-end for a new auction-based concept that my friend and co-founder has come up with
* Coming up with ideas for mixing/matching data when Google releases their RSS feeds for google searches
* Trying to master CSS and transparency to make pretty boxes and stuff. I'm not very artistic. :)
* Writing a play-by-email and play-by-web strategy game
* Coming up with a way to keep a linux configuration on my laptop so when I do a fresh-install of Fedora 10 next month, I don't have to re-create all of my custom configurations from scratch (again)
* Thinking of cool ways to use the WiiMote
* Setting up my father's website (has an idea about improving K-12 education)
* Keeping my older kid from injuring my younger kid
> Coming up with a way to keep a linux configuration on my laptop so when I do a fresh-install of Fedora 10 next month, I don't have to re-create all of my custom configurations from scratch (again)
Maybe you meant something substantially more complicated but....
...just mount /home/ on a second partition, that way you can wipe and/or upgrade linux and keep all your personal settings.
I'm working on an open platform for cloud storage. Imagine something like MobileMe, Microsoft Strata, or Carbonite, but without your data being trapped by a single vendor.
I've got the partner (alexkravets), now we're looking for funding to mitigate the risk of having no day job.
We don't have a write-up online at the moment, but we firmly believe in the "ideas are cheap; execution is everything" philosophy, so we'll answer any questions.
Question: how do you plan on making things sync as effortlessly as they do on MobileMe? I'm sure it can be done - look at Dropbox - but do you have any ideas on how to beat something that's built in to the system?
First we'll build the equivalent of an online mountable disk so it'll be a natural fit for online storage/backup and sharing.
Building applications on top of this storage layer such as photo sharing and syncing will be next.
As for how to compete, the magic sauce is openness on two fronts. Bandwidth and storage are commodities, and we want this storage tier to be a commodity marketplace as well. The storage providers will compete for end users while cooperating to store and serve up data. A user can switch providers and retain the same data in the system (cloud).
Along with an "open" system, most (if not all) of the software will be open source. We envision a small hub of centralized services (identity and such), a storage provider ring, and the end users.
So basically we'll beat the big guys by creating an open system with open software. Our company, then, will be taking a small slice of a big pie, rather than on these players head-on.
It's a travel guide for people who love science and technology. It contains 128 places where you can see really great bits of science or technology history, and it explains the science behind the place.
Unfortunately I don't have the time to do anything too crazy but here's what I currently got going:
- Just about finished a small 2 week project that will allow indie game developers a place to host their games, upload media, and give status updates. Been done before (Infact, I made one of first incarnations the style of service about 6 years ago) but I need something to do with my www.gamecake.net domain and this was a fun way to learn more about django and give a little back to the community I no longer belong to due to time restraints.
- Starting up a video cooking blog. My side passion is cooking and I would like to create videos of my recipes. I'm celiac/dairy-free so I have a niche to focus on. I've got a good camera now, and will probably shoot my first real episode this week now that I have some recipes nailed down strong.
Not looking to make money on either of these, just for fun and learning. Plus they look good on a resume in my opinion.
I aggregate all the gigs sites I can find e.g., craigslist (all of them), sitepoint, elance, etc, and then use Bayesian filtering to bring the most relevant gigs for you to the top.
Excellent! Glad to hear the recommendations are good.
I find links between artists and recommend based upon that. These links include: being recommended by a human, being on the same record label, being mutual admirers, playing gigs together, being posted to the same mp3 blog, being on the same mixtapes and so on.
Great site, thank you. It will be useful for me (I know nothing about music, so my musical variety is very limited... a good recommendation engine that goes out of the typical genres is like gold for me).
typed in "frank sinatra" and got, among others: queen, bob dylan, and coldplay. one issue with music recommendation is how people (subjective creatures!) usually demonstrate low-tolerance for "bad" recommendations.
I'm trying to skew the site towards unusualness and away from genres. Thus, the ways I link artists can produce some weirdness like the above. However, users can give feedback to help reduce the insanity quotient.
i'm with you on genres -- they're an anachronism invented by the record and retail companies back when music something you put on a shelf, but most ppl still seem to adhere vehemently to genre preferences.
I've been working on an online storefront product that should serve as a great starting point for web developers that need to roll some custom functionality for clients. All text can be multi-lingual, support for complex product options and pricing, multiple storefronts using the same code, and more. nothing to show yet, but more info here http://greaterscope.com
A friend of mine runs http://www.udm4.com and we've talked about running an ad on there since its primary audience is developers (nevermind the fact that I don't really like the menu). Other than that, try to partner with good development shops that do online stores ... I have a few in mind.
Any other ideas, besides taking out the obvious ad on google? I really don't want to screw with trying to get high keyword ranking via the SEO black-magic route.
Stitcho is a desktop notification widget
for your website, with support for Windows and Mac. Add desktop alerts to your web app in less than 30 minutes.
Also, trying to build an Erlang community in the DC area (search for Erlang on meetup.com)
Finally, putting together a presentation for BarCampDC this Saturday.
Stitcho is basically "Growl for the Web", but NOT in the sense of being another Javascript-to-Growl bridge (a few of those exist out there, protoGrowl, Growl mootools, etc.)
Rather, Stitcho lets you send notifications from server side code that are delivered to your users via the Stitcho widget. The Stitcho server sits in the middle to route and deliver the notifications.
Also, Stitcho provides widgets for Mac and Windows. (The Mac version can use Growl if it's available.)
Does that answer your question? If not, please clarify.
A: Absolutely, but the shortcut makes it viable to create on-the-fly links to search results (or use str8.to's I'm Feeling Lucky option) in IM conversations, or on twitter, or in emails (I recently told a client to http://look.fo/how-to-use-ftp) without having to go look up a good answer.
Working on a desktop app that keeps your photos safe (through sync/backup), and allows collaboration on a bucket of photos across multiple computers. Photos are stored in a peer-to-peer version control system like git. http://www.thephotothing.com
A friend of mine's working on a bunch of DARPA projects, and his path was:
1. Attend a top liberal-arts college (CS, Amherst)
2. Get master's degree from top research university (HCI, Carnegie Mellon)
3. Work for General Dynamics
4. Stick around long enough to get promoted, kick butt, etc.
5. Profit!!!
BTW, he said that chances are, whatever the next big thing is will come out of DARPA. His bet was on pervasive computing - DARPA's apparently doing a lot with computers in clothes, computers in canteens, computers in backpacks, computers in visors, basically computers everywhere. The logic being that most of their troops are getting deployed to inhospitable environments (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) and if they can monitor environmental conditions for things like excessive heat, sandstorms, laser sniper sights, explosive residues, they can save lots of soldiers' lives. And of course, if it trickles down to consumer uses it could completely change how people use computers.
1) A lot of large research companies get DARPA research grants. General Dynamics (like nostrademons said), HRL, Boeing, etc. etc. You can get a job with them, and if the environment doesn't feel soul-crushing to you, you are golden.
2) A lot of CS research at Universities is funded by DARPA. If you are still in school, or if you are out but still have close relationships with your professors, you can always find out what kind of projects they have. DARPA projects are especially nice because they are large in scope and there's always a need for extra people. Don't expect to be paid much though.
I chose route 2 - after my startup failed I wanted to do something that paid, was not as intense, and had nothing to do with Web 2.0 and Social Networking and all that, so I just e-mailed a professor.
I'm not sure DARPA is that hot these days. Having worked on a DARPA project and talked to (and gone drinking with) a lot of people in academia and industry that work on DARPA projects, it seems they're suffering from focusing too hard on yearly "deliverables".
In my experience, that makes it difficult to get anything too interesting done as people (due to budgetary constraints, particularly at the industrial research labs) focusing on getting the minimum deliverables done, instead of trying new things. The downside here is pretty obvious: if a DARPA program manager could specify 3 years in advance what should be achieved, then it isn't really research, more like engineering.
I guess that's why most savvy researchers only write DARPA/NSF proposals for things they've already done (but not published on); gives them money to work on the _next_ big thing :-)
I hope so. There's a serious vacuum when it comes to small, niche investing banks. All the big firms are no longer in that category. Total i-bank market cap has been cut down by billions.
* Porting my chess problem website (http://chesstr.com) from Rails to Django
* Working on a new version of my chess engine. I've had various versions over the years with the strongest playing around ELO 2300 (master level)
* Working on a chess engine that uses non-traditional searching/AI techniques. I'd be absolutely thrilled to get this thing playing as well as a child.
* Teaching Intro to Computer Science at the local university - a tremendous experience.
* Learning Doc Watson's version of Deep River Blues on my guitar
I've been a big fan of Zecco's business model. I'd be more than happy to generate exclusive content for major providers. Any networking you can provide would be greatly appreciated.
My main brokerage is thinkorswim and that's the platform I do screencasts from.
Hopefully (crossing fingers) when I get some good traffic going I can get some advertising contracts with some financial service companies.
Thanks for the encouragement. It's something I'm passionate about, and I've received a ton of good ideas. If you have any suggestions, feel free to email me (see profile for address).
My friends and I run the Music and Gaming Festival (MAGFest: http://magfest.org/ ) and for the past few years I've been tinkering with a webapp to help us get more organized. I've been to a lot of conventions, mostly anime conventions, and no one has a good integrated system for tracking attendees, staffers, shifts, events, inventory, budget, etc.
My webapp does all of this, and I've spent a lot of my free time lately making the code cleaner and easier to read. After the next MAGFest in early January I'm planning on releasing this webapp as an open source project on Sourceforge or somewhere similar.
I think a lot of other conventions might find this useful if they can find a programmer or sysadmin to make the small changes necessary to adapt the code for their purposes. I'm excited that some of our staffers are already planning on recommending this system to some of the other conventions they staff.
Damn, people are still commenting here and I forgot to mention the non-commercial stuff I'm doing. It all lives at http://greaterscope.net. I'm taking a stab at:
* Creating a foreign key based ORM for PHP5
* Creating a PHP5 database abstraction layer that's easier to use than PDO or the alternatives
* An abstraction layer for html forms that generates, validates and even supports deeply nested "arrays of fields"
* A console terminal multiplexer (GNU screen, but split-screen) in C for Linux
Disclaimer: There are existing projects similar to many of the above, but I'm striving to make my APIs cleaner, code readable and more concise. Plus I enjoy learning by doing.
I'm also extremely interested in wireless mesh ... anyone working on that?
Finishing my distributed memory list caching system. Think Memcached, but instead of storing an object, you store an array, and can CRUD it in an atomic way. Fast, simple, non-persistent. Usage case: caching a one-to-many relationship in a relational database.
I'm currently working on a system flexible to play the card game Mao and every reasonable rule that could be made for it online. I'm also working on a nice, comfortable, abstract way to create Turing machines in Arc, with the ultimate goal being to have one simulate a von Neumann machine (namely by having it able to interpret a sizable subset of the machine language for a modern processor). I've taken a long break from both to work on my college applications, though.
To cut down on my total workload (and so my mother wouldn't complain when I worked on these projects), I'm using both for two different projects for the IB diploma program. As a result, I have to do the Mao-playing system in Java though.
Working on my startup, http://taskgravy.com. A project management / collaboration suite that doesn't neglect the analytical side of project management.
And also looking for a permanent gig, because I just got laid off. :]
A LAMP & AJAX driven framework to assist small businesses who want put their data online. It is also good at giving startups backend functionality to their databases so that they can concentrate on the client front end.
I'm also at the concept stage for a site providing some tools to help UK residents manage their finances with emphasis on debts.
I have considered this idea a few times over the past couple of years as I work for an organisation that gives me a great deal of exposure to people in debt and the methodology typically used to assist them to address those debts.
In the past I have ignored the idea as I considered it technically uninteresting but I have now found myself in the position where I am (a) wanting to jump into the startup game, (b) have relevant industry experience, and (c) it's the right time (credit crunch).
I have a web application that manages agile/scrum projects for large organizations. I've beta-tested it at a large corp, but they're not going to be able to use it for a while due to legal reasons.
So right now I'm finishing up version 1 this week and deciding whether to 1) start marketing version 1, 2) start on version 2 and then market, 3) wait for large corp to come around so I can continue usability testing and making the product better (it's clunky now), 4) Look for a partner and do any of 1-3
I'm not sure which way to go, to be honest. Anybody got any ideas?
Working on Job Alchemist (meetings, Startuply, JobSyndicate, fundraising(??)). Trying to figure out how to get smart kids to work for startups and cool companies in general rather than for the man. Thankfully, the Wall Street meltdown will help, especially as it works its way into consulting. Get a real job, squares (or "suits," as fallentimes would say).
'Bout to lease some space at a pretty rad SoMa office loft, to be joined by Eddie of Picwing - what's his HN name?
Realizing it's way more fun when the odds are stacked against you.
A little python script to generate a LaTeX beamer presentation with some default theming/styling/etc. added.
I tend to forget the LaTeX syntax because I don't use it very often. However, I really like doing LaTeX beamer presentations so I wrote a little script which basically provides me with something to start with.
I'm working on http://rawberry.tv - somewhat of a platform for creating your own music video mix reel. It's not even close to being done, but I'm hoping to finish it by the time I graduate to help me land a job or something.
Thanks, I think it's going to be fairly straightforward with twitter-like functionality at first. I'm not really planning to introduce anything technically groundbreaking. I just need to have a project to work on.
(a) Working through Cormen et al's Algorithms book.
(b) Trying to learn how 3D game engines work by building one (in java). Rendering is completely in software.
(c) Working through Rudin's "Principles of Mathematical Analysis"
Wow, pretty cool to see other people have a lot of irons in the fire too. Working on a (yet another) better financial management tool, raising a newborn, and the day job :).
1) a new/obscure music blog - www.audioindie.com
2) a data tracking app for medical stats
3) clinical trial data management
4) getting my car ready for a DE event.
Blogging at SitePoint.com, switching RailsForum.com over to vBulletin (no, Beast won't cut it), and working on a utility for educators (K-12 and post secondary).
I've actually met a few people (and some customers, actually) through Twitter, and one person so far through Hacker News (davidw) - I think a more organised/rigid approach would just be weird. But then I probably wouldn't use an online dating site either if I were single...
but that's kinda rigid (gotta choose your interest category) ... doesn't do the work of pairing you up with others based on a broad range of interests.
* Working on better pre-caching scripts/SQL for http://mediawombat.com search results
* Working on how to charge a company that wants to use the http://mediawombat.com API
* Coming up with ideas for a back-end for a new auction-based concept that my friend and co-founder has come up with
* Coming up with ideas for mixing/matching data when Google releases their RSS feeds for google searches
* Trying to master CSS and transparency to make pretty boxes and stuff. I'm not very artistic. :)
* Writing a play-by-email and play-by-web strategy game
* Coming up with a way to keep a linux configuration on my laptop so when I do a fresh-install of Fedora 10 next month, I don't have to re-create all of my custom configurations from scratch (again)
* Thinking of cool ways to use the WiiMote
* Setting up my father's website (has an idea about improving K-12 education)
* Keeping my older kid from injuring my younger kid
* Keeping the wife happy
* oh, and my actual paying day job :)