I just finished all of my work for this semester. Now I am free to do whatever I want until about the middle of January. My plan is to learn more about Objective-C. Since a lot of us are college students, I was wondering: What projects are you working on over the break?
I'm a grad student. I'm working on a way to turn papers written in latex into a form that's readable online, because having to print everything is so 1990s. I start from the output of latex2html and go from there. For instance, if you hover over a citation, I pop up a bubble showing you links to author homepages, the abstract of the cited paper, download links, etc., even though the latex bibliography didn't specify any of those.
Edit: I do this by doing a full-text search on the citeseer database, which is a couple gigs uncompressed. Right now I'm grappling with the xapian library: http://www.rkblog.rk.edu.pl/w/p/xapian-python/ If someone knows an easier/better way to do this, I'd love to hear. Thanks.
Being able to hover the mouse over a citation and get a hyperlink to the referenced paper, abstract, and homepage would be a huge time saver when doing research. PDF can only give the title of the paper and (if you're lucky) where to find it.
I have a 5000-line, awfully written and horribly slow (but working!) patch from an offshore team that implements the rather complicated MBAFF features of H.264 in the open source x264 encoder.
I'm a full-time small project maniac. I've been working by myself for over a year now, my model being to work on a lot of small things for a few days, trying if anything catches on. Worked great so far. I've done about 40 different things, some released and abandoned, some abandoned due to lack of interest, but a few I've released and they've succeeded well enough to cover the time spent on all the others. Christmas will be the only time I'm NOT working on some small project, but I'm sure I can't avoid thinking about them.
I'd like to learn more about how you're making this work. I'd like to take the same approach, but am worried about sustainability. I'd appreciate it if you could get in touch. My profile has my email.
I'm not a college student, but I have been taking advantage of a little bit of a slowdown during the holidays (sales always drop off a bit for a couple of weeks).
I'm working on a chiptune version of Abbey Road, in order to teach myself a few new trackers that I've never used before (the last trackers I used heavily were OctaMED and ProTracker on the Amiga). I'm mainly tinkering with Renoise, which is an awesome multi-platform modern tracker with VST/LADSPA support. But I'm also playing with a cool sounding SID emulating tracker called Goattracker, and NitroTracker for the Nintendo DS. I probably won't finish all of Abbey Road in two weeks or spare time, since it's quite elaborate, and I'm only about half of the way through one song two days in, but I'm sure I can make three or four nice tracks. And I'll probably get faster as I get more comfortable with the tools.
My goal over the holidays is to become much better with my editor (emacs). I am also trying to contribute a bit to open source and release some Merb and DataMapper code onto github.
Also, we're hoping to open source it and release as a Django project for others to hack on. Should be cool.
Type in your address.
We figure out the coordinates.
We place those coordinates in all their relevant political "zones" (neighborhood, district, ward etc.) and give you maps of what they look like, just like the Times.
We show you everyone representing you in those zones with links to the homepage, wikipedia page, twitter results, flickr results, youtube results etc
We show you a newsfeed of their appearances in mainstream press.
Very cool, I had a similar idea for a "scorecard for politicians" type of app - input either your location or a politician's name, see some info on what laws they've voted on and if possible, boil it down to a scorecard of where they stand on issues (pro guns, pro choice, etc).
Looks like we're going to build it at the eventual live URL so I'd rather not give that out just yet. My buddy's doing all the heavy lifting on this one. I'm just tracking down shape files and representative listings and so forth.
I've got an incremental update to ShoveBox in testing now, but I'm spending most of my resources finalizing the iPhone version of the app and getting it to sync properly with the desktop app. That will probably be 1.8 or 2.0.
I'm not sure if I should charge for the iPhone app or not though. I'm worried Windows people will accidentally download it and get pissed. Hmm. But none of my direct competitors (except for maybe Evernote) have this feature, so I'll be psyched to have it out.
1) I promised someone I'd build him a remote-controlled swivel for a pole mounted movie camera and I have yet to finish it, that's project #1. Gonna be spending a couple hours in the machine shop!
2) Hopefully finish up the software for my wireless temperature monitor, build a page for it and start getting some sales :-)
A compiler that takes Sed programs and produces Parrot interpreter code. It was a project in a college Compilers class that I didn't take seriously enough, so I'm revisiting it to see if I've actually grown better at this programming thing since I've graduated.
I'm working on a way to play the card game Mao online, except that, as Mao is a game that lets you make your own rules, in order to be capable of playing a substantial subset, it'll have to be capable of playing any card game.
(Yes, I've thought about turning this into a startup.)
And that reminds me, I really should be working on that right now, if I'm going to have time to do my college apps...
Haha, I can see why you would say that. What I was trying to convey was that from an SEO standpoint, your site fails miserably. You need to change your title tags to be more keyword specific, and move your wiki to a subdirectory instead of a subdomain (same goes for the blog).
Sure, and I appreciate the advice, but it's not rocket science.
I already have http://www.mibbit.com/networks/ (Work in progress) which is a complete browsable list of networks and channels, with topic info etc etc. As well as being hugely useful for users, it's obviously useful for ranking on searches.
For example, if someone searches for "freenode", mibbit has some good results there.
A solid example: Search google for "freenode javascript". Mibbit is result number 3. I'm happy with that...
I repeat. SEO is not rocket science, it's simple best practices for end users.
At the moment I'm working on automatically generating maps from a small base dataset, and shortly I'll start working on a Django based wrapper to host this for many people's use.
I'll finishing my sinatra/sparrow web app that ensures a set amount of EC2 instances are up and running at all times by automatically running other instances among failure. I'd like to launch early next year, http://www.ec2mon.com
My partner and I are going to remake http://jobzor.com. We were originally looking to make a job board and internship recruiter as a Facebook App, but it's just not our thing and there is enough competition in the market already for that.
Instead, since we both rely heavily on freelance work, we're positioning it as a directory of approved designer (with specific specialties), copywriter, and developer freelancers so clients looking for work or partners can find them easily.
Given my focus on delivering great designs within my focus-time of 24 hours, this should be a good help in finding clients, as well as any revenue we scrape together through the site if we choose to monetize it.
In the next few days I'll also be releasing my personal project, http://epictee.com to connect great t-shirt companies with the media they deserve. I helped co-found http://anticlothes.com and while I was there, a major problem was getting coverage for the brand and for the owner.
I've noticed this is common for most tee labels, especially as they start out (no coincidence), and rather than be a salesman trying to move shirts, I'll be a salesman moving brand equity, which I'm much more comfortable with.
Going to take a nice week long break away from my home in Austin. For the past 4 months I've been cooped up in my place trying to get everything put together with this mobile app company. It's been many late nights and 7 day work weeks... time to recharge.
Thinking of hacking together a twitter archiver, for those who want to keep a record of their tweets past the limit Twitter itself currently offers. Will allow export in csv etc., and possibly printing off your tweets as a diary-style book, if there's enough interest.
The web interface only allows you to go back 10 pages (* 20 tweets), and the API only allows 10 * 200. So if you want to keep your tweets, start archiving!
Although I'm not really on holiday I seem to have taken on the reinvigoration of the customwars project. It's a java 2d tile war game like chess but with nice animations. It's over at customwars.com if anyone would liek to help out over their time off.
Me too — I try to rewrite my own blogging platform/CMS every year or so, wrapping up all the design elements and programming quirks I've learnt over the past year, into a cool little package — fast, simple, and fun to use. :)
Explain your "educating the world's future smart people." I have thought about writing a free online textbook for some branch of undergrad mathematics.
I'm planning on starting a "chain" of either charter or cost-free/cost-very-little schools. These schools would be high schools, but they'd be for geeks/nerds/people who actually want to learn.
Needless to say, I'm still in the very early stages of this idea.
About your textbook, what branch would you _like_ to write about?
I have always been fascinated by the application of both ordinary differential equations and partial differential equations. The mathematical ideas behind the methods involved in reaching solutions are some of the most beautiful ideas in mathematics. I also find the mathematics of game theory and finance quite beautiful. Any one of these topics are more than enough to fill several textbooks.
Writing a Java bytecode emitter for my company's language (currently called GScript, hopefully open-sourced under a different name some time in the not-too-distant future). It's currently executed off the parsed AST.
Nothing spectacular but I'm going to try my first go at using PyGTK as I finish up a very simple command-line ftp uploader. The api is almost done, then I'll just wrap the GUI around it. I've only worked on it for a few hours but have learned a lot about Python in terms of file/directory scanning, ftp, and threading.
Apart from that, I'm just taking the time to get a simple portfolio/resume site up. Working full time during the year makes it hard to get time for these things.
Writing a simple Missile Command clone with separate game logic and graphics modules; after using simple 2D graphics to test the gameplay, I'm writing a 3D artillery-style graphic representation. The whole thing is mostly an exercise to learn the Actionscript 3D library Papervision3D better -- there's a ton of work there in the future as the Flash Player keeps improving its core 3D transformations.
I created Ruby Advent (http://advent2008.hackruby.com), which was inspired by 24ways(httpL//24ways.org).
It was actually turned out to be a great experience. I got the opportunity to connect with many renowned Ruby Hackers and learn bunch of awesome stuff myself.
Also, I sincerely hope other Rubyists too enjoyed the series.
I've been playing through the games I haven't had time to, and also learning how to write apps for my Mac and by extension for the iPhone. I've had a bunch of ideas for things I thought would be great for the iPhone, so I made a class next semester with a friend of mine and we're going to start a business. (And before someone says it, we checked and we own the code ^_^)
I'm no longer in college, but my employer does give a lengthy winter break. I plan to finish some iPhone applications (hopefully providing some extra income), work on some music recording, read, and do a bit of volunteer work for Project GNU.
Basically, what I do on free evening/weekend hours, but I'll get to focus on it for longer blocks of time. :-)
I have a large project I am working on, and will be spending my entire summer on. However, over Christmas break I have a very small website which is basically a product specific blog. Hopefully I will make a little amazon affiliate money.
For my last winter break, I'll be working on completely re-doing a web-based game I made. I'm thinking I might also work my way through a simple book on NLP (http://www.nltk.org/book).
Going to wedding parties! Looks like all of my friends are getting married nowadays.
Also beginning work on a new project that is essentially an online site editor like Weebly but for a very niche market. Still figuring out exactly how to do that though.
Working more and more on my PHP framework, it's starting to get some traction as I will release 0.2 before new years. Check it out, http://artisansystem.com
I'm making a mod for Half-Life 2 with a friend. At this point we're both fooling around with the SDK to see what we can do, but I think we have a solid plan for a pretty good mod.
Upgrading our webapp to the latest version of the symfony framework, then spinning off the open source version to attack another vertical. Makes for interesting and exciting work.
I'm not a student, but I do have most of a week off and I'll be working on a way to help diabetics better manage their disease (my wife is Type I and I'm pre-pre-Type II).
Just graduated from college 2 weeks ago, working full-time on my iPhone gaming startup now. This last week has been the best in my life, I love startups!
Edit: I do this by doing a full-text search on the citeseer database, which is a couple gigs uncompressed. Right now I'm grappling with the xapian library: http://www.rkblog.rk.edu.pl/w/p/xapian-python/ If someone knows an easier/better way to do this, I'd love to hear. Thanks.