With The Band

Like so many things from my college experience, I never realized how amazing this was until years later.

Rather than taking a “usual” internship at a government agency or consulting company for the summer, I instead chose to stay on campus for the summer, and in addition to a lot of relaxing, worked at two amazing labs at UMD. One was the Center for Satellite and Hybrid Communication Networks, where I got to play around with awesome gadgets like motion tracking cameras and sensor networks. The other position, which I kept throughout the following school year, was as a researcher in the Human Computer Interaction Lab. I was tasked with working on an Java interface (using Swing) for the MALACH project, which, in a nutshell, was to allow people to browse and view a massive amount of transcripts of recordings of Holocaust victims. The recordings originated from the Shoah foundation, whose mission is to record and store all memories of survivors of the Holocaust (side note: my grandmother volunteered as one of the interviewers). So I spent the summer working under Ryen White, who now works at Microsoft Research.

As we were presented with developing an entirely new interface, we had a number of challenges. We came up with some pretty cool solutions. One thing I came up with was an interface element nicknamed PygmyBrowse. PygmyBrowse is a rather simple and easy method of bi-directional navigation of infinitely complex trees in a compact environment. I thought nothing of it at the time, but the professors around me disagreed, and suggested I pursue it further. After spending a good chunk of the semester holding user trials (in between running one of the largest student groups on campus, being actively involved in my computer, and oh yeah… double major), we ended up with an academic paper, with yours truly as the primary author. Which ended up getting accepted to a major human-computer interaction conference. Whiiich I didn’t attend, because there was one or another extra-curricular event going on (kicking myself 3 years later).

Now when you do a google search for PygmyBrowse (a lame moniker I concocted with a couple friends), it’s actually been implemented.

If I dig up the Java source code for it, I’ll release it.

You can download the PDF of my paper here, or view it on Scribd.

Just finishing up another great night over at the C-SPAN Debate Hub. One of the cool features in there is the Word Tree, a treemap display of the most popular words in the debate.

One thing stood out. McCain said “friends” 18 times. Obama? Zilch.

It’s clear who has my vote.

When I first made the jump from a big consulting company to a tiny creative agency, I was worried I would be spending most of my time doing small boring web projects. Yeah, right.

As if I the C-SPAN Convention Hubs that I wrote on earlier weren’t successful enough, we at JESS3 teamed up with C-SPAN and New Media Strategies again to launch the Debate Hub. I served as lead developer. Not only does this have the same great features as the Convention Hubs, like embeddable video, Twitter coverage, and blog content from all over the web, we added in some really killer features.
The Timeline is one of the best features. We’re pulling in transcripts as the debate progresses, and have it segmented out by speaker. Click on a piece of the timeline, and magic happens. This is built off of MIT’s SIMILE project.
The Transcript Treemap is another awesome feature. It shows the most used terms of each candidate, based on the transcripts, along with sparklines (more appropriately, the jQuery version). I even managed, thanks to some more jQuery magic, to allow you to dynamically filter what debates/candidates to show. Of particular importance to me, as the Treemap was created at my alma-mater’s Human Computer Interaction Lab, where I was a researcher for a short period of time (more on what I did there later).

It’s received a ton of press coverage, including ZDNet, Ars Technica, TechCrunch, RedState, and a number of other sites. It’s been a wild ride.

I’m not a very politically involved person. For me, I make sure I vote when possible, care about the issues I choose to care about, but never get more involved. However, I like to think that, when working on projects like these, we’re giving more people access to more information than they previously had, and allowing them to make more educated decisions when it comes to electing their leaders. It may only make a small difference for a small group of people, but that’s all that matters.

Hard to believe I graduated college two years ago…

Tom Friedman, author of The World Is Flat and From Beirut to Jerusalem, was on Meet the Press promoting his new book and gave a great and inspirational interview. Posting here because it’s definitely worth watching.

“100,000 people in 100,000 garages” - great line.

JESS3 has been working on a not-so-secret project for C-SPAN in the past few weeks.

TechCrunch, the best tech blog out there, just reported on it. C-SPAN is still ironing out some last issues, but IT’S ALIVE!

Read it.

A very big moment!

Much more to come about it later.

There have been many studies and articles about the changes in the human mind due to the Internet. The Atlantic has a particularly powerful one. Even as I was reading it, I constantly found myself switching around to email, twitter, facebook, google reader, etc.

I’ve been noticing for a while that, since graduating from college where I had to memorize programming languages, I learn less and less. Why should I bother to memorize the ins and outs of every system when instead I can just do a quick google search and find what I need?

As a web designer/developer, am I contributing to this? Is this a good thing or bad thing? And how can we combat it, or accept it?

Being a web designer and developer, the CMS I choose for a client is a huge issue. I wrote a little bit about it before. However, sometimes you just can’t find a CMS that will work for that particular project, and, barring changing the architecture of the site to fit in the mold, you’re left writing your own system for displaying and updating content, which, sadly, I’ve had to do a number of times.

I read an article today about FireRift - this seems exactly what I was looking for out of a content management system.

Firerift is a Template Independent CMS. That means you design and/or
develop how you want, and then plug Firerift into the portions of the
site where you want it to manage that content. Firerift will scour your
code looking for any Firerift Code Snippets and convert them into the
corresponding function.

Really looking forward to this, as should any frustrated web developer.

Stemming out of an heated conversation about who knows what, an idea was born. Jesse and I decided to hold off client projects for one day (just one, calm down!) and set out to build an entire Facebook application from scratch. We had tossed around different ideas in the week before, but by the time we set marker to whiteboard on Monday morning, we had locked down an idea - Facebook friend-based statistics. Jesse is a huge fan of data visualizations, and I like discovering information and patterns out of existing data that I didn’t realize.

So we started from scratch, and by the end of the day, we had the wireframes, full design and a functional version. Jesse was blogging during the day about it.

And now, it’s a full app! Say hello to FriendCompare! We still have a LOT more we want to do with this - even at 1 AM the next morning, Jesse and I were on the phone brainstorming on different things we could do. However, we had to cut it off somewhere!

Development-wise, the application didn’t turn out to be as easy as we thought it would be :-(. Hence why, for the past week, among with working with all our clients, I’ve been working like crazy to get it out.

Some Development Notes:

• Having all the information about the users - their friends, events they attend, education information, is AWESOME - and digging out the interesting nuggets of data poses a really cool challenge.
• FQL, Facebook’s own version of SQL - the language used to access information from just about every modern day database - gives you access to what you think would be a great wealth of today, but also poses HUGE roadblocks, besides the privacy restrictions. You would think that for a statistics application, you would need lots of standard SQL functions like COUNTs and JOINs, but as Facebook had neither, we were left pulling huge amounts of data down onto our server and analyzing it there. This makes any good web developer cringe in pain.
• Additionally, Facebook’s API is horribly slow. If you try to make more than a couple FQL/API calls, Facebook starts timing out, rendering the application useless.
• Enter Preload FQL. Rather than you calling the API from your server, you can specify ahead of time what information you’ll need from the Facebook databases, so when Facebook calls your application, all the data you need is already there. However, developing in that method tripled the amount of time necessary.
• We needed a LOT of different pieces of information, so bearing in mind all the above issues, it took a lot more than a day’s work to get it done.

So, in hindsight, maybe this particular idea wasn’t the best to try and tackle in a day. We were offered an existing codebase, however I turned that down, as it seemed a better decision at the time to write from scratch.

Thanks to everyone who helped out, including Eric and Jay from Lookery! Not to mention all the people who blogged about it and sent messages of support, and our clients for letting us take the day off!

Late last week Sam Huleatt approached me to tell me about a side project he was working on, in addition to his company and main product. I, while working for JESS3, volunteered to help out, and whipped up a logo for him. Sam launched it today.

StartupTweet is an open forum for people to make micro-posts. You’ll be able to subscribe to the content over Twitter.

Pretty neat, right? Check it out.

Learning from other people’s mistakes is a heck of a lot better than learning from your own.

Continuing the *Camp franchise, a group of entrepreneurs with failures under their belt held an unconference in Philadelphia to focus on their failures. It was last weekend. Sad I missed it!

Check out FailCamp. Hope they post their slides and such soon!