atevans.com

Well, now I have my furniture set up, my computer in place, and my internet connected, I can say I am settled in my new apartment. I now live in San Mateo, CA and work full-time for a large internet company in Silicon Valley / the Bay Area.

For the time being, I have suspended any and all freelance activities. I am not sure that I can do freelance or contract work for others and still fulfill my obligations to my new employer, and I’d rather not chance it. While I’m getting settled I will probably not post much - I suspect my personal web projects will pick back up once everything is running smoothly here.

If you want to read my personal blog, it is available at http://neatthings.blogspot.com - though that is mostly pictures and talking about my day.

I look forward to posting here again some time.

Our team, Unstoppable Learning, just placed 3rd in the Burton D. Morgan Business Plan competition here at Purdue. This competition had 47 startups submit executive summaries for their startup companies. Of those, 10 were selected for full business plan reviews, and whittled down to 5 businesses that would present in front of an audience of VC’s and CEO’s for judgement.  Our company placed 3rd, netting us $5,000 in cash and $2,000 of in-kind services from the Burton Morgan Center for Entrepeneurship and the Discovery Park startup incubator.

This is a big deal for us. First of all, I never win competitions, ever. Maybe it’s because I had such an awesome team backing me up, but I’m very excited to be recognized for something. Secondly, because the rest of my team wants to take this company live, and start selling educational games to schools. I would like to see them succeed, and this is a fantastic first step.

Well, so far I haven’t kept up my commitment to blog once a week. Those were heady days, when I could imagine having all kinds of free time for awesome projects and fun ideas.

So what have I been up to all semester? Well, aside from interviewing and working for IDC,  I have been working on a senior design project. The last class required to graduate from Purdue’s Computer Graphics Technology degree is CGT 411 & 450 (two classes which are essentially combined). Our group, Unstoppable Learning, is building an educational game for the Nintendo DS. It’s almost done. We are going to use it in a study researching the effects of educational games on the motivation of high school students. The study is next week, and we will be having our final presentation about 10 days after that.

The semester has been absolutely nuts with all the work we’ve put into this - we’ve presented at a conference, a poster session, two elevator pitch competitions, and are finalists in the Burton D. Morgan Business Plan Competition. We have gotten approval to run our study on high school students from our professor,  an awesome and helpful teacher at a high school here in Indiana, the principal, and Purdue’s Institutional Review Board.

With the completion of the study, the analysis of the data, and our final presentation ahead of us, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Almost there! Maybe I will have more projects to post about once I have time away from classwork again.

Yahoo has gone Hadoop. They’re shifting a critical part of their search technology to use the open-source distributed file system / processing engine. From Erick Schonfeld over at TechCrunch:

Hadoop is an open-source implementation of Google’s MapReduce software and file system. It takes all the links on the Web found by a search engine’s crawlers and “reduces” them to a map of the Web so that ranking algorithms can be run against them. (Update: A second try at explaining this. What MapReduce and Hadoop do is break up a computation problem into mangeable chunks and distribute them to different processors—that is the “map” part, it is mapping the data. Once all of the individual results are in, they are combined into one big result—that is the reduce part. Search engines, in turn, use this technique to literally map the Web. Sorry for any confusion my paraphrasing might have caused.)

This is a technology that’s come up in several of my interviews lately. Much like Amazon S3, Hadoop is a solution for quick and easy scaling. With it’s associated HBase database system emulating Google’s BigTable structured data storage system, Hadoop seems like a fully-featured method for scaling to solve large-scale problems on the back end of web applications / services.

In short, there is now an open-source way for small companies to design their data processing architecture so that it can easily scale to the multi-petabyte range. So the next time I’m running a pet project that might actually go somewhere, I may build in Hadoop - even if it’s just in single-core “pseudo-distributed” mode. If nothing else, it seems to be the thing to learn for serious developers today.

A company requested I develop a small, command-line application to provide them with some Ruby sample code. Blackjack is a good example application because it can be implemented well using a class structure, its rules are relatively simple, and AI behavior is well defined.

I am posting my blackjack application here in case anyone else wants to see what it looks like when I code something. The code itself is published under the Creative Commons license, such that anyone is free to redistribute, modify, or enhance it as they wish, so long as I get some kind of attribution from it.

Blackjack a la Ruby

Blackjack by
Andrew Evans is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

The word is out: Microsoft is offering a ridiculous amount of money for a total buyout of Yahoo! John Gruber is guessing it’s a deal. I agree that it will be ‘interesting’ to see what Microsoft will do with Yahoo!’s largely LAMP-based infrastructure, considering that Microsoft does all of their web business with their own .NET / C# / Windows Server stack.

It does seem as thought Microsoft is trying to buy a community with Yahoo! and not acquire any of its particular services. Yes, Yahoo! has IPTV going, but Microsoft has the Xbox Live Video Marketplace, and they were working on IPTV there last I checked. In fact, I can’t think of a single property Yahoo! has that Microsoft hasn’t created some kind of evil duplicate of: Flickr? Del.icio.us? Yahoo! MyLife? Those could all be folded (shoehorned, really) into existing Microsoft Live services. Mail? Instant Messaging? Search? Microsoft has them all.

I can’t imagine the quality of service improving after a switch to .NET  on things like Yahoo! Mail or Flickr - the number of headaches that would cause would be astronomical, and during the total development time used to switch backend architectures those applications would not be developing new features. Can you imaginge Yahoo! music running on Silverlight? Me neither. I can see a huge number of Yahoo!’s users hemhorraging during such a switch.

Microsoft could run it the other way - foist all their online users into the Yahoo! services. There would be headaches there, too - but frankly I think Yahoo!’s web services are higher quality than Microsoft’s right now, and if it’s an improvement the users might not mind as much.

My big question is - how does this help Microsoft compete with Google, as everyone is saying the purpose of the deal is? If it’s purely a competition for pageviews in the online world, then acquiring Yahoo! makes sense in light of Microsoft’s acquisition of a stake in Facebook, and a stake in MySpace would seem a likely next step. But in terms of services I don’t think Microsoft is getting anything that will boost them relative to Google.

Google released a neat-sounding new API. Here’s the scoop:

Here’s how it works: we crawl the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people’s accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages. But instead of returning links to HTML documents, the API returns JSON data structures representing the social relationships we discovered from all the XFN and FOAF.

The ability to access social network data from another website sounds pretty cool. But right now it seems a bit limited. I know the semantic web crowd is all about this sort of markup - FOAF and event formats and structured data… But it seems to me that 99% (or more) of the social network data on the internet is on Facebook, Myspace, Hi5, LinkedIn, and other ‘central-database’ networks. The Open Social api seems like a better way to crawl and access friend data than relying on semantic markup which isn’t widely adopted yet. If Google put Open Social crawling capabilities into this, however, it could become a great way to access friend data from open sites.

Another concern, however, is user annoyance. Do we want to make it as easy as possible to spam your friends with invitations to new web sites? Think of how many annoying Facebook application invites you are ignoring right now. Google is promising with Social Graph to clutter your email inbox in the same way with requests to join new websites. My inbox gets things quickly enough right now. Perhaps an opt-out tag or attribute in the FOAF / XFN tags would be a way to handle this?

Just finished watching Helvetica. Brilliant little film about the history of one of the greatest typefaces in the modern age. Gary Hustwit put together a fine documentary here, and interviews a number of prominent designers with some interesting queries about Helvetica - including Albert Hoffmann, the son of one of the original designers.

It traces the history of Helvetica, from it’s original conception under the Swiss firm Stempel (owned by Linotype), up through its adoption in the sixties, the counterculture revolution of the seventies and eighties, and why we’re swinging back towards it in the digital era.

I really enjoyed watching the older and younger designers nerd out about Helvetica and what it represents. Everyone had something interesting to say about it, and you can tell from the editing that the director does not worry about appearing geeky to the general public. It’s a wonderful indulgence into the type of design discussion I can never quite get enough of.

If you’re a designer of any sort, I’d say this film is a darn interesting watch.

Nineteen Fortysomething was a project done very quickly for a course I took. The course’s focus was on Flash development, and I decided to create a game using Actionscript 3 so that I could better understand the nuances of Adobe’s implementation of ECMA script.

Being a huge fan of shmups, I wanted to make something like this for my game. 1942 (youtube link) was one of the original arcade shoot ‘em up games, and I wanted to emulate at least a small part of that awesomeness. Major thanks to Flying Yogi for the open-source graphics library - that allowed me to focus on the engine development and enemy-spawn routines.

Take some time if you like to play Nineteen Fortysomething.

I’ve made the switch. Until recently, atevans.com was merely an aggregation site - pulling together things I’ve posted around the internet with the magic of Magpie, and resyndicating everything as one giant RSS feed Yahoo Pipes-style.

It was cool, but it had some issues - namely, browsing posts older than the front page’s worth was not possible without pursuing them all the way back to my other blogs, Twitter page, etc. Plus, I didn’t like posting things like my portfolio data to other services like Blogger. Sure, it’s a great service, but something seemed unprofessional about hosting my portfolio on a free Google domain.

So now I’ve made the move to WordPress. Sure, I could write my own mini-CMS customized to my needs (I’ve done it before), but I’m short on time, and why reinvent the wheel? Wordpress is an great platform used by a number of luminaries in the blogging community - it’s certainly good enough for my humble corner of the internet. Especially with a custom theme that’s similar to my old layout. Major thanks to Michael Heilemann for chocking the Kubrick markup full of good CSS hooks.

I’ve never been much of a blogger - even on my personal blog I have a posting record that’s spotty at best. Writing good posts takes time, and I try to filter my posts to things that would interest my readers. I’m going to pledge here to try and post at least once a week on the topics of web development, productivity, and technology. And maybe a few photographs. Hopefully that will make this portfolio site just a little more interesting.

Thanks for reading, and have a nice day!