So, what have I been up to for the past nine months?  I got a twitter account, and you should probably follow me!  I’ve also been working, quite a bit.  Back in October we got a new project and it’s been quite an experience to get it finished, however it should be done in the next couple of weeks.  I had a chance to use some new things in this project, the different things we used are:

• ORM
• .NET 3.5
• LINQ
• WCF/JSON/jQuery
• CodeSmith with .netTiers
• SQL Server 2005
• SnapDragon Framework

I’ve had a few people ask me about one of my earlier blog posts about some heart problems I was having.  I’d like to go ahead and update everyone.  I haven’t had a heart palpitation in over a year, things are going really well since I started staying away from caffeine.

I’ve signed up for a paperMoney account at thinkorswim and I’ve been playing around in the stock markets.  It’s only a simulation, but it’s pretty fun to keep up with.  So far I’ve managed to turn $100,000 into $116,500, too bad that’s not real money.  I’ve been thinking about putting some real money down on the line, but I don’t want to start until I have a somewhat decent amount to start with.  I’ve met Anthony Davian, a hedge fund manager in Akron, Ohio, through twitter.  Anthony and Keith Barna host a happy hour show every week where they sample beers and talk about the markets.  It’s very interesting to attend and learn new things.  There’s also a newsletter that you can subscribe to for a monthly fee which will provide you with different trades that you can look at and see what they’re currently buying/selling.  If I were to actually go into the markets, I’d probably subscribe to that so that it’s not just me out there calling the shots, there’s someone else doing all the research and I just get to piggyback for profits!

I found another program called Devo that solves this problem.  Well, sort of… I’ll get to that later.  It’s a Firefox extension that gives you basically the exact same UI (you press Shift+X or set the trigger command to whatever you want it to be instead of it always being Shift+Space) and allows you to search google, yahoo, flickr, wikipedia along with several other sites.  There are also a few other cool features like annotating a site through SharedCopy.  Those are all cool, but what I think really makes this stand out is that it allows you to create your own commands.

So, back to the contextual problem; I still see it here.  These commands are only available when Firefox is open.  What if you boot up your computer and you want to immediately do a google search, without having to open Firefox?  What if you want to use that same UI to do something in another application, like notepad, iTunes, or internet explorer?  I think that ultimately Enso solves the entire contextual problem because it’s a small program you download and install on your computer.  This makes it computer-wide, so you can use it within any application you want to.

As for the features that Enso packs, it has all the web searches you could ask for.  There are media controls to control your music (which Devo also has, however you must have the FoxyTunes Firefox plugin).  There’s the spellcheck command which will do a spellcheck on any text you have highlighted, and since this is computer-wide it brings spellcheck to every application on your computer, which is pretty damn cool if you ask me.  There’s also the launcher commands which, if I’m remembering correctly, crawls your computer for applications to run and adds them to the launcher so to open the calculator you can type, “open calculator” or “open calc” since the auto-complete will fill in the rest.

I really like these command based UI’s that allow users to do what they want to do quickly, without losing focus of the task at hand or having to reach for the mouse, keeping the UI pretty (not like a command shell), and keeping the commands easily readable by humans.  I think that once more and more people start using these, they’ll realize how helpful these tools can actually be.

Last quarter I was working along with Josh, getting verbalizations working for the ORM subset constraints. After we worked on that for about eight weeks, we were assigned the task of creating the framework to make it possible for end users to generate a PHP back end once they get their information modeled. We were able to get this done successfully in 10 days.

This quarter I’ve been working on reverse engineering a database to ORM. This task has had its complications, but is coming along smoothly. When this is done I’ll be teaming up with Josh again to get the framework setup to generate a Java back end.

Also, since the release of Internet Explorer 7 (and its support for alpha transparent png’s), I’ve decided to go back to the old layout on the site. I’ve always thought it looked nicer, however it didn’t play nice with IE7.

I’ve also been on a team of a group of coders known as Revolutionary Networks. We’ve been working on a portfolio type project which will, in the end, display each of the members in Rev Net and display certain details such as which projects they’re working on, which technologies they know, where they’ve worked, their resume, etc. It’s a very in depth project that’s been going on for awhile.

• Golf
• Game Programming
• Calculus
• Algorithms and Data Structures
• Development in the J2EE Framework I
• Projects IV

I’m pretty excited for the Projects class. This quarter I’m working on the PHPGedView project. Which is currently ranked #2 on the list of most active projects on sourceforge. My group is responsible for creating an Open “Source” Repository so that people can easily find more sources to look up information about their family tree. It’s a very interesting project and I can’t wait until we get past the database design and start the coding.

I also landed a grading position this quarter, so I have some source of income. I’m grading the Topics in Software Development, which is a class that all of the new students have to take. It’s pretty interesting to see the different things that get turned in and the different ways people decide to do things.

I’ve started playing World of Warcraft again after giving it up for about a month. I’ve decided that I’m going to finish leveling my Rogue and transfer it to Kalecgos since they’ve opened realm transfers. Most of the people that I used to play with decided to give the game up, and I have some friends on Kalecgos, so.. goodbye Tichondrius.

That’s really all that’s going on right now. Since it’s 1AM and I have Golf bright and early in the morning, I’m going to bed.

It uses information found from the Music Genome Project to hone in and figure out exactly what you want to hear. Very cool.

Trip also showed me something called Digg. This is a cool news site that shows you popular stories from across the internet. It’s pretty cool, too.