Bart G. Dev...

I've been busy this summer working on a few commercial projects, and a few research related projects at Ryerson University, the dept. of Computer Science, so my posts have been a bit rushed. By rushed I mean not at all, or consisted of a place holder from xkcd.com

I wrapped up a video project for Athletes Video. A golf swing analysis application From the success of the site, I see golfers REALLY like that sort of thing. Check it out here (login: 'demo'). I'm working on a second one which is looking to be a first of it's kind (as far as I can see).

The Computational Intelligence Initiative lab at Ryerson has been keeping me pretty busy. That's what happens when you like what you do and the people you work with. It's hard to leave work behind. There's several things on the go, so here's a list of just a few:

ryePod - an Automated Mulit-Agent and Information Syndication
I mentioned this in more detail before, but now I have this fancy pic and poster.

3D Node Simulator (snappier name pending)
This application visually represents the current state of a network or a multi-agent system, tracks and records the progressive stages:

Ryerson's Women In Engineering (WIE)
The latest project to wrap up is part of WIE, where we had the opportunity to mentor three very talented and intelligent engineers-to-be from grade 11. We worked on several projects, one of which is presented here, and won 3rd place in the competition which followed the 6 week program. Nika, Nilanthy, and Susan did a great job, and were a pleasure to work with.

An honorable mention of a project which completed this summer that is not my own. Jeff Hardy and Cloves Carneiro Jr., with Hampton Catlin, published a Rails book, Beginning Rails: From Novice to Professional from Apress. From reading the TOC the book sounds well through out, but I'll picking a copy up for the lab. With the increase in web development our students our asking for, and the great implementation Rails has done implementing MVC, this will be a great addition to our texts for students. And Jeff is a great developer, who will teach me a thing or two.

One last thing. Apparently my nerd score is 89/100... a bit higher then I thought it would be, but oh well... life goes on.

Courtesy of xkcd.com

Google has finally come out with Street View.

Yes, in addition to seeing and interacting with your maps, viewing a satellite image of your car in your driveway, flying through the air around our little plane on Google Earth, and marking the geography of your places and adventures, you can now check out the street of some cities in the US.

Looks like New York, San Francisco, Miami, Denver, and Las Vegas are the chosen ones.

I'll be in San Francisco next week on a street which presumably looks like this:

I'm sure it's not the first attempt at something like this, but it's a big undertaking, and Google has pulled it off quiet nicely.

The comics and blag by a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

Bonus: well do you know?

It's been a busy news day, first BlackBerries go down, then slowly go back up.. and now this!

For the past couple of months I've been working on podcasting lectures, and making it dead simple. One click to start, one click to end... Done! (ok I lied.. you need a 2nd click to end the presentation) We're merging a video of the presenter as well, so it's not just a simple slide show with voice over. Craig Codeiro is now a QuickTime API expert I believe.

Hossein Rahnama has been running the project which is a collaboration between the Computer Science Dept and the Roger's Media Centre at Ryerson University in Toronto.

"Instructors without a technology background will be able to use the service because it performs all the post-production work automatically"
- quote

Yahoo's new ad system has been launched for a while now, but investors are not happy. Yahoo is going against Google's Ad System, no easy task.

What's your experience with it?

Ryerson University hosted it's first Web 2.0 Competition this passed Wednesday, which was organized by Hossein Rahnama, the instructor for CPS630 and Research Coordinator at the Ci2 Lab.

The Computer Science course focuses on the Web 2.0 Buzzword, and its participatory architecture and protocols. The main topics of discussion the students engage in were AJAX, Information Syndication, Pervasive Web, Rich Internet Applications and Service Oriented Architectures. Using these concepts, students had the task of conceiving and building a tool or service, which would be offered via the internet. The students had the opportunity of presenting their projects in front of academic and industry judges, and gaining an insight into creating and developing the ideas, applications and services which are actively and collaboratively defining the term Web 2.0.

The comments and criticisms brought up by Many Ayromlou and Hampton Catlin were very constructive and effective in terms of developing their projects further. Michael Glenn’s questions and suggestions on marketability gave each group a clearer and focused understanding of how to take their projects from the classrooms and make it a reality. Leila Boujnane’s presentation on the important and sometimes forgotten aspects of a startup put the realities of working in a successful group into focus. Bradley Fortner’s and Karl Moskowski’s helpful comments and suggestions were to the point, and allowed the students to see the potential of their ideas.

Thanks to the Ryerson Computer Science Dept. for allowing us to put the event together, and it's Chair, Dr. Ali Sadeghian for speaking to the students.

Congratulations to the 3 winners, and to all the groups:

1. Find Your Game
2. RyeWebTop
3. SCS-Locator

I know I’m not the only person who Google’s him/her self once in a while. It’s good to know what the o’ internet has to say about you.

I found this old post I made back on May 2001, when I just started my first full time job straight out of college.

It was about workaholics.. and it made me think, how little things change.

“Well put Glen! I just spent a few minutes at work reading your e-mail which technically counts as a break; lunch was spent punching away at the keyboard with sandwich in hand. I wouldn’t call myself a workaholic. Working full-time, I think I’m still considered a student, having just graduated college and still picking up courses and studying new technologies. Is studying after work considered working, making me a workaholic? Or is studying a separate entity from work and therefore considered leisure or extra curricular activity. In this industry I believe the first idea to be true. Learning something new every 6 months seems to be survival tactic rather than an extra curricular activity. I guess it depends on your reasons for studying: personal growth, money, or staying a float.

Bart”

I started class once again a couple of weeks ago and it gave me a chance to take a break from Ruby and Rails and get some academics done. Well, not really a break, as one of my courses is comparative languages. First assignment will be in, yep, you guessed it, Ruby. The first exam will be some history, and some coding. The coding part, yep, Ruby.

I wanted to try something cool so took a graphics course. It uses OpenGL to go through the image rendering, 3D affects, and the like. It was cool as it gave me a chance to play around with C++ and Windows which I haven't done in a while, since MFC days. I found a great tutorial which goes through the basics and jumps right into 3D images.

After playing around with my rotating-cone-and-triangles for a minute, I had to look what support Ruby has for OpenGL. Well guess what ladies and gents, yep, Ruby supports OpenGL out of the box. Here's a cool blog about starting OpenGL with Ruby from someone more experienced in graphics then me. As you can tell from my rotating-cone-and-triangles it's not that tough.

The OpenGL libraries for Ruby were originally written by Yoshi, and continue being developed. See the RubyForge site at htp://ruby-opengl.rubyforge.org/ for status and updates.

Some sample code available from Thomas Lee