February 2008

Stewardship and naming

Submitted by David Snopek on February 19, 2008 - 9:19pm

So far, I haven't had much luck building a community around Memorati™. The Drupal make-over will help bring more community features to the site and this should help. Which also makes this an opportune time to make any big changes, while, essentially, no one cares...

Right now, Memorati attempts to be three things:

A free public website which hosts an online flash card program.
A piece of open source software implementing this online flash card program.
A community effort for maintaining the program.

But as I mentioned a few months ago, I also want to find a way to monetize Memorati this year. That means that it would be a commercial venture too. Now thats probably a few things to many.

So, sometime after the new Memorati site goes live, I'm going to be making some changes, which I will describe below. First, however, I would like to define some terms:

Harry Potter: The book that taught me Polish…

Submitted by David Snopek on February 19, 2008 - 9:06pm

The title of this post is very misleading... I could already speak Polish at an intermediate-ish level before I started reading Harry Potter. However, this experience has really taught me alot!

What and why?

First, some background. Along with my own evolving ideas about language acquisition I've recently (maybe over the last 6 months?) become interested in the ideas of Stephen Krashen and Steve Kaufmann. They both emphasize "comprehensable input" as the primary means to language acquisition. This means reading and listening.

So, I decided that I wanted to read more in Polish. I had two primary goals:

To expand my vocabulary.
To read something interesting that I would enjoy.

I chose Harry Potter for the following reasons:

dijit.Dialog: To fork or not to fork!

Submitted by David Snopek on February 13, 2008 - 8:06pm

I've been redesigning the Memorati™ user interface to be based on pages and dialogs. Formerly it consisted of a collection of mutually exclusive pages (meaning no dialogs):

Browse Cards
Add Card
View Card
Quiz
Settings

These pages were all accessible at any time from a menu on the left sidebar.

In the new UI, what was formerly "Browse Cards" will become the "Dashboard" with links/buttons for all other functionality. All the rest except for "Quiz" will become dialogs (although, maybe "Quiz" should be a dialog too? Eh?).

Life Hacking

Submitted by David Snopek on February 13, 2008 - 7:07pm

Yes, you guessed it! I'm interested in life hacking. Just thought I'd let you know in case the name of this blog wasn't a dead give away (ed: this domain was originally intended for a life hacking app). I'm a big fan of David Allen's Getting Things Done, which was also the inspiration of the great life hacker website 43folders.com.

Anyway, I recently added some life hacker blogs to my RSS reader and just read this post. It doesn't have much that I haven't heard before, but its always good to periodically review these types of tips to remind yourself, and think, "Oh, yeah, I should really get around to trying that!"

Ash Wednesday Update!

Submitted by David Snopek on February 6, 2008 - 10:08pm

I haven't posted in awhile, I apologize! Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, however, I didn't make it to mass because we were hit with a massive blizzard. I walked home from work, partly because the buses stopped running and partly because I'm bad-ass. ;-) It was good exercise.

Here are my projects as of late:

Released POE::Component::MessageQueue version 0.1.8! I have to give most of the credit to Paul Driver who really did all the work this release. But its still exciting!