DataSmith

My HCI (Human-Computer Interface) course is done and the fictitious catering company site I developed for it has been graded. 100%!

While the focus of the project, for the course requirements at least, wasn't to develop a fully functional site, I was able to get a lot of the site actually working.more>>>

The World Community Grid recently celebrated its fourth anniversary. For those unfamiliar with the Grid, the project allows users to download a client application for their computer. That application then takes advantage of the idle cycles of the user's computer (when the computer's on but not doing anything) to perform analysis of the data from a host of medical and humanitarian projects. Essentially, the Grid wires up lots of consumer-grade computers to perform the work of rare and costly super-computers. It's a perfect example of the efficacy of the "Long Tail" theory.

To celebrate their fourth anniversary the Grid put out a video called 'I Dedicate', which highlights some of the reasons people participate in the World Community Grid and some of the accomplishments the Grid has made in the past four years. Here are just a few of the accomplishments:

• Provided the 'Help Conquer Cancer' project with 2900 years of computational power
• The 'Fight AIDS at Home' project was able to complete 5 years of research in just 6 months

What's your computer doing when it's not doing anything?

Yesterday I headed into the city for the DC Doc Sprint. We had some difficulties because the library had assigned us a room which didn't have wi-fi, but we migrated up to lobby of the Black Studies section and got going there.more>>>

I'm working on two projects at the moment. The first is the development of a module which will administer, store, and report on outcomes of an administration of the WHO-5 Well Being Index. I'm still deciding on the feature list, but briefly I want it to:more>>>

Based on a question in the forums, I went looking for a module to handle content spotlighting, selecting a single item (specifically a user) to be displayed separately in a Featured Content block and rotating the selected item on a cron basis (e.g., weekly).  To my surprise, there doesn't seem to be one. more>>>

A question came up in one of the forum posts on drupal.org about a module to prevent inappropriate usernames.  A couple options were discussed, including using access rules and the abuse module.  Mostly as a learning exercise, I decided to try my hand at writing a module to handle the issue.more>>>

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