Ask HN: What are you working on today?

Today's my last day as an employee at my job of 6 years. I'll become a consultant starting Monday so if they need me, it'll be hourly billing. I'm just reviewing my emails today and reassigning my regular responsibilities.

Telling my girlfriend's parents that she's getting married. :)

I am working on stuffing my face with burgers and chips prior to going back to the land of noodles and raw fish. Plus customer support emails, since birthdays and bridal showers don't stop just because I am on vacation.

Working on redesigning Notifo's website. I started by nuking all the css from the last design, removing divs I didn't like, reorganizing the site with a page div, some wrappers for header and footer so I could stretch them out 100%. Worked on the logo a bit to get a slicker look that blended in with the background, in addition to a subtle letterpress effect.<p>I still have lots left to redesign in terms of content pages, in addition to adding a few new sections to the site but I've been tinkering around with some typography recently. I really want to use TypeKit but last night Chad and I found that - possibly related - scrolling on the site is incredibly slow when TypeKit is enabled than when it's not, or when using a Google WebFont instead.<p>Using lots of CSS3 throughout - combined with Sass it makes it super easy. for example, my box-shadow mixin:<p><pre><code> @mixin box-shadow($ho, $vo, $b, $c) -webkit-box-shadow: $ho $vo $b $c -moz-box-shadow: $ho $vo $b $c box-shadow: $ho $vo $b $c filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.dropshadow( OffX=" $ho, "OffY=" $vo, "Color=" $c ")" -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.dropshadow( OffX=" $ho, "OffY=" $vo, "Color=" $c ")"</code></pre>

My SXSW proposal. I plan to present "Design for the Coder's Mind": <a href="http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/design-for-the-coders-mind-reverse-engineering-visual-design/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/design-for-the-coders-mind-...</a><p>But I'm stuck on the name. Some contenders:<p>- Hacking Design: Reverse-Engineering Beauty<p>- Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty<p>- Visual Design, Reverse-Engineered: Design for Coders<p>Thoughts?

It's late evening at the moment, and tomorrow is the birthday party for one of my boys; a Pirate Party, arrrr.<p>At the moment I'm cutting out eyepatches so we can play pin the eyepatch on the pirate. Next up I've been assigned to draw treasure maps. Should be a fun day

Well... I took the entire week off from my day job, so I could work on my startup project.<p>Some background: My stuff is all open-source, and I'd been working on it under a name that I'd picked out 2+ years ago. But development had kinda stalled out a while back, and I'd never aggressively promoted the project and tried to solicit much outside help. So I started working on it hard again earlier this year, but changed directions fairly substantially. Switched to coding in Groovy/Grails at the same time, and have made tremendous progress.<p>What I've done this week:<p>1. Write a pile of Groovy code, making fixes and tweaks to the actual project.<p>2. Renamed the open-source project, and started moving the development from java.net to a combination of Google Code and GitHub.<p>3. Spun up two new slices at Slicehost, and started building two new servers: One for infrastructure "stuff" (Bugzilla, Hudson, etc.) and one for a demo site where the public demo will live.<p>4. Started working on the "Community" section of my company website, which will contain information about the open-source side of things. I'm setting up something similar to the what JBoss has; with their site divided into "JBoss.com" and "JBoss.org" where the .org site is aimed towards developers and users of the open-source code<p>5. Need to rewrite all of the copy on the company website to reflect the new focus. I'm basically reusing a company name and domain I'd setup to use for doing consulting / freelance development... so the website talks about all of that, instead of the product I'm working on.<p>The goal is to have all of the code moved to Google Code / GitHub, have the public demo up and running, have Bugzilla installed and setup, and have all the new website copy done, before I go back to work on Monday.<p>Screenshots:<p><a href="http://imgur.com/mR50F.png" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/mR50F.png</a><p><a href="http://imgur.com/kcfL2.png" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/kcfL2.png</a><p><a href="http://imgur.com/dOo8L.png" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/dOo8L.png</a>

Creating a PHP application for my employer that will allow us to deploy small 5 page websites for clients quicker than ever. We found we had to turn down a lot of jobs because the money didn't add up to the time required, but this will fix that issue.

working on the ui components of the next gen Kindle :P<p>Other than that, finishing up the ipad/iphone version of a children story I have been working at home. Almost there.... kinda cute actually.

Wrapping up my last day at the office.

Working on a Silverlight app for my employer. I inherited this app from previous contractors and some of the stuff they did is pretty scary, so last night was the tipping point and I've decided to start ripping out all the bad stuff.<p>I'm also torn on Silverlight in general and seriously considering rewriting the app from scratch in an HTML framework (debating between Rails and ASP.NET MVC, even if that debate may seem like a silly one to some :) )

Fixing my son's newly bought second-hand bike. This is probably his last intermediate bike until I can buy him a brand new adult-size bike that will accompany him after that.<p>The rear wheel seems to be quite badly out of alignment. Part of it is bent to one side for about 1 cm and after fixing that down to 1 mm or less by trimming the spokes, there's still considerable vertical misalignment left.<p>Due to the horizontal misalignment the spokes and nipples don't have equally distributed configuration reserve, so it's pretty difficult to compensate against the slightly oval shape of the rim. While it's fun to fix things, I think I'll just go for a new wheel.<p>Other than that, the bike was a good find. The power transmission was in good shape (chains and gears ok, the derailleur and the gear changer work ok, ball bearings are ok) and it worked out of the box. I only replaced one braking cable and repainted one section of the body, and I think I'll go with that. Oh, I paid 15€ for it, and the good old ones are of a ten-fold better make than the cheapest bikes you can buy new.

Hand-rolled SSE optimised version of a domain transform and coefficient re-order for a video encoder. 3x speedup over the C++ version, yay!<p>(My development environment just looks like Visual Studio, and that's because it is.)

No one is doing something more mind-numbing than me.<p>Waiting for I.T Support to give me Admin rights on my PC to get something/anything working.

Learning OpenGL ES (and computer graphics concepts in general for that matter) while trying to make a 3D iPhone game for my graphics class this summer.

Trying to figure out how to get my mom out of these cash advance schemes and chronic overdrafts due to her lack of understanding of how banking works. Then reworking her finances into something manageable so she can manage to buy groceries.<p>Got some google maps integration going for one of my web app ideas this morning while on the train. Hoping to knock out the remaining stuff on the way home.<p>What am I not working on? Anything related to my day job, even though I'm at the office while I type this.

Working on a few things:<p>Starting to get the word out for GISQuery.com, a Q&#38;A site for GIS professionals using OSQA. Having an interesting time getting the word out on this one since I need participation for the site to grow.<p>Learning CodeIngniter as a PHP framework to help get a few other ideas off the ground (a revamped 140Pl.us and a new beer website). I am getting tired of trying to build highly functioning sites from scratch so I thought I'd try a framework.

Reverse engineering the communication protocol for a Thorlabs stepper motor and writing a Linux driver for it.<p>Planning my road trip to CERN from Scotland next week and getting to know a Monte Carlo simulation for physics reactions for when I arrive!<p>Deciding where to go for dinner...

PowerPoint presentation.<p>Who's happier than me? No one.

Today I released my three-day project "I Write Like". You paste some text, it analyzes it and tells you what famous writer you write like. Link: <a href="http://iwl.me" rel="nofollow">http://iwl.me</a>

The same thing I do every day, try to take over the world---okay, not really, currently work on SWIX, working on updating some payments stuff, and setting up redis to prototype some new features.

Trying to get an avionics subsystem to display a particular error message, in order to demonstrate completeness in testing. Part of this effort:<p><a href="http://www.eurocontrol.int/link2000/public/subsite_homepage/homepage.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.eurocontrol.int/link2000/public/subsite_homepage/...</a>

Drew my first webcomic on the interaction between programmers and recruiters yesterday: <a href="http://bit.ly/bx1vi5" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/bx1vi5</a><p>Thinking about a follow-up.

The REPL and debugger for GNU Guile, an implementation of Scheme. I'm trying to integrate the two, so when you get an error, you're just dropped into a new recursive REPL that happens to have a debugger too, so you can inspect the stack from there.

Stayed up all night chatting politics with a friend in SF to preempt jetlag from flying to Poland, proceeded to fly to Poland, slept on plane 1/2, fixed niggly bug on plane 2/2, touched down in Warsaw, went to the Chopin museum, had some vegan pierogis. Now shipping three updates and heading to bed lamely early on a Friday night as said preemptive jetlag strike was only marginally successful.

An Android app that turns the phone into a simple SMS gateway, allowing you to deploy SMS apps anywhere in the world the phone works (without having to install complex hardware/software, deal with service providers etc)<p><a href="http://wiki.github.com/niryariv/txtgate/" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.github.com/niryariv/txtgate/</a><p>Work environment: Java / Eclipse / Android (new to all of these, varying degrees of pain ;))

Today I am recovering from my first actual mixed martial arts class. My wife and I (recently reconciled, if you're following my posts) went, and she learned her first jab, (vicious) right cross, uppercut, left hook, front kick, body kick, armbar, rear naked choke and a kimura that's still got my arm a little weak.<p>I used to train in a number of martial arts like, 20 years ago, but now I'm 33, about 25-30 pounds overweight, and VERY out of shape, and decided to jump back in 100%.<p>Joined a Team Lloyd Irvin dojo (Ivey League MMA) and did the MMA basics course, which nearly killed me during the warm up, but I and my wife kept going through the entire class.<p>We'll be going back Saturday, and my 8 year old daughter is enrolled as well after watching the other kids enjoy kicking the snot out of the instructors.<p>As for a picture of the development environment... I suppose this'll do? <a href="http://i468.photobucket.com/albums/rr41/iveyleaguepics/grand%20opening/go1.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i468.photobucket.com/albums/rr41/iveyleaguepics/grand...</a>

Now: drinking coffee and laying in bed reading HN.<p>In an hour: Building an iPhone app in tandem with its Rails backend for a client.

Things I did today:<p>1. Improved my stock trading environment. I moved into active trading of leveraged ETFs recently(FAS and FAZ regularly move 4% or more in a day, opening the possibility of a living income even on a modest portfolio), and I was using the E*Trade web interface, but it had some nasty limitations and glitches, so I finally bit the bullet and moved up to their $100/mo "Pro" system, which has the arsenal of charting tools I was looking for.<p>2. Worked on the lexer for my scripting language project. It's all hand-rolled because that's how I've always done it - and I stick to simple syntax anyway. I'm actually doing this because I'm stalling a bit on the runtime model. I've established most of the core ideas for that, but not having done something so complex before, it's easier to nibble away at the edges that I understand first.

Working on polishing a new WordPress theme. I am not a designer per se, but it is very difficult to come across simple and neat themes for websites. So I designed one for myself and now I am giving it away as a free theme.

Writing a book on human rationality.

Today I'm taking a two hour trip with my grandad (born 1917) up to our log cabin at Vassfaret, Norway. Kinda looks like this: <a href="http://image54.webshots.com/154/2/36/38/451523638WCSqPv_fs.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://image54.webshots.com/154/2/36/38/451523638WCSqPv_fs.j...</a><p>I always wanted to do more things with him. He thought he'd never would see the cabin again, but this will be his final trip up there. I'm going to spend some days, breathing in mountain air and doing some thinking.

Porting _why's park place to ruby 1.9/sinatra/mongodb.

Porting my molecule viewer from 2d canvas to WebGL:<p><a href="http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/img/canvasmol-webgl-chrome.png" rel="nofollow">http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/img/canvasmol-webgl-chrome.png</a><p>Here is my development environment (just SciTE and tons of browsers):<p><a href="http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/img/dev.png" rel="nofollow">http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/img/dev.png</a>

Same project I've been working on for the better part of 3 months, unfortunately: a web based chat using GWT to replace a flash based one. The primary reasons are: we wanted to control the source code and remove dependecy on third-party products and becase we want the chat to work on iPad so flash is out.<p>Running into tons of stumbling blocks primarily around keeping the app near realtime and stable. It's GWT on the front-end, but .NET webservices on the backend. The existing flash based system has a custom server service and periodically dumps logs into SQL Server. We started off trying to write directly to SQL with our version but it wasn't fast enough and we were running into too many contention issues. Now we're throwing Memcached in the middle and it's much faster, but we're not entirely out of the woods.<p>I'm thoroughly convinced HTTP just shouldn't be used for chat applications.

Client side image resizing for an image uploader, part of a larger web app build. Saves a ton of time/bandwidth/CPU. So far its turned really well.<p>Its pretty easy actually, thanks to the most recent beta of SWFUpload. If you want to implement yourself, make sure to grab the patched .swf or you may have trouble queueing uploads.<p>SWFUpload 2.5 Beta: <a href="http://code.google.com/p/swfupload/downloads/detail?name=SWFUpload_v250_beta_3_core.zip&#38;can=2&#38;q=" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/swfupload/downloads/detail?name=SWF...</a><p>Patched SWF: <a href="http://code.google.com/p/swfupload/downloads/detail?name=swfupload.swf.v2.5.0.beta3.2.zip&#38;can=2&#38;q=" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/swfupload/downloads/detail?name=swf...</a><p>Demo: <a href="http://demo.swfupload.org/v250beta3/resizedemo/index.php" rel="nofollow">http://demo.swfupload.org/v250beta3/resizedemo/index.php</a>

building an A.I. that has something at least marginally interesting and more-or-less correct about any subject

Answering support mails, thinking how to scale app to at least 1000 simultaneous connections, preparing presentation to brief Forrester, contacted some more bloggers, watched Mixergy interview on how to sell to Fortune 500 companies, finalizing on new feature: test result segmentation.

I'm implementing our PCI compliance by putting the entire credit card transaction handling offsite.

I am working on an open source automated testing framework called aost tellurium....trying to figure how to record the structure of a popup window. A link to the project: <a href="http://code.google.com/p/aost/" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/aost/</a>

a hacker news rss filter written in haskell that uses redis to store feed information.<p>i've found a few filters that are like "only show feeditems which have 10+ votes" etc. I'm going for something a little more complicated - most popular n posts by hour, day, week and month.

Writing COBOL on an IBM mainframe:-) Updating a system for managing credit card portfolios.

Just received a Sugru.com kit yesterday, and I've been prototyping a mirror to make photos in front of my macbook:<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/alx/tags/sugru" rel="nofollow">http://www.flickr.com/photos/alx/tags/sugru</a><p>30min of fun, rest of the day for usual work :)

Today I am trying to crunch 3 years of failed maintenance on a lab of 24 machines into a single day.<p>None of which were even registered on the domain!<p>Updating group policy information, pointing the machines to the WSUS server, installing updated antivirus, installing new DeepFreeze client-- tedious work that should have been done by previous techs/admins-- so I'm cleaning up a mess.<p>This will be my summer. Get this school ironed out before the students come back.<p>Oh, and I'm learning Python in-between-- it's that <i>structured procrastination</i> thing. :)<p>What possessed me to try and tackle this on a per-machine basis? Why did I not just image one and roll it out? I wouldn't have time for HN and coding! :)

Work: Tuesday, international flight to a customer to gather requirements for new product version - enough work for a year. Thursday, try to integrate WordPress and Facebook Connect and curse loudly - the architects who return either a userID or a WP_Error object and the plugin writers who just (int) $result without checking if it's an error.<p>Free time: reverse engineering a C++ game and extending it. <a href="http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/9215/devenv.png" rel="nofollow">http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/9215/devenv.png</a> - IDA to rev/eng it, Eclipse C++ with a custom build tool to compile, Rose Tyler background just because.

Working on a variant of Etsy's Deployinator, with a bunch of extra things we need at work.<p><a href="http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/05/20/quantum-of-deployment/" rel="nofollow">http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/05/20/quantum-of-deployment...</a>

Last night, I set up IMAP, TLS/SSL, and webmail on a server for myself, to liberate myself from third parties (i.e. GMail) having a searchable corpus of my email history.<p>In addition to that, I recently adjusted my fork of RVM[1] to work with Gentoo again (installed and managed systemwide as root, with users read-only).<p>Also, for the past week or two, I've been helping with RDBI[2], a new project aiming to be to database access what Rack is to web servers and web frameworks.<p>[1]: <a href="http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/" rel="nofollow">http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://github.com/RDBI" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/RDBI</a>

Today I am working on my strategic procrastination project - an Android game. I got bored with my regular project, a Data Deduplication file system, and decided to have some fun with learning Android development.

I had a bit of inspiration a couple nights ago and decided to rework an old abandoned project and turn it into a service.<p>It's an automated crash logging thing that will collect info from your webapp every time it throws, ball it up and send it off to an API at our site. Then, on a schedule, we'll hit your site with the exact HTTP Request that broke it the first time.<p>So yeah, I'm hoping to get it "Show HN"-able inside of a week. The collection API is working, as is the regression piece. All it needs is some pretty reports and a bunch of documentation.

Work: Finished some batch jobs and starting a new semi-interesting web project. It'll be a welcome change from the boring admin/infrastructure stuff I've been doing :)<p>Home: Android notes tutorial. Also fun :)

Working on Twitterrific for iPhone/iPad.

It's 33 degrees C in my room, I'm afraid nothing is getting done today.

Today I'm going to convert these two designs into xhtml/css templates. phew.<p>Design 1: <a href="http://bcoffee-projects.com/work/Indispensable" rel="nofollow">http://bcoffee-projects.com/work/Indispensable</a> Design 2: <a href="http://bcoffee-projects.com/work/tad/design-review" rel="nofollow">http://bcoffee-projects.com/work/tad/design-review</a><p>And much of this week was spent on research on what e-commerce platform and payment gateway to use on my client's online florist

I was working on this till 2am San Francisco time, so I guess technically it was today.<p>I started writing a Node.js client to consume the EVE-online api. They have no json support, so it means eating XML. I was able to plug in node-xml(<a href="http://github.com/robrighter/node-xml" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/robrighter/node-xml</a>) and start getting usable data from the xml right before bedtime, so I consider that a short-term goal accomplished.

Trying several approaches to get a screenshot of a known rect on the screen that has a flash video in it (that is loaded from an external site) with the click of a button and then save/stream the resulting image to a PHP script to be saved to the server. The end users are not very technically savvy so teaching them Jing or even image cropping is out of the question. Currently experimenting with Flash and Java appplet solutions.

I'm working on automating slang term variant creation on OnlineSlangDictionary.com . For example, making the main entry "blow (one) away" also available under<p><pre><code> blow him away blow her away blow them away </code></pre> etc.<p>It's an unfortunate tax I have to pay to search engines. Luckily it'll pay off additionally when I switch from Google Custom Search to a real custom search solution, and it'll be useful for a few upcoming special projects.

So my customer has a critical production database that was hit by excessive locking issue on a table that slowed everything to a halt. It looks like an abuse of existing feature, so I worked on collecting enough information to help the developers find the broken feature and abusing users.<p>This also seems to be impacting parts of the app that shouldn't be touching that table, and I'm trying to figure out why that is happening.<p>Life is exciting at operations :)

Trying to figure out some core animation tricks in order to be able to create fully customizable buttons/shapes on iPhone/iPad without the need to use PNGs.

I'm the biz cofounder at Timetric, so I've spent quite a bit of time on local and transatlantic phonecalls and taking meetings.<p>We're a <i>really</i> technical company, though; the three of us who founded it met as postdoc researchers doing materials simulation. That means we all can code, though my cofounders are way stronger than I am, but today I've got the chance to do some programming. Internal editorial-awareness tools, mostly.

Today I'm working on fleshing out some ideas for some business models for my startup, Syphir. Here's a pic of the desk in my bedroom, aka my development environment: <a href="http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/9176/developmentenvironment.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/9176/developmentenvironme...</a>. A lot of screen real estate, but today most of my work will be done with a pen and a pad :)

Working on a new iteration of Forrst's Rangers algorithm.

Porting all the JavaScript in our main web application (written years ago) over to jQuery so we can use some nifty plugins. Been working on it all week.

Spent the day chipping away at log analysis, but using it as an excuse to get my hands dirty with freebase and mongodb. Now it's evening. I'm sitting alone in the office, becoming more alert as the temperature drops, thinking about the open data movement. Drafting something that might become a blog-post or an article, but mainly just as a framework to get my head around it all, and figure out where I fit in.

I'm building an immutable filesystem of sorts on top of a distributed key-value store, and am about to benchmark Riak to see how it might fare (as the underlying key-value store). I'm also looking to do some visualization for execution tracing of a product using Simile Timeline, but I'm wrestling with incomplete documentation (the default DateTime resolution of 1 millisecond is not sufficient).

Producing a predictive model for student retention: aiming to assign a score to a student on whether or not a newly admitted student will complete their first semester through final semester (graduate).<p>Using SAS Enterprise Miner's various tools to compare a few different methods for producing the model.<p>Also fighting off some reporter who is desperate for open records data but unable to pay the $45 fee required for data access.

When did HN become twitter? Using Clojure to sanify and convert doctor's notes from a giant Oracle instance on a EMR to a simple CouchDB instance.

Finishing up my first iPhone app, which I've made with Appcelerator Titanium so I can code in Javascript instead of Objective-C. Exciting! :-)

Got bored with real work so I'm working on a thing that prints Python tracebacks: 1) in colour 2) in colums, function | line num | file name 3) stripping file name directories 4) Only printing code line on the top N frames (because the rest is just noise).<p>There may be something like this already, but it's a good excuse to learn more about Python tracebacks.

I've just finished these 2 blogposts <a href="http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/07/new-version-is-coming-up.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/07/new-version-is-coming-up.ht...</a><p><a href="http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/07/facebook-style-business-software-should.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/07/facebook-style-business-sof...</a>

Trying to convert some gnarly test fixtures into a Machinist file in JRuby on Rails. After that, 10% time, but probably still on test-related topics. If I don't think of anything that needs it more, installing Cucumber and getting it hooked up to our build server, so we can use it for testing.<p>This is all in JRuby, and my editor of choice is emacs.

Validation of a wiring diagram extracted from a cluster of physiologically characterized cells in mammalian visual cortex.

Building a simple DB using json files as storage system.<p>The goal is to provide a schemaless (and serverless) database for simple websites.

Continuing work on my summer research project. I'm building a high-precision 3D scanner for meshing out dissected rat eyes in transgenic opthalmology studies. We've nearly got all the components talking and controlled and I'm also close to finishing the first parts of the de-noising and data analysis programs.

Trying to get Sign Inventory location data (stop signs, traffic lights, etc) from the city of Rockville, MD. So far it's a losing battle. Integrating TIGER data into my GIS the rest of the time (Geodjango is fun).<p>The view from my home office: <a href="http://twitpic.com/23rg8a" rel="nofollow">http://twitpic.com/23rg8a</a>

Today I resisted the urge to walk out of the office and never go back.<p>One day I hope to be able to say 'failed to resist' instead.

1) At a coffee shop revising mockups and finishing new design work for a client's business site. Adobe Fireworks or pure HTML\CSS, I hate Photoshop for web stuff.<p>2) Researching apartments\courses\requirements for Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Decided to go back to school for a CS degree, previously studied cog psych)

this is kinda cool, it's like a scrum for hackernews<p>- co-founder dating in mountain view<p>- sf city parking pass<p>- "identity and the browser" blog post<p>- develop business idea docs

Negotiating the purchase of phone numbers for <a href="http://www.hellofax.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.hellofax.com</a>.<p>Telecom companies are great at hiding their cost structure. With just one company, I had a preliminary call, plus a conference call and I'm still waiting for their price sheet.

Writing software that generates music.

As far as my work is concerned, I'm doing quasi-issue-tracking that's tightly integrated with our IT platform. In Delphi, I shall add.<p>My side project is still in the conceptual phase, so I'll tell ypu this: I hope to add my entire town to OpenStreetMap by this summer. I've just started.

I'm working on methods for automatically identifying tokens that act as noise in a non-statistical text-classification system. I suspect the noise filter will end up looking a bit like a Bayesian classifier.<p>No screenshots today, but it's easy enough to find screenshots of Emacs+Slime.

I'm working on promoting/marketing my cheatsheet site - <a href="http://devcheatsheet.com/" rel="nofollow">http://devcheatsheet.com/</a><p>I'm also just starting development on a new site - a directory of tech events and conferences. Hope to have a very basic alpha version by next week.

Finishing touches (I hope!) to an automated aggregation &#38; report system written in Perl which produces multiple excel files (group level) &#38; PDF reports (sub-group level) using clients customer insight data which are sent to relevant stakeholders each week.

Today is my last day at work in Connecticut -- in two weeks I'll be moving to San Francisco and seeking a new position. (Anybody looking for a solid, well-rounded front-end guy who wants to dive into more stuff? I'm huge on detail and a quick learner.)

Http://Like.fm, a social music site I've been working on since being on hiatus from college.

Working on a MUD engine written in PHP, an open sourced pet project of mine for a while now.

Working on improvements for <a href="http://dddone.com" rel="nofollow">http://dddone.com</a>

Writing btree_balance_split. If I manage to get that finished today, I'll move on to btree_balance_merge. I hope to have btree_balance finished by the end of the weekend, at which point I'll write btree_mutate and finally have a key-value store.

Finalizing a budget, Creating job postings, Ordering company signage, Helping plan a company trip, Fixing exceptions in a Ruby/Rails application, Mapping out an asynchronous cache proxy solution that speaks JMS, Riding on Amtrak for 3 hours

Building .NET client and server components to transfer disk images over HTTP as fast as the I/O system can handle.<p>This gives me an idea: when will Mattel give us "Asynchrony is hard" Barbie?<p>My development environment is Visual Studio 2010 with R# and the zenburn theme.

-- making coming soon pages for 3 iphone apps and 3 physical products in development (see my profile)<p>-- working on iphone app to manage/coordinate your medical care: <a href="http://twitpic.com/23sew2" rel="nofollow">http://twitpic.com/23sew2</a>

Building a live auction application for an auction house, in Tornado/memcache/jQuery.

Optimizing the map tile rendering stack for our mapping platform (<a href="http://www.cellmaps.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.cellmaps.com</a>). Finding the right streets to render in the whole world. Needs to be faster.

At work, setting up CouchDB to store annotated genomic data. Currently replacing a few CouchDB temporary view functions with Lucene search functions.<p>At home, using Django to write a social photo guide-sharing web app for tinkerers.

Just fixed a semi-critical bug that allowed an invalid email address to be entered in and "try" to send (without any try/catch) thus crashing the application. The application has been live for several years. Doh!

Working on PyQt development for my employer, and when I get home, a bit of Django for a webapp I'm building with a friend.<p>Edit: my dev environment <a href="http://imgur.com/IEPWO.png" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/IEPWO.png</a>

I've been working on improving keytweet.com's algorithm. I develop our python code in idle on windows. The goal is increase the number of relevant results that are related to the popular topics in your feed.

I'm working on implementing theme-support for a new travel journal app.<p>I'll also attempt to integrate FusionCharts in <a href="http://www.cashbasehq.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.cashbasehq.com</a>, a personal finances app.

I've been hanging out with my friend who now lives in NYC (I'm in Denver).<p>Relationships FTW.

Looks like my morning is going to be figuring out the status of a few clients we have, afternoon is going to be hacking on one or more of them. Murphy willing I can work on GSOC this evening in peace.

I'm three weeks into an internship on the Google Maps tile-rendering team.

A business proposal, a report on fisheries in France, a marketing plan, part of a grant proposal, some reviews for Amazon, a few blogs - and I'm going crazy ready to shoot a partridge in a pear tree.

Mostly front-end dev:<p>Putting the finishing touches on a client's online store. Starting a larger WordPress project. Finishing up a personal design project.<p>I do most of my work in E Text Editor (Textmate clone for Windows).

A web app for setting up group buys for Steam games (ties into Valve’s OpenID implementation).<p>But has to take a detour to pick up a free book on cognition my psychology professor had. What a nice lady.

Being a business guy by day and teaching myself PHP by night using this tutorial: <a href="http://devzone.zend.com/article/627" rel="nofollow">http://devzone.zend.com/article/627</a>

Configuring more cell phones for an open and cheap GPS bus-tracking project. And messing with the UI too -- <a href="http://dutrack.com" rel="nofollow">http://dutrack.com</a> .

I'm readying up a Lisp to PHP compiler for release of the next version. Ideally it'll be done soon today while I add finishing touches to the website and do some final testing.

Finishing my dating app. Planning to launch for testing early next week. I know dating is a saturated market, but I'm trying to approach it on a different angle. Wish me luck!

Working on a custom AMI I put together for Amazon's EC2 that is designed specifically to power a rails framework I built. Having some fun with their EBS volumes, very useful.

Making user controls work in a MOSS 2007 Document library. So now front end people can just edit the control without re-building parts and re-deploying. It's actually fun :)

Automating AMI creation across all four Amazon regions so it can be part of continuous integration. Goal is to integrate continuous deployment with EC2 auto scaling groups.

Finishing first week (of eight) doing some fairly boring contract C# work (aggregating logs over low bandwidth to a webservice) to earn some money between university terms.

On vacation, during which time I usually refactor my timetables/strategies for the upcoming year (which I usually have to re-do after summer ends and I get serious again).

Learning how to make a driver to OpenSolaris. Yeah, OpenSolaris.<p>Since I've never done anything close to that (I'm mostly a Rails guy), it's being kind of cool. College stuff :)

Creating config files for a universal report loader. Then hopefully deprecating the over 100 scripts which exist to do the same thing as the universal loader.

Finishing up a milestone build of an iPhone game for a client, and if I have any time in the day after that I'm going to keep digging into CouchDB/Couchrest.

Specializer which propagates argument types through a dynamically typed function and gives me back a statically typed one. Polyvariant type inference ftw.

Pistol Slut, my Javascript 2D platformer: pistolslut.com

I'm creating a log parser for yellowpages.ca with Redis.

Continuing to improve the technology that is powering my newest business. Almost daily it seems to get better, make more money and provide new ideas.

Writing ADA code; It's about as exciting as it sounds.

Two things:<p>a) A module to load and execute arbitrary ELF files, to be used for post-exploitation in penetration tests.<p>b) A PoC method to detect SSL stripping attacks, client-side.

Just finished and launched the website for my freelance business, and did some IE testing for a portfolio site I built for a graphic designer.

A performance tool to pull raw data out of a process without slowing it down very much. Today, that means reading through the gdb sources.

Updating our abstraction for a particular 3rd party camera, since we found ANOTHER edge case not mentioned in the documentation &#62;.&#60;

Building a digital signature tool with SVG and Batik to replace a paid tool (Pronto from AlphaTrust) that costs about $1 per signature.

Backing up my entire hard disk so I can shift to Ubuntu from Windows, all necessary because virtualenv doesn't play nice with Windows.

my finances, however I wish I hadnt as its depressed me considerably. So im going to go work on a few pints at my local after work.

The most mind numbing bugs that probably don't matter. At night and in the early mornings I work on personal projects that matter.

Geo-search backend for a mobile social network on App Engine. It's a project for someone else's startup and has been a lot of fun.

Polishing my web app <a href="http://prettygraph.com" rel="nofollow">http://prettygraph.com</a> to Ask HN for a review on Monday.

Tweaked my desktop theme (emerald aquatweak) Continued work on a rails/sqlite app port to Sinatra/datamapper (jruby app engine)

Working on creating a web front end for a very old C++ app (no .net support) using java/jsp because that's what I know.

I'm digging into jQuery and jQuery-UI to make the look-and-feel of my current project easier to build and maintain.

- solving Facebook algorithm/career puzzles - waiting for my wife to get out of surgery - enjoying the warm weather

Importing all of the actors/roles from IMDb into mongoDB for a little proof of concept. 12m documents and counting!

A CSV parser in Javascript with support for embedded commas/quotes/newlines that can yield rows as they are parsed.

Getting security/QA audited (&#38; drug tested).<p>Yes, on a Friday. Apparently men with clipboards have no idea what POETS day means!

Migrating from my old mac book pro to my new mac book pro! Maybe some work if there's time after lunch. :)

I migrated <a href="http://wasitup.com" rel="nofollow">http://wasitup.com</a> from Tokyo Tyrant to Redis.

Sniffing out a buffer overflow issue on an AT32UC3B. Very new to the lower level c, so it's a process.

Just lost job today, possibly due to HN. Pondering whether to start job search or startup my business.

Trying to finish up some client work, so I can work on my mechanical turk api and watch more vimcasts.

Big deployment to Production last night that deleted 100K+ rows. Trying to figure out what caused it.

Today I am working on my presentation for the MobileBeat conference. 4 minutes to pitch. No sweat.

Got 7 clients competing for my time, right now. If you're considering making the switch, do it.

Writing some systems integration stuff to allow US ecommerce companies to sell to Latin America.

Working on an iPad app for Barilla for a couple of hours and the rest of the day on FancyDocs.

I'm building a machine learning system in .NET to attempt to predict the outcome of NBA games.

Reading python and django docs while considering a possible port of a Rails app to Django.

Today's goal is to squash some bugs from a popular utility iPhone app I recently released.

I've been reading the entire archive of sequences on LessWrong.<p>I'm paid by the hour and it's been slow.

Writing my first programming language... And VM, and lexer, and parser, and compiler!<p>Good clean fun!

Right now, procrastination. Later, getting my las exposition as an undergrad ready.

a 500K government RFP...ugh..

Writing an extension to do remote authentication between Zendesk and Joomla.

Putting some enhancements on a dieting application for my employer. C#/MVC

Customizing Fogbugz. Surfing Hacker News. Setting up my new Android Phone.

trying to fix few issues and add some features to my web app (<a href="http://onlineqrlab.com" rel="nofollow">http://onlineqrlab.com</a>); also looking for a PHP script to decode Qrcodes, any idea?

Developing a statistics system for the football premier league in the UK.

Using Ruby to create a better way to specify CSV exports from our system.

I am working on an API for moviesnowapp.com. Figuring out the structure.

Two games, 3 apps, and finding a new house to rent for me and my DJ

UXEP spec doc for a major mobile provider's next hot phone.

Fixing one last firmware bug so a major customer can ship!

Working on AduanaCol.com, uploading data to DB

building an oracle query that pivots data based on a selection of columns (user selected) in 10g (no pivot function)

Trying to make your search results not suck.

A new form of database, new query language.

Tornado, MongoDB and using Emacs to do it.

working on the curation of datas on <a href="http://www.gmbhnews.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.gmbhnews.com</a>

Icefaces front end work. Java baby!

Getting JOSSO to work with Hudson.

Thinking of something to start...

Getting over a week-long illness

Packing for a backpacking trip.

implementing HTML5 offline web storage for an inventory management system. C# MVC

au contraire, it would appear most of you are wasting time reading HN like me :)

GE Smallworld GIS Magik code.

Writing a device driver

chemistry laboratory write ups.

bugfixes.

android games and Libraries..<p><a href="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4076/4776883837_ff1ed211e1_b.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4076/4776883837_ff1ed211e1_b....</a><p>blog <a href="http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com" rel="nofollow">http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com</a><p>I start dev a 3d game next week using a game engine in C++

Finished up a web app/program (PHP and Python cron jobs) that will notify you if a course that you want at Virginia Tech opens up.<p><a href="http://hokienotify.me/" rel="nofollow">http://hokienotify.me/</a>