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A friend from work, Sean, is consulting on integrating a small text search module into the code. He joined Endeca a month before I did, and is also fresh out of college.

We checked out Ignite Boston last Tuesday. The first talk was about Processing, which we used in our Infomercial. Traer physics and animation libraries are especially awesome.

My favorite was the wiki-like programming contest. It is a competition where the entries are open source. It is useful to iteratively submit entires to receive feedback on one’s algorithm, but then other teams can make use of your insights. Sounds fun, not least of all because everyone is working together in the big picture, while still vying for short-term breakthroughs.

Click to play movie

Our very first commercial! Sooo exciting I can’t even wait to start gushing till it finishes uploading. Big ups to Luke Sullivan, Becca Nesson, Wayne Marshall and of course the lovely Lucy Mendel! Nice work team!

Let us know if you would like to be involved in ThoughtAndMemory.org’s real world event calendar. Although it is not yet our primary focus, outreach will become increasingly important as our service expands.
GetInvolved@ThoughtAndMemory.org

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Sam and Ale are going back to school, and Luke is busy with other work. Marcos, not a committed member, but still a useful consultant, is leaving for RISD in a few days. HuginMunin has a commitment to demo our application at the Somerville food and arts festival October 10th. The prototype needs another iteration of work fast, so Clay and I are looking for more volunteers. What about you? In case that falls through we are holding a ‘make-a-cool-frontend’ competition at the end of September. The winner gets an Ipod.

We have been invited to host a table at this event! More details to come…

As history accumulates, science finds rational perspectives with which to interpret the natural world. Today we find less and less need for perspectives shared through stories of gods and the heroes of old. But such stories persist and are often rewritten. Sometimes need of a story reemerges. Such a story’s telling can unexpectedly be rewoven with strands of contemporary life. If you will bear with me, there is a story of Odin’s ravens which is now worth retelling.

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Today was the last dev team meeting. We presented to ourselves our accomplishments. Ale showed off the web app, Sam the cellphone proof of concept, Peddie the firefox extension he consulted on, Clay the front end design proposals and I the graph modules.

I wish I could have showed off how much we all learned, both technically about web dev, as well as in understanding what we are building. We are making a new kind of collaborative software, like a wiki, but with tools for helping the group decide the trustworthiness of each contribution. Controversial information is distilled into quantifiable numbers, efficient for SMS and powerful for third party applications. We’ve done good.

We are nearing the end of summer and are still just wrapping our heads around the technology. We have in the process of getting forms working for entering nodes, behaviors and arguments. Ale is integrating django’s user models and Sam is wrapping up a cellphone proof-of-concept. I have been playing with integrating different systems for displaying the corporate supply chain (processing, prefuse, graph viz), as well as mucking with website layout. Marcos met with us to answer some technical questions.