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For the competition kick-off I fixed up some documentation on the wiki and put together a presentation to ramp up the contestants…er, contestant. Gus donated Toscanini ice cream for the cause. Oh, but that is not even the best part! Best of all, we picked up a solid frontend contributor. A friend of Clay’s, Eggar, is volunteering his professional web skills to give our prototype a real layout and user interface. Since he was the only person to actually fulfill the competition’s aims, we selected him as our winner. Having the backend and frontend covered by two great workers is a load off my shoulders. The prototype took longer than my original estimate of a couple months, but now we are really rocking.

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Announcing ThoughtAndMemory.org the comic book! You can now view the entire comic book online. Follow the adventures of Hugin and Munin as their story unfolds.

Are you a comic book artist? Email us to help with our next issue.

Check out the dev flock’s open source trac dev nest.. Use the dev nest to find out more about the design and implementation of our system, track our progress against milestones, report bugs and request features in our soon-to-be released prototype.

I’m getting the hang of installing software: configure, make, make install. Break a few things, google a few things, break different things. Figure out each problem along the way until it is finally put back together. It is not so different than debugging someone else’s code.

Installing trac with the right build of subversion and apache took a full day’s work. Having a repo browser is great, and I like the new wiki layout. Welcome to the trac wiki!

Shouting OUT to web 2.0 programmers!

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Yesterday’s New York Times reported that the Pope has made accepted a gift valued at 150k from a Hungarian start-up called Klimafa.

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An MIT student, taking time of from MIT, received the competition announcement and wrote back enthusiastically. His name is Dan, and he is currently living in Baltimore looking for work. He had been thinking of doing something similar for rating politicians, and is passionate about building the technology. Already he is improving our database models.

I turned in my thesis on Friday and started work on Monday. Clay quit his Student Art Association job to work on HuginMunin full time. We got a dog. We drove all over visiting different pounds. At one of them there was a dog so big that when a little kid walked by he said, “Look, Daddy, a cow!” Many dogs are named after bears, or even just Bear, so when we saw our Bear we were already calling him Little to distinguish him from the others. It was love at first sniff.