Mini Projects
Sierra Sliders
Kathy Sierra, of the Creating Passionate Users blog, posted about using an equalizer metaphor for product planning and brainstorming. She included some images for her readers to play around with for their own equalizer-planning projects. I took those, apply the Gimp to them, and mixed with Bob Ippolito's uber-cool MochiKit.
Silent Boggle
When my daughter was born, my wife Daniela and I like to play Boggle a lot, but we worried about the noise waking the baby, so I coded up a quick CGI script to create a web page listing the letters with the same frequency as the game. That worked OK, and now we could play without rattling the box, but of course a project never stops where you thought it would. I kept thinking that it would be cool if I could list all the words available, making it useful for learning new vocabulary, or just checking your score. It turns out that Peter Norvig covered solving Boggle as an AI problem in his book AI: A Modern Approach. And he also provides the code from the book, in both Lisp and Python. So, armed with a standard linux word list, munged to remove words illegal or impossible in Boggle (and to handle my funky hack involving the Qu face of the Boggle dice) and the AIMA python library, I was able to get something going. A little slow, and resource intensive, but it works (if that project ever starts getting much traffic, I'll have to stick the wordlist in a separate, long-running process).
Magnetic Poetry
The home of my dynamic HTML magnetic poetry page, with a form interface to initialize your poems and set of magnetic words. Poems are bookmarkable, with unique urls. Also features our Scrabble poems.