I realize that I haven’t posted much recently, and I’m sorry. It’s not from not being busy - in fact, just the opposite. I just haven’t felt anything was important enough to relive it in a blog post again. Well, except for this little nugget, which I’ll share in a minute. Classes finish this week, with a final on Friday and a paper next Wednesday. Then I get a month of relaxing and “real life” before I start the summer onslaught (but it shouldn’t be too bad.)

Between work and school sucking up my time, I decided I’m a glutton for punishment and entered the 2nd Annual Siebel Center Computing Habitat Competition. (My regular 1.879 readers should be cringing at the second annual part. I feel your pain.) I’ve wanted to do open source, “public good” development for a while now - but I didn’t submit last year, and wasn’t selected for the 2005 Google Summer of Code program. But, this spring, I went for it — and I won first prize! There will be more about my project later, but basically it’s an RSS/XML middleware filtering and regrouping tool. It’s goal is to make announcement notifications for events and news on campus work better — get more announcements in front of more people, and deliver it in the format they choose, and make it easy to add it to your calendar. I named my project Announcr, and it’s a LAMP application - Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl. I’ve burned up all my available time to tinker with it for the semester, but later this month I hope to add more RSS/RDF/ATOM support and allow email outputs from it and I’ll call that a 1.0 release.

As for the prize money, I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to spend that. Part of it will be earmarked for TiVo Series 3 and a Playstation 3 (mmmmmm HD DVD), but that should leave some scratch left over. Maybe a new flat-panel monitor, or a trip to Vegas.

[ Edit 5/8/06: I made the CS news. ]