Update of 2006 State of the Projects.
Free-time project status:
- Password Exporter – Finished version 1.1 this week and is currently awaiting localization to the 20 languages it’s now in. Should be released sometime the first week of January. More details on that version will be in an upcoming post. Password Exporter has now been download over 203,000 times and has about 70,000 active users every day.
- FavLoc – Haven’t had time to work on it. Will try to find time to update compatibility for Firefox 3 sometime soon, but doubt I’ll add any new features. 28,000 downloads and 6,000 active users.
- LSU Campus Map – I haven’t updated anything since I first made it a few years ago, but it’s still very popular with people just searching for an LSU campus map. It had especially high traffic following the recent shooting on campus.
- All other projects including arraise, Startup Authenticator, Degree Analyzer, elurt, and all other ideas in my head that I detail but never start – I haven’t had time to work on and are pretty much dead.
Work project status:
- addons.mozilla.org – Remora was launched in March and the AMO team is currently working on version 3.2 to be launched in mid-January. I’ve been working on a statistics dashboard for add-on developers, and after 3.2 will be continuing to work mainly on AMO stuff, probably including a Developer Control Panel revamp with lots of new features.
- Operation Firefox – Contest was a big success and winners were announced earlier this month. Site will probably stay the way it is.
- Extend Firefox – Contest ends tonight. Future plans to be announced later.
- Rock Your Firefox – 0.6 released. Work on other milestones is not currently scheduled, and the app is pretty much in maintenance mode right now.
- Personas – Site hasn’t officially launched yet, but has been finished for a few weeks.
- Misc. other projects popping up and going away just as quickly.
The last few days I’ve been cleaning up a lot of site stuff, as I was quite shocked to find I had over 50 subdomains on this site, many of which are no longer used. I think I’ll be removing the ribbon from my pages soon, as I don’t think it’s helping anything.
I’m taking a class between the fall and spring semesters in order to fit in 3 more hours to graduate next December. There are only a few courses offered during wintersession, but fortunately two of them fulfill the generation education humanities course I needed. My choice was obvious and I’m now spending 3.5 hours a day Monday through Saturday studying zombies.
English 2025 is a fiction course that is taught on a variety of subjects, one of which is Zombies in Fiction. I went in not knowing much about them and after the first class I already felt that I knew way more than a normal person should know about the undead. I’ve never liked horror movies, but these haven’t been bad at all. Zombies didn’t originally attack people or seek flesh anyway.
In the first 6 classes, we’ve managed to read and view a whole lot of Zombie fiction: White Zombie, I Walked With a Zombie, “Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields”, “Salt Is Not For Slaves”, The Plague of the Zombies, “The House in the Magnolias”, “Song of the Slaves”, “While Zombies Walked”, Night of the Living Dead (1968 original and 1990 remake), Return of the Living Dead, I Am Legend (novel and movie), 28 Days Later, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”, and Fido.
In the remaining 4 classes after Christmas break, there will be 4 more movies, 2 novels, and a couple more short stories. Wooo.
I was killing time in a hallway until my next class started when I decided to visit the College of Business office to see an advisor about something. I ended up leaving checked out for graduation with 33 hours left. My graduation date is set for December 2008.
The courses I have left to take are:
- FIN 3715 – Business Finance
- MKT 3401 – Principles of Marketing
- MGT 3830 – Strategically Managing Organizations
- ISDS 3200 – Advanced Business Programming
- ISDS 4120 – Business Data Communications
- ISDS 4125 – Analysis and Design of Management Information Systems
- 3 hours Gen. Ed Humanities
- 6 hours ISDS electives
- 6 hours business electives
Last semester I took a course in which there was a speaker from the corporate IT world every class (once a week) who talked about the various IT processes at his/her company. One night after (or possibly during?) a particularly uninteresting speaker, I jokingly asked shaver if he wanted to come speak. Fast forward 6 months to Thursday, when shaver arrived in New Orleans from London, drove here to Baton Rouge, and had a rental car tire blowout that almost caused him to miss his first talk. Maybe he’ll post pictures.
The first talk was to a technology club – the LSU chapter of Association of Information Technology Professionals. I was really surprised at some of the questions that were asked – I had no idea that people around here would care about Mozilla’s thoughts on mobile, Silverlight, or have heard of the “10 days” incident.
Immediately following that was the main talk to the Management of Information Resources class, a business elective of somewhere between 150-200 people. Shaver started off asking how many people use Firefox. I was very surprised when what looked to be about half the room raised their hands, and I’m sure after his talk, the rest of the people went home to try it out.
The next day I saw some of the Firefox buttons we gave out on a few backpacks. The talks were awesome, so big thanks to shaver for taking the time to venture down here before he’s grounded for a bit.
In January, a broadcast email was sent out with a Course Management System survey regarding the use of Semester Book and Blackboard at LSU. This is an issue I feel strongly about, as I am constantly frustrated by both Semester Book and Blackboard. I completed the survey, and in the comments section I basically wrote an essay.
Early this week I was invited to be on the Learning Management System Sub-committee, a part of the Flagship Information Technology Strategy (FITS) that will decide which single CMS to use as part of FITS Recommendation 7.01.
We had a committee meeting today and I am quite satisfied with the requirements that have been set out for the new CMS. I was also pretty pleased to see that several of the systems being considered for evaluation are open source. Unfortunately, this won’t be a quick thing – we are to make our final recommendation by August 2007 and then it will take a year for it to be implemented for August 2008.
I’m looking forward to working on this project – it should be interesting to see how it all works out, especially in regard to the open source vs. proprietary debate, some of which took place this morning.