

Ask HN: Any Special Projects Over the Holidays? - brentr

I just finished all of my work for this semester. Now I am free to do whatever I want until about the middle of January. My plan is to learn more about Objective-C. Since a lot of us are college students, I was wondering: What projects are you working on over the break?
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randomwalker
I'm a grad student. I'm working on a way to turn papers written in latex into
a form that's readable online, because having to print everything is so 1990s.
I start from the output of latex2html and go from there. For instance, if you
hover over a citation, I pop up a bubble showing you links to author
homepages, the abstract of the cited paper, download links, etc., even though
the latex bibliography didn't specify any of those.

Edit: I do this by doing a full-text search on the citeseer database, which is
a couple gigs uncompressed. Right now I'm grappling with the xapian library:
<http://www.rkblog.rk.edu.pl/w/p/xapian-python/> If someone knows an
easier/better way to do this, I'd love to hear. Thanks.

~~~
kingnothing
Why not just convert it to a PDF?

<http://www.msi.umn.edu/software/tex/help/pdf.html>

~~~
acj
Being able to hover the mouse over a citation and get a hyperlink to the
referenced paper, abstract, and homepage would be a huge time saver when doing
research. PDF can only give the title of the paper and (if you're lucky) where
to find it.

------
DarkShikari
I have a 5000-line, awfully written and horribly slow (but working!) patch
from an offshore team that implements the rather complicated MBAFF features of
H.264 in the open source x264 encoder.

I'm going to take it and make it committable.

Yes, I'm risking my sanity.

------
bemmu
I'm a full-time small project maniac. I've been working by myself for over a
year now, my model being to work on a lot of small things for a few days,
trying if anything catches on. Worked great so far. I've done about 40
different things, some released and abandoned, some abandoned due to lack of
interest, but a few I've released and they've succeeded well enough to cover
the time spent on all the others. Christmas will be the only time I'm NOT
working on some small project, but I'm sure I can't avoid thinking about them.

~~~
navanit
I'd like to learn more about how you're making this work. I'd like to take the
same approach, but am worried about sustainability. I'd appreciate it if you
could get in touch. My profile has my email.

------
SwellJoe
I'm not a college student, but I have been taking advantage of a little bit of
a slowdown during the holidays (sales always drop off a bit for a couple of
weeks).

I'm working on a chiptune version of Abbey Road, in order to teach myself a
few new trackers that I've never used before (the last trackers I used heavily
were OctaMED and ProTracker on the Amiga). I'm mainly tinkering with Renoise,
which is an awesome multi-platform modern tracker with VST/LADSPA support. But
I'm also playing with a cool sounding SID emulating tracker called
Goattracker, and NitroTracker for the Nintendo DS. I probably won't finish all
of Abbey Road in two weeks or spare time, since it's quite elaborate, and I'm
only about half of the way through one song two days in, but I'm sure I can
make three or four nice tracks. And I'll probably get faster as I get more
comfortable with the tools.

~~~
arnorhs
I can whole heartedly recommend renoise... very solidly built and it has great
sound quality... can also work inside other hosts.. cubase etc..

------
brandnewlow
Making a local politician tracker for Chicago.

Basically a Chicago clone of this:

<http://prototype.nytimes.com/represent/>

~~~
brandnewlow
Also, we're hoping to open source it and release as a Django project for
others to hack on. Should be cool.

Type in your address.

We figure out the coordinates.

We place those coordinates in all their relevant political "zones"
(neighborhood, district, ward etc.) and give you maps of what they look like,
just like the Times.

We show you everyone representing you in those zones with links to the
homepage, wikipedia page, twitter results, flickr results, youtube results etc

We show you a newsfeed of their appearances in mainstream press.

Should be cool.

~~~
quickpost
Very cool idea. Do you have a URL for it yet? I'd like to bookmark it to check
back in the future... :)

~~~
brandnewlow
Follow me on twitter <http://twitter.com/bflora> I'll announce on there.

Looks like we're going to build it at the eventual live URL so I'd rather not
give that out just yet. My buddy's doing all the heavy lifting on this one.
I'm just tracking down shape files and representative listings and so forth.

~~~
nootopian
You might be interested in a UK site <http://www.theyworkforyou.com/>

~~~
brandnewlow
I'm a big fan of what they've done. Those MySociety People are really making
some neat stuff.

------
wastedbrains
My goal over the holidays is to become much better with my editor (emacs). I
am also trying to contribute a bit to open source and release some Merb and
DataMapper code onto github.

------
dangrover
I've got updated versions for all of my products (<http://www.wonderwarp.com>)
in the works.

I've got an incremental update to ShoveBox in testing now, but I'm spending
most of my resources finalizing the iPhone version of the app and getting it
to sync properly with the desktop app. That will probably be 1.8 or 2.0.

I'm not sure if I should charge for the iPhone app or not though. I'm worried
Windows people will accidentally download it and get pissed. Hmm. But none of
my direct competitors (except for maybe Evernote) have this feature, so I'll
be psyched to have it out.

~~~
jpcx01
Cool! I love shovebox. iPhone sync would be rad

~~~
dangrover
Thanks!

If you're interested in beta testing, you can join here:
<http://www.wonderwarp.com/shovebox/beta>

~~~
ashleyw
Cool, just found ShoveBox and it looks awesome! Can't afford to buy a licence
right now, so I may as well help you test it! :)

------
HeyLaughingBoy
1) I promised someone I'd build him a remote-controlled swivel for a pole
mounted movie camera and I have yet to finish it, that's project #1. Gonna be
spending a couple hours in the machine shop! 2) Hopefully finish up the
software for my wireless temperature monitor, build a page for it and start
getting some sales :-)

------
nailer
Continung work on 'perf' my top replacement:

* Load average based on the amount of CPU cores in the machine, so that 100% is busy anywhere you run it.

* Figures for memory unused by apps, more apparent usage of page cache

* Figures for IO alas IOtop

* IO nicing

* Not doing silly thing like opening and closing a file handle every loop.

* Zebra striping, other niceties.

Also making a working, simple, stable dock for Linux - a GNOME panel applet to
replace the window list.

------
youngnh
A compiler that takes Sed programs and produces Parrot interpreter code. It
was a project in a college Compilers class that I didn't take seriously
enough, so I'm revisiting it to see if I've actually grown better at this
programming thing since I've graduated.

------
Darmani
I'm working on a way to play the card game Mao online, except that, as Mao is
a game that lets you make your own rules, in order to be capable of playing a
substantial subset, it'll have to be capable of playing any card game.

(Yes, I've thought about turning this into a startup.)

And that reminds me, I really should be working on that right now, if I'm
going to have time to do my college apps...

------
GavinB
Writing my novel!

Okay, so I guess I'm not a real hacker.

~~~
silencio
Oh please :)

I wrote a novel during nanowrimo and ignored it since then, I may use my free
time to edit and maybe publish copies for friends/family.

but mostly, I'm going to knit, work on some iPhone and Mac app ideas, and
generally just have fun.

------
abstractbill
Hoping to get a bit further with the robotic xylophone I'm building:
<http://prehacked.com/tag/xylophone>

------
axod
Finish XMPP/Jabber support in Mibbit.

It's a ridiculously overcomplicated horrible format designed by committee :(
Seems like a good job to pick though...

~~~
stanley
I find your site very useful. If you'd like some SEO advice shoot me an IM
sometime (AIM: StanleyShilov).

~~~
axod
Your comment scores 98% on my spam detector.

~~~
stanley
Haha, I can see why you would say that. What I was trying to convey was that
from an SEO standpoint, your site fails miserably. You need to change your
title tags to be more keyword specific, and move your wiki to a subdirectory
instead of a subdomain (same goes for the blog).

~~~
axod
Fails miserably??

#1 on google for 'mibbit' (obviously)

#2 on google for 'web irc', 'online irc client', 'web irc client', 'web based
irc', 'irc web', 'irc web client', 'web based irc client', etc etc

#9 on google for 'irc client', (Only mirc and xchat beat it).

This is all without doing any SEO. Sure there are ways to improve it, but it's
more important to improve it for users, than for search engines.

Glad you like it though :)

~~~
stanley
SEO is not just about ranking for a handful of keywords, it's about ranking
for the million other searches that aren't as popular.

Well, either way you're obviously against taking any advice so I won't waste
any of my time trying to help you. Good luck with your service.

~~~
axod
Sure, and I appreciate the advice, but it's not rocket science.

I already have <http://www.mibbit.com/networks/> (Work in progress) which is a
complete browsable list of networks and channels, with topic info etc etc. As
well as being hugely useful for users, it's obviously useful for ranking on
searches. For example, if someone searches for "freenode", mibbit has some
good results there.

A solid example: Search google for "freenode javascript". Mibbit is result
number 3. I'm happy with that...

I repeat. SEO is not rocket science, it's simple best practices for end users.

------
akkartik
Trying to understand a reimplementation of a famous AI program from the 70s
that I've had lying around for 9 years: <http://github.com/akkartik/am-
utexas/tree/master>

And oh, learning prolog as I go.

------
st3fan
Eat turkey. Drink eggnog. Spend time with the family. Stay away from the
computer and work.

------
tome
I'm going to be improving metapaw-dip:
<http://www.metapaw.co.uk/projects/metapaw-dip/>

At the moment I'm working on automatically generating maps from a small base
dataset, and shortly I'll start working on a Django based wrapper to host this
for many people's use.

------
symptic
My partner and I are going to remake <http://jobzor.com>. We were originally
looking to make a job board and internship recruiter as a Facebook App, but
it's just not our thing and there is enough competition in the market already
for that.

Instead, since we both rely heavily on freelance work, we're positioning it as
a directory of approved designer (with specific specialties), copywriter, and
developer freelancers so clients looking for work or partners can find them
easily.

Given my focus on delivering great designs within my focus-time of 24 hours,
this should be a good help in finding clients, as well as any revenue we
scrape together through the site if we choose to monetize it.

Any HN members interested in being listed?

~~~
symptic
In the next few days I'll also be releasing my personal project,
<http://epictee.com> to connect great t-shirt companies with the media they
deserve. I helped co-found <http://anticlothes.com> and while I was there, a
major problem was getting coverage for the brand and for the owner.

I've noticed this is common for most tee labels, especially as they start out
(no coincidence), and rather than be a salesman trying to move shirts, I'll be
a salesman moving brand equity, which I'm much more comfortable with.

------
pxlpshr
Going to take a nice week long break away from my home in Austin. For the past
4 months I've been cooped up in my place trying to get everything put together
with this mobile app company. It's been many late nights and 7 day work
weeks... time to recharge.

Spiked egg-nog... here I come!

------
jcapote
I'll finishing my sinatra/sparrow web app that ensures a set amount of EC2
instances are up and running at all times by automatically running other
instances among failure. I'd like to launch early next year,
<http://www.ec2mon.com>

------
joshsharp
Thinking of hacking together a twitter archiver, for those who want to keep a
record of their tweets past the limit Twitter itself currently offers. Will
allow export in csv etc., and possibly printing off your tweets as a diary-
style book, if there's enough interest.

~~~
jcapote
Interesting idea; Wasn't aware there was a limit...

~~~
joshsharp
The web interface only allows you to go back 10 pages (* 20 tweets), and the
API only allows 10 * 200. So if you want to keep your tweets, start archiving!

------
chomchom
Although I'm not really on holiday I seem to have taken on the reinvigoration
of the customwars project. It's a java 2d tile war game like chess but with
nice animations. It's over at customwars.com if anyone would liek to help out
over their time off.

------
speek
Flock simulator in either ObjC, some form of lisp/scheme, or Erlang. Haven't
decided yet but Erlang really makes me happy.

I'll probably start up another company January 2. I have a dream about
educating the world's future smart people.

~~~
brentr
Explain your "educating the world's future smart people." I have thought about
writing a free online textbook for some branch of undergrad mathematics.

~~~
speek
I'm planning on starting a "chain" of either charter or cost-free/cost-very-
little schools. These schools would be high schools, but they'd be for
geeks/nerds/people who actually want to learn.

Needless to say, I'm still in the very early stages of this idea.

About your textbook, what branch would you _like_ to write about?

~~~
brentr
I have always been fascinated by the application of both ordinary differential
equations and partial differential equations. The mathematical ideas behind
the methods involved in reaching solutions are some of the most beautiful
ideas in mathematics. I also find the mathematics of game theory and finance
quite beautiful. Any one of these topics are more than enough to fill several
textbooks.

------
bjclark
Working on some super awesome blog software. Just like, uh, everyone else in
the world.

~~~
ashleyw
Me too — I try to rewrite my own blogging platform/CMS every year or so,
wrapping up all the design elements and programming quirks I've learnt over
the past year, into a cool little package — fast, simple, and fun to use. :)

------
akeefer
Writing a Java bytecode emitter for my company's language (currently called
GScript, hopefully open-sourced under a different name some time in the not-
too-distant future). It's currently executed off the parsed AST.

------
bkrausz
Research into web crawlers for a startup idea, some consulting work, and
bartending classes.

Also writing up an article about the soda machine card reader I built, as well
as some other blog posts.

------
truebosko
Nothing spectacular but I'm going to try my first go at using PyGTK as I
finish up a very simple command-line ftp uploader. The api is almost done,
then I'll just wrap the GUI around it. I've only worked on it for a few hours
but have learned a lot about Python in terms of file/directory scanning, ftp,
and threading.

Apart from that, I'm just taking the time to get a simple portfolio/resume
site up. Working full time during the year makes it hard to get time for these
things.

------
iron_ball
Writing a simple Missile Command clone with separate game logic and graphics
modules; after using simple 2D graphics to test the gameplay, I'm writing a 3D
artillery-style graphic representation. The whole thing is mostly an exercise
to learn the Actionscript 3D library Papervision3D better -- there's a ton of
work there in the future as the Flash Player keeps improving its core 3D
transformations.

------
laktek
I created Ruby Advent (<http://advent2008.hackruby.com>), which was inspired
by 24ways(httpL//24ways.org). It was actually turned out to be a great
experience. I got the opportunity to connect with many renowned Ruby Hackers
and learn bunch of awesome stuff myself. Also, I sincerely hope other Rubyists
too enjoyed the series.

------
tialys
I've been playing through the games I haven't had time to, and also learning
how to write apps for my Mac and by extension for the iPhone. I've had a bunch
of ideas for things I thought would be great for the iPhone, so I made a class
next semester with a friend of mine and we're going to start a business. (And
before someone says it, we checked and we own the code ^_^)

------
tjr
I'm no longer in college, but my employer does give a lengthy winter break. I
plan to finish some iPhone applications (hopefully providing some extra
income), work on some music recording, read, and do a bit of volunteer work
for Project GNU.

Basically, what I do on free evening/weekend hours, but I'll get to focus on
it for longer blocks of time. :-)

------
ideamonk
I'm gona finish <http://www.bestdealaz.com> soon, and then begin to expand
portfolio at <http://www.madetokill.com> Also, have a nice web app {secret} me
and my friend have been working on :)

------
mcxx
A Lisp library for the Twitter API. And then, use it for some reasonably small
entertaining side project.

------
jasonlbaptiste
We'll be releasing a new project to hacker news on Tuesday. It's perfectly
timed for the holidays.

------
mdolon
Going to wedding parties! Looks like all of my friends are getting married
nowadays.

Also beginning work on a new project that is essentially an online site editor
like Weebly but for a very niche market. Still figuring out exactly how to do
that though.

------
mapleoin
I'm gonna work on my Jekyll-in-python project I started a few weeks ago:
<http://github.com/mapleoin/pyblee/tree/master> . And while I'm at it, I'll
also be improving my blogging.

------
meqif
I'm working on a lightweight shell. It was originally an assignment for
university, but I thought it was interesting to work on it.

I'm also trying to start a project with my Arduino, though I'm not sure what
I'll create. Maybe a simple robot.

------
sammcd
I have a large project I am working on, and will be spending my entire summer
on. However, over Christmas break I have a very small website which is
basically a product specific blog. Hopefully I will make a little amazon
affiliate money.

------
ruddzw
For my last winter break, I'll be working on completely re-doing a web-based
game I made. I'm thinking I might also work my way through a simple book on
NLP (<http://www.nltk.org/book>).

------
rksprst
Working on finishing up two web applications and an iPhone app that
compliments one of the web apps.

Also some updates to my current iPhone apps (<http://www.awaytalk.com>).

------
leftnode
Working more and more on my PHP framework, it's starting to get some traction
as I will release 0.2 before new years. Check it out,
<http://artisansystem.com>

------
clearlytired
Brand-jacking: <http://twitter.com/clearlytired>

Exit strategy: get rid of crappy service without having to pay for the
'privilege' of doing so.

~~~
iigs
Send me an email (in profile)... I may be able to help.

------
drfloob
Studying graduate-level texts on computer vision

... after re-learning 1st & 2nd year calculus

... after re-learning trigonometry

... after refreshing my memory on algebra & geometry

------
djb
SICP and learning calculus.

------
streblo
I'm making a mod for Half-Life 2 with a friend. At this point we're both
fooling around with the SDK to see what we can do, but I think we have a solid
plan for a pretty good mod.

------
sgrove
Upgrading our webapp to the latest version of the symfony framework, then
spinning off the open source version to attack another vertical. Makes for
interesting and exciting work.

------
dmpayton
I'm not a student, but I do have most of a week off and I'll be working on a
way to help diabetics better manage their disease (my wife is Type I and I'm
pre-pre-Type II).

------
gaius
I would like to really sink my teeth into OCaml or Haskell.

------
physcab
Trying to do this <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406705> ...any ideas
welcome!

------
charlesju
Just graduated from college 2 weeks ago, working full-time on my iPhone gaming
startup now. This last week has been the best in my life, I love startups!

------
rahulgarg
Python to C compiler.

~~~
nailer
Awesome. Anywhere I can follow your progress? What do you think the
performance will be like vs psyco?

~~~
rahulgarg
I will post a link to it on HN in sometime.

------
dhimes
Finishing my second app; boosting the marketing to improve conversion rates on
my site (which are abysmal....)

------
PStamatiou
i graduated from undergrad last week so i'm just starting to devote more time
to my startup for the last year or so. <http://skribit.com>

------
sdurkin
Just playing around with iPhone development.

------
epi0Bauqu
Clearing out some of my bug list.

------
theycallmepost
refactoring the 9 year old PHP code i've been recently assigned to maintain at
work

------
qqq
Gonna read more Feynman and Popper.

