Saturday, July 26, 2008

Another Semester to Bed

Games class is over which is why I haven't reviewed any games in the past few weeks. This does not, however, mean that I haven't been busy.

The end of a semester means that the focus of this blog will be changing again. I had fun blogging about games. I never seem to have problems criticizing anything, as my husband will be the first to tell you, so reviewing games came pretty easily.

For the next semester, I am expecting to be blogging more about test automation, semantic web and other topics that cross my path during my year of research.

Although my blog changes focus from semester to semester, I will say that I absolutely love using Zemanta. Ok, just let me go viral for a minute or two. Zemanta is a firefox plugin that pulls up pictures and links that can be added to a blog post with a click. I've been in touch from time to time with the guys who develop this app, and they really are a class act. I emailed them during my independent study in the Spring to ask about how Zemanta uses the Semantic Web. Their CTO sent me such a great letter about their technology and was encouraging to me about my studies. This Summer when I had to blog on Ning, I noticed that Zemanta wasn't available so I emailed and asked if there were plans. They had support for Ning available a few weeks later, and they emailed to tell let me know. Very cool.

I've gotten notes from a few people working on apps that I've discovered over the past few months. I wrote about Zemanta, above. There's also the emails I got from Pandora's team when I was searching for the band !!!...really, it's called !!! so you can see how this could cause problems. They were very interested when I told them I wrote a paper about their app. Lastly, one of the developers from Zon posted a comment to my somewhat lackluster review of his game. It just goes to show how badly developers want their applications to be useful for their intended audience, and how some of them are really starting to hit the mark.

Over the past year, I've worked on some very complicated projects. In the Fall, I finished up my distributed querying application and right now, I'm finishing up the epic saga that has been my artificial intelligence project. At this point, I can honestly say how deeply one can feel invested in a development project. Even though the projects that I do are just for a grade, I get so emotionally attached to them. I can only imagine the attachment felt by those who are involved in the apps that I've written about, and these apps are someone's livelihood. It's very inspiring to me to see people taking such risks and such care with what they do.

Cheers to ya!