Knol is closing down

Google's four year experiment called Knol (unit of knowledge) is being taken out of service on May 1, 2012. This is just one of several projects Google is shutting down. Knol was launched in 2007 as platform which allowed users to write their own articles and receive comments and suggestions from others. Some thought it might be a strong competitor of Wikipedia since it replaced anonymity with authority in the publishing space, but that has certainly not happened.

Google has coordinated with Annotum to allow users to migrate their content out of Knol, but I'm curious how many articles will be lost permanently because of inaction. I wrote my first and only knol about search engines back in Feb 2009. Instead of migrating my article to Annotum, I have saved it to my own website.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from the McCown's

"Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and goodwill towards men." - Luke 2:14

Photo by Stacy Schoen

Android app course wrap-up

As the semester has come to an end, my Android App Development course finished with a showcase last week displaying the 8 Android apps that were developed by 17 computer science and 11 graphic design students. I'm including a brief description of each app below to give you a feel for what was created this semester.

None of the apps have been made available yet on the Android Market, but a few teams have allowed me to share links to the their apps below. Before you can download and install them, you'll need to change your settings so your phone or tablet can install non-Market apps.

Bison Live: This is your one-stop destination for all things Harding. See your grades, look up contact information, and read the latest news. Download

Red Zone: Design offensive and defensive football plays. Save them or email them to your friends. Download

Dream Log: Keep track of your dreams with the aid of recorded video, photos, and tagging.

RallyPoint: Invite your friends to rally to a central location.

Ultimate Wedding Planner: An app to help you plan the ultimate wedding.

Terra Explorer: A game to help you improve your knowledge of geography and country flags.

Acorn Maze: Guide your acorn through a multi-level maze to reach the flag.

Searcy Info: Find out the latest news, weather, and places to dine in Searcy, Arkansas. Download

In order to determine the overall success of the course, I asked the CS and GD students to complete a survey when the course was finished. When the CS student were asked if they were pleased with how their project turned out overall, three quarters of them said they agreed or strongly agreed. Nearly three quarters of the CS students said they would like to continue working on the project even when the course was over. 82% of the CS students enjoyed working with their graphic designer counterparts, and the same number thought their project was made significantly better because of the GD students.

The GD students were somewhat less positive about the experience. 64% of the GD students were pleased with how their design was implemented by the CS students, and about half expressed interest in continuing to work on the project after the semester was over. The GD students expressed even more interest in porting the project to the iPhone which isn't surprising: before this course, most of the GD students had zero experience with Android.

Unfortunately, only a third of the GD students expressed an interest in working with CS students in the future. Communication seemed to be a problem for a few students, and one complained that the CS students just picked what they wanted from her design instead of adopting it completely. The CS students also complained of communication issues and other difficulties, but in general they seemed to come out of the experience with more positive feelings. Perhaps this is because the CS students felt more ownership of their projects and had more control about what went into the apps.

We are planning on running this experiment again in a future offering of the Android course. Hopefully we can devise a way to engender more positive feelings for the GD students.

Windows Live GUI Blooper

This morning I was signing up for a Windows Live account and was asked a typical security question in case my password needed to be reset. Apparently a programmer thought he was "increasing" security by requiring my first pet's name to be at least 5 characters in length. I just don't know what I was thinking at age three when I named my dog a three letter word!



Just in case you were wondering... no, my first pet was not named Tron.

Game Development course in Spring 2012

I'll be offering a Game Development course in the Spring 2012 semester for computer science majors. The prereqs are Data Structures and OOP. This is the first time this course has been offered since fall 2009. Like the fall 2009 course, this one will use the XNA platform, the same platform used by Xbox and the new Windows Phone 7 OS.

I am considering structuring this course like my ongoing Android course. Students would be placed on two-man teams and would deliver a number of software engineering milestones in order to produce noteworthy games which could be released in the Xbox Live Marketplace as XBox Live Indie Games.

I'm also considering having our students compete in Microsoft's Imagine Cup or perhaps the Dream.Build.Play Challenge. These would be exciting programs to participate in, but I'm not sure if they would be something we could tackle in just a single semester.

Android student projects

The fall semester has turned out to be much busier than I anticipated, but I wanted to take a moment to write about the Android course that I'm teaching this semester. Although I've joint-taught an Android course before, I revamped the course to have more group work and focus more on software engineering principles by following the direction of David Janzen's Android course at Cal Poly - San Luis Obispo.

Seventeen upper level CS students are teaming up with 12 upper level Graphic Design majors to work on eight Android applications with the intention of releasing a working beta on the Android Market in December. The projects range from kid apps to useful utilities and everything in between. I'll share more details about the projects in a blog post later this semester.

This is the first time I've been able to coordinate a joint project with our graphic design students. Not only will the joint venture lead to better looking apps, but I believe my students will benefit greatly from having to interact with non-CS majors who use a different vocabulary and see software differently. I'm thankful to Stacy Schoen, a colleague of mine in the Dept of Art and Design, who is helping me in this experiment.

Warrick's status

I've received numerous inquiries about Warrick the past few months, so I wanted to let everyone know where it currently stands. For those of you that don't know about Warrick, it is a program I wrote that can automatically reconstruct a website that is no longer available on the Web by locating missing web pages from various web repositories like the Internet Archive, Google's cache, etc.

Since creating Warrick about six years ago, a lot has changed:

• The Internet Archive radically changed their web interface in the spring.
• Google deprecated their web search API and beefed up their ability to detect automated queries.
• Microsoft's Bing is now Yahoo's search engine, rendering Yahoo's cache worthless.

These changes have required me to make some radical changes to Warrick in the past, but it's still broken in terms of accessing the Internet Archive. That's why there's been a note on the Warrick website for several months warning about Warrick's current state.

Fortunately, a new development called Memento will help shield Warrick from some of these types of difficulties in working with various web repositories. Memento is an addition to the HTTP protocol which enables easier access to old web pages. If you keep up with this blog, you might remember that I implemented an Android browser a year ago that uses Memento to surf the Web. Warrick can use Memento to find archived web pages much easier than the current method which requires custom code for each web repository.

A PhD student at Old Dominion University, Justin Brunelle, is currently modifying Warrick to make it Memento-compliant. Hopefully Warrick will be up and running again soon. Once it's working, the old Warrick website will be replaced with a more up-to-date version, and it will be open to the public once again.

I appreciate everyone's patience while Warrick is being transformed.


UPDATE

Dec 12, 2011: Justin is still making progress on Warrick. I hope it will be available in a few weeks. I will keep updating this blog post when I know more.

Dec 20, 2011: Justin has given me a beta version of Warrick which I am testing. I hope to make this version available as soon as some documentation is available. Unfortunately, this beta version will require some technical knowledge of how to install Perl libraries and run the tool from the command line. We plan to make Warrick run automatically from our website in the future.

Jan 24, 2012: Warrick 2.0 Beta is now available from Google Code! You can read more about the new version here. Right now Warrick only runs from the command line on Unix systems, but a Windows version is in the works. Work is also being done on a new web interface for less tech-savvy users... I don't have an ETA for it yet.