The new design is based on a theme called PixelPower by Curt Ziegler. My previous design was also one of his themes, and I’m certainly a fan of his minimalistic style.

PixelPower employs responsive web design techniques, so the site should now scale in size from my large desktop monitor down to smartphones, without the need for fragile plugins and browser sniffing.

The new theme also supports WordPress post formats, which will enable me to start micro-blogging. My goal has been to make this site the repository of all my personal activity on the web, and this is one more step along that path. Over the coming months I intend to archive my tweets and bookmarks here and start treating this site as my canonical data warehouse.

Alongside the new theme, I am using the excellent WP Resume plug-in by Ben Balter. It uses custom post types to capture the resume information in a structured format, and comes with an intelligent default template and markup structure (hResume+HTML5). Certainly beats maintaining a text resume by hand!

So expect the volume on this blog to increase moderately, as I start posting content here that I might have otherwise posted on Twitter or various mailing lists. Here’s to an exciting 23rd year!

Microsoft

In March, I was still in Redmond/Bellevue, Washington, working through my third internship at Microsoft with the Dynamics CRM team. I got to continue working on a set of functionality that I started on during my previous Summer 2010 internship, and which will hopefully ship in the next release. I also got to see the wheels turning on some longer term work, and I’m super excited about where the CRM product is heading.

So excited, in fact, that I’ve accepted Microsoft’s offer to join the team full-time after completion of my degree this school year. As it stands, it looks like I’ll be moving to Seattle in September 2012.

Back to School

After my adventures with Camayak and Microsoft, it was time to return to my studies and finish my degree. I spent the summer here at Yale in New Haven, CT, taking several courses to get back into academic mode.

Today was the first day of classes of the fall semester, and it’s exciting to be back among so many passionate students. I miss many of my friends from the Class of 2011, but will soon get to better know my new Class of 2012 peers and more underclassmen.

World of WordPress

With my previous Yale extracurricular involvements terminated, I finally spent some time digging into WordPress this summer in my “spare” time. Over the past couple of years, I’ve gotten to know a number of people involved in the WordPress community, and they’ve slowly dragged me into it as well. I’ve now been to four WordCamp events, and met even more folks that way.

WordPress is an interesting beast of a project, and I must confess having mixed feelings about it overall. Several years ago, I did the Courant News project because WordPress was not yet ready (IMHO) to power “proper” news websites. But since version 3.0, I think WordPress is better suited for the task, as evidenced by countless news sites now running on WordPress. I intend to write more about that in the future.

But my involvement with the news folks has been quickly winding down, so I’ve gotten involved in WordPress to scratch two of my own itches.

XML-RPC API

While working on Camayak last fall, I wrote a python library to integrate WordPress with other systems by leveraging WordPress’ XML-RPC API. We ended up going a different route for Camayak, and the library sat in my GitHub account for several months.

This spring, I discovered that several folks were using the library for real-world problems, such as the Chicago Tribune news apps team. This led me to finally finish several outstanding workitems and fix some discovered bugs. The library is now at version 1.5, and I intend to keep actively maintaining it.

This summer saw a Google Summer of Code project dedicated to expanding WordPress’ XML-RPC API, finally gaining feature parity with internal APIs and features such as custom post types, taxonomies, and post formats. The project just finished this past week, and will hopefully be merged into core by WordPress 3.4 (feature freeze for 3.3 is technically today, and the patches aren’t really ready).

I’ll be writing several posts on XML-RPC soon, as I have a ton of thoughts on the topic and where I see WordPress evolving on that front.

WordPress for Windows Phone

In May, Verizon finally launched their first Windows Phone 7 phone, the HTC Trophy. As a Microsoft intern, I had a voucher for a free WP7 phone, and was eager to take it for a spin. However, I soon discovered that the WordPress app for WP7 was pretty weak.

Given WP7′s low marketshare, Automattic’s mobile team understandably wasn’t spending much effort on the WP7 app. As all WordPress mobile apps are open-source, I decided to get involved and start submitting patches. We managed to trim the existing bug backlog and in July put out version 1.2, the first since December 2010.

I’ve since been given commit access, so that I can take a more active role in developing the app. I have a ton of ideas for where to take the app, just not enough time to execute on them for now. I’ll have a post in the coming weeks on some UI ideas for rich text editing and revamping the functionality to take advantage of the new XML-RPC methods mentioned above.

Conclusion

My goal is to post at least once per week, and eventually start microblogging and reducing my dependence on external services like Twitter and Delicious/Diigo.

As my primary work these days is as a full-time student, I’ll eventually be blogging about my studies. In the meantime, I have a backlog of post topics expanding on items mentioned in this post. Thanks to Andrew Nacin and the CoPress gang for inspiring me to get back into using my blog again.

Last summer while at my second Microsoft internship, it became clear that I needed some time off from school. I had become weary of the grind of school, discouraged by my failure to convince the YDN of its need to adapt to a digital future, and sad about the abandonment of the Courant News project.

My time at Microsoft reminded me how much I love software, working with teams of awesome people, and collaborating on products that I’m passionate about. Thus, I decided to spend at least half a year exploring, full-time, the intersection of two industries that have shaped my recent life: software and journalism.

I shopped around various professional newspapers seeking developer jobs, but a mutual friend connected me with two other guys who were passionate about creating better tools for journalists and we decided to make a run of it. I’ve long wanted to do a software startup, and this was the perfect combination of timing, team, and product idea^[1].

Since September, I’ve been working remotely with Roman (NYC/London) and Stijn (Belgium) from an office near my family home in Philadelphia. Roman had visited with dozens of college and small professional newspapers and magazines, and my task was to take all of their feedback, combine it with our own experiences, and design a software product to solve the problems we had identified: the software powering newspaper websites was inadequate for the needs of a modern multi-platform news organization, and there was a lack of low-cost newsroom management and editorial workflow software.

I spent six weeks building a prototype that we showed to potential customers and investors, and then Stijn and I started writing production code in November. In January, we moved to London (in the Shoreditch neighborhood) and set up our first office to work in-person.

With the product well on its way to its first release and the team growing (now on its way to four developers), I had achieved my goals and decided it was time to move on. I’ll be involved as an advisor, but Stijn and the crew are now running the show and I wish them the best of luck in coming months and years.

I’ve spent the past week at home with family, and tomorrow I fly out to Seattle to start the next leg of my adventure: I’ll be rejoining the Microsoft Dynamics CRM team for another three-month internship. The CRM team just launched the latest version which contains features that I worked on in my previous internships, and I’m eager to contribute to the exciting roadmap planned for the next release.

After that, I intend to return to New Haven to take summer courses at Yale before completing my EE/CS degree in the 2011-2012 academic year. I regret missing senior year with many of my Yale ’11 friends, but I am thankful for the time off to explore my entrepreneurial interests and work on exciting projects with some great people.

Inspired by Daniel, Andrew, and others, over the coming weeks I’m going to turn my personal site into a more active log of what I’m up to. Until then, I’ll keep posting the occasional update on Twitter or Facebook.

[1] Camayak company description (from LinkedIn):

The name ‘ca~ma~yak’ comes from CMYK, the colours used to render content in print – the first efficient form of disseminating content non-orally and en mass.

Camayak is a specialist tool that enables content creators to collaborate and archive their work within a single platform.

Camayak is a pre-publishing system that gives each journalist, editor and publishing baron their own account to work in concert with one another to produce high quality content. We equip publishers with editorial and multimedia workflows that allow them to coordinate every contributor and staff member within their own virtual newsroom community.

Camayak facilitates the publishing and promotion of your content through popular delivery tools: Adobe InDesign, WordPress, mobile applications and social media accounts. We orientate production priorities to ensure that publications can focus on enhancing their most valuable asset: content they can publish.

We performed survey research on eight of the most discussed new business models for news, although we tried not to prescribe any of them as “the” solution. As countless others have pointed out, there will not be any single solution that will work for any or all news organizations, so it is instead important to understand how each might contribute to a new news organization structure. We hope to update the site periodically as events unfold in the industry, and will continue to post to our Publish2 newsgroup as we come across relevant new content.

We hope our research and summaries are useful to interested observers, especially those who may not have been following the issues at hand as closely as we have. Feel free to give feedback and let us know what you think.

Session #1: Who Uses the News and How?

Session #2: Preserving Local Journalism

Session #3: Publicly Owned and Operated Media

Session #4: Quest for Pay Models (minus most of Q&A)

This page will be updated throughout the day.

Over the past 6 months I’ve been installing new builds of Windows 7 every month or two on one of my laptops.

General Programs

The set of programs I install after each wipe:

• Microsoft Office (productivity suite)
• Firefox & Opera (web browsers)
• Trillian (multi-protocol IM client)
• Twhirl (Twitter client)
• Pandora desktop client (internet radio)
• iTunes (music for personal music device)
• Adobe Reader or Foxit (PDF reader)
• 7-zip (zip/tar archive creator/extractor)
• Sling Media Player (watch home TV from across internet)

Development Tools

I also have a bunch of development tools:

• WinSCP (FTP/SCP client)
• Putty (SSH client)
• XAMPP (LAMP stack)
• Python (programming language)
• VMWare Workstation (virtual machine environment)
• Komodo IDE (programming environment)
• TortoiseSVN and GIT (source control integration)
• Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, etc.)

There’s probably some that I’m missing, but those are all the ones that I use most often.

Conclusion

I think it’s safe to say that it’s near impossible to replace my development setup within my browser, but honestly “most” of the population doesn’t do such work.

On the general software side, I could probably get by with just a browser. Twitter, IM, Pandora, Office Web/Google Apps, etc. could replace many of the programs that I listed. I’d still have some issues with zip files and watching TV through my SlingBox, but my general needs could be satisfied. Yet I currently decide to use the desktop versions of these apps, because I can run them nicely in the background, with OS notifications, and automatic startup at system boot.

I’m curious to see what other people use and how readily they could forgo everything but a browser.

I’ve been a space enthusiast all my life, and have followed the Shuttle program since I watched John Glenn’s return to space in my 4th grade computer lab in 1998. I’ve watched most of the 34 shuttle launches since then, and have followed most of them very closely during the missions; I even woke up one Saturday morning at 5 a.m. to watch the daring repair of the International Space Station’s torn solar array panel.

However, I had never been down to see a launch in person, which I had heard was an incredible experience. When I saw that the STS-125 launch fell right in my off-week between school and my summer internship, I jumped at the opportunity to go down with my Dad (fellow space enthusiast) to see it. With the Shuttles retiring next year and only 8 flights remaining, I couldn’t be sure that I’d ever have such a perfect alignment with my personal schedule.

We spent roughly two hours at the Kennedy Space Center’s Visitor Complex, which is home to a number of exhibits and the Rocket Garden. Below you can find most of the non-duplicate pictures that I took in the Visitors area, including shots of the mock shuttle Explorer, the rockets in the Rocket Garden, the next-generation Orion crew capsule mockup, and a full-size LEGO version of the Mars Exploration Rovers (another of my favorite space missions).

Then around noon we headed out to the VIP launch viewing area, out on the Banana River Causeway about 5 miles from the launch pad, and the closest people can get if not a member of the press or under the employment of NASA. We then proceeded to wait for about 2 hours in the record 95 degree heat, the shade of our umbrella making it barely tolerable.

But in the end, it was absolutely worth it. It only lasted a few minutes, but it was an awe inspiring sight. I tried to grab a few pictures as best I could, but also wanted to take it in with my own eyes.  Pictures are below.

At liftoff, the shuttle and pad were enshrouded with smoke/water vapor, but it quickly cleared the towers. The exhaust plume is as bright as the sun, leaving an afterimage on the retina, something which definitely is not captured properly in the limited dynamic range of digital still and video cameras.

It took what seemed like a long time, but was probably only 5-10 seconds, for the sound waves to hit us. They dump enormous amounts of water under the pad before ignition, which serves to suppress vibration and noise from the initial liftoff, so only once the shuttle started rolling to the east did the sound really reach us. You literally feel it in your bones, like the loudest sub-woofer you’ve ever heard.

Eventually all we could see was a bright dot of light, then the solid rocket boosters fell away and it was mostly lost to sight. Then the thousands of people on the beach make a run for their cars and buses. Three hours later we finally got back to our hotel. Lots of travel for only a few minutes, but it was totally worth it and I’d love to do it again if given the opportunity. Especially for a night launch.

Launch Pics

Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex