Jason Leveille’s Blog

The death of an open source project starts when the lead developers stop actually using the project. If it is only being maintained out of a feeling of obligation for those who have downloaded and installed the code, than it’s bound to have a short shelf life. In July of 2006 Stephen Eskin (a former student of mine) and I launched the first version of Project Alumni. We had implemented an alumni application for our High School and we figured we might as well make it available to the world. In nearly two years the project has been downloaded approximately 3400 times. I’m pretty happy with those numbers. Just query google for “Powered by Project-Alumni” and you can get a good idea of the number of sites using the project. (more…)

I’ve been working on a project for a while now at work which we have dubbed SimpleMC (Simple Managed Content). I spoke with Dave this morning, and he gave me the go ahead to start the process of open sourcing the project … which I’m very excited about. I haven’t officially even released an alpha version yet, however you can get a sneak peak:

• Google Code Repository
• Live Demo
  • u: admin
  • p: admin

I apologize in advance if someone gets in there and changes the admin password or completely destroys the demo.  It is a demo and thus I haven’t spent a lot of time (5 minutes) putting it in true demo mode.  I’d also like to mention that you won’t find any documentation about getting SimpleMC to work for you.  You can take a look at /bai_cms/demo/ in the source to see how it is integrated into a page.  Any issues, just contact me or post a comment here.

I recently implemented DFS and Iterative Deepening algorithms to search for a target node in a tree. Initially I thought I would write my program in C++, however after some thought I decided to go the route of JavaScript. I believe the source code is commented sufficiently to give you a glimpse into some of the decisions I made, therefore I won’t be providing any real detail in this post.

DFS and Iterative Deepening Project

I have to give much thanks to Kirupa, as his ActionScript implementation of DFS and BFS gave me the inspiration to go the route of JavaScript. Not only that, but I was able to use much of his work as a model for the direction I took. I hope you find that I did provide sufficient credit in my comments. Enjoy.

NOTE: I stayed up until 1am, two nights in a row to finish this. I don’t work well late at night and that is likely reflected in some of the algorithmic decisions I made. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask. Also, you might be asking, WTH did he use extjs here? Honestly, I don’t know. I originally had grand visions for my node tree, etc, however those didn’t pan out. In it’s current state there is no advantage to using that framework.

Ok, so here it is. I originally had grand plans of launching the new blog powered by ExpressionEngine, however for various reasons I never got around to it. I always knew though that I could launch a WordPress blog in under 10 minutes. The downside is that I won’t be implementing my new design (thanks to Jon Weaver for his creative genious) until this summer.