I have meant to post about AideRSS for months now, but I have been so busy at Suited Media gearing up for the launch of Pokerspace that I have completely disregarded this blog and its readers. Rest assured I will be able to put more time back to this blog in the coming months.

For those that are still listening, there is a something you should check out. Simply put, I am very impressed with some software, a web application, created by a small team of local professionals including a fellow UW graduate, Ilya Grigorik, the Chief Architect of AideRSS, Inc.

AideRSS may be the first tool I have found in a long while that has the potential to significantly improve on my Bloglines experiences. Bloglines has been my tool of choice for blog reading for years, but as past posts have detailed I have found some difficulties navigating and enveloping hundreds of feeds a day, many of which post a lot, some of which post rarely. I used to subscribe to almost 500 feeds, but I am now cut down to about 335.

After meeting Ilya I knew he was creating innovative and potentially important software. I met Ilya at my UW graduation ceremony a few months ago. We exchanged some of our experiences and entrepreneurial interests. Conversing with him before the ceremony confirmed my initial impressions that Ilya was a very interesting individual. We exchanged contacts and I actually added him to my LinkedIn, which is something I have never done with someone I have known for such a short time. Now, a quick glance at his LinkedIn profile shows he is linked to more than 100 very interesting people - I not surprised in the slightest.

I played with his site for a few hours one night after work and found it to be a very well designed web application. I explored the site throughly and found it be an exemplary example of modern web design. I imported my entire OPML feed of into the site and it performed flawlessly. The interface was clear and easy to follow. I especially liked the quality feedback it gives the user at the apprioriate times and places. Looking at the CSS confirmed my guess that it was a cleanly coded site. Without any hesitation I subscribed to the AideRSS blog.

I am also impressed with their technology, PostRank. In fact, I use a lot of the same ranking techniques myself and have
experience with most of the sites (Bloglines, del.icio.us, Technorati, etc.) that enable the AideRSS application. I still use a lot of these services to run what I call “tracking feeds” for myself, my company, and other key words I care about so that I can hear immediately whenever these terms are mentioned online. I used to love PubSub (if you remember of it… if not, research it). I wish it was still around. Wow, apparently it is coming back…

PubSub is undergoing redevelopment at the moment. We’ll be relaunching as PubSub 2.0 this winter with a host of exciting new features and services.

Anyways, I suggest you check out AideRSS.

You may have noticed that Echo Generation has been fairly quiet recently. In my last post, I talked about my new employer, Suited Media Inc, but I have yet to blog about what exactly I have been working on.

So, what have I been doing? I have been very busy developing a new social networking site called Pokerspace.

Pokerspace is currently in its final stages of development for a demo release. If you would like to be one of the first few people to try out the site and help us improve it, you can submit your name and email address at Pokerspace.com.

We also recently launched the Pokerspace Development Blog, where you can stay up to date on the most recent Pokerspace development news.

That is all I have time to blog about for now, but as always, stay tuned to my blog for updates.

On Monday I finished the last exam of my undergraduate career. Needless to say, I felt very good. I was filled with the warm sensation of having finally accomplished what I had set out to, many years ago.

I now feel filled with energy, determination, and focus. I have been concentrating primarily on school for the last few years, so now I am primed to get into the workforce in a real way. I am ready to use my talents in the business world - where they will be tested much more throughly than they have been in the academic world.

I am also ready to jump into work because I am excited about the company I will be working with. I start tomorrow at a small start-up company called Suited Media Inc. Suited Media Inc. was founded in November 2006 to develop innovative online marketing solutions.

I will be working in a beautiful new building located on UW’s north campus, the Waterloo Accelerator Centre. I am quite excited be joining a small entrepreneurial software company at such a critical time in its young life. I feel ready to dedicate my attention to the continued growth and success of Suited Media Inc.

I have been running Echo Generation since 2003. In that time I have made almost 500 posts on a wide variety of topics that I find interesting. So, which posts have been post popular? Since the inception of the site, the top 10 most highly accessed posts are:

1 - Making space on the wall for my University of Waterloo Honours degree, Bachelor of Computer Science w/ Business Option
2 - Finding the Blog Influentials
3 - MyDensity maps 2 degrees of the social network around any URL
4 - Acoustic analysis shows how temple transforms echoes into sounds of nature
5 - Ning, a free social application playground
6 - iUpload blog coverage
7 - Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines, shares tips on startups
8 - Mitch did notice my MyDensity post
9 - Advances in invisibility / stealth technology
10 - Cool Mind Hacks stories

I am now ready to jump into the working world with full force. I graduate in April and I am available to start work in May.
I am looking for a full-time position working in the area of software development and/or business development. Web-related development is my preferred type of software development work, although I am open to all interesting offers. See my resume for all my details. My preferred work location is Waterloo, Ontario (and area), but I welcome interested employers from across Canada to contact me.

I am quite excited to be finishing my final term at the University of Waterloo. In about three months I will be the proud owner of an Honours degree in Computer Science from one of the best CS programs in the world. I now understand why it is considered such.

I have had many exciting years at UW, but I am ready to leave the academic world and use my knowledge and experience to create real world innovation. The knowledge I have acquired at UW has been deep and wide, hands-on and theoretical, and current and relevant. And, I already have years of real-world business and software development experience thanks to the amazing co-op program at UW. The knowledge and experience I have acquired during co-op terms has been substantial. Furthermore, my personal research efforts span far and wide. The number of blogs on my personal reading list is extremely high and has been stabilizing (see Number of Feeds I Read) over the past few years. I can hardly believe I have been running this blog since 2003! The number of posts is now nearing 500.

Although I have not made any posts in a while, I still continue to follow a large number of blogs. So, just how large you may ask?

Well, I got quite disappointed after I received my response from Sun. It said I would be required to have a VISA, MC or AMEX credit card pre-authorization approval for the total value of $10,785 plus tax. As a student, I simply to not have access to this much spare credit. So, I simply ignored the offer. I have not heard anything from Sun since. I have still not had the chance to play with any Sun systems. I have however played with the some of the newest Apple laptops and I am quite impressed.

It has been a long while since I posted to Echo Generation. Too long. But why? I was too busy with the previous school term, and than with holiday festivities. But now that I am back on campus and into school mode I have started to blog again as well. In the meantime, with only occasional blog reading taking place, I now have about 14000 unread posts in Bloglines! Time to do some more culling.

This term should be quite enjoyable. I am taking a number of interesting courses, including two 4th year CompSci courses. CS 480 - Information Systems Management is right up my alley, covering many of the topics under my personal research umbrella. CS 498 Image and Vision Computing seems even more cool. So much of what we have covered in the first few lectures is actually making sense to me primarily due to my experience with audio and synthesizers. Low-pass filters, sampling rates, Fourier transforms, and so on, are topics I already know about from on my on going quest to learn as much as I can about audio/sound/music.

I have been quietly building a lot of posts lately, gathering more information for each post before I make it. I figure that my previous posts show a lot about what I am interested in already. In future posts, I will try to add more value to the blogosphere by combining more sources, over more time, with more of my personal comments added. I would like to focus more on emerging synergies from different personal, academic, and business niches — with less posts about a single cool idea. More perspectives = better information.

No blog posts (or even blog reading!) for the last while, because I am completely flooded with assignments right now. The CS 454 (Dist’d Systems) assignment I am working on right now, building a working RPC system, it taking forever. And mostly because the assignment specifications, while detailed, have left more questions than answers in some areas. Thus, I have been implementing it fairly slowly, piece by piece. At least they gave the entire class an 8 day extension… but I am guessing that is because the specs are so vague. I think this is the first time in my CS career at UW that a class was given a huge multi-day extension.

I have not even started my graphics assignment which is due Tuesday. And it is the creation of a ray tracer! That is also going to take forever. I am guess the blog posting will be slow for a while longer. In the meantime, here are some cool graphics related stories I had noted a few days (probably weeks) ago.

CMU scientist honoured for novel method of using computers to simulate collisions of objects

Dr. Doug L. James, assistant professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed new methods to make computers simulate collisions a thousand times faster than previous methods.

In a computer, the shape of an object is typically represented by tens of thousands of tiny triangles. In conventional programs, when an object collides with something, the shape of each triangle is recomputed, based on physical principles.

“In most cases, things don’t touch each other all over their surfaces,” he explained. So, using what he calls “bounded deformation trees,” the computer does detailed computations only for those triangles that are touching. That reduces the amount of computing drastically and thus speeds up the entire process.

SwiftShader Software Renderer

TransGaming’s SwiftShader technology provides the world’s fastest pure software 3D renderer with DirectX 9.0 class features, according to the company, including support for Pixel and Vertex Shaders. SwiftShader is built to provide the same APIs that developers are already using for their games and applications. This makes it possible to directly integrate SwiftShader into applications without any changes to source code. Direct3D 8 and Direct3D 9 compatible APIs are available immediately.

HDR (High Dynamic Range) Technology

HDR, or High Dynamic Range, is a lighting process that’s been designed to emulate in-game or artificially generated lighting to closely mirror the changes we see in the real world.

In simpler terms, HDR allows you to make the objects brighter by allowing them to use the full brightness capabilities of the monitor and not just the brightness level at which they have been shot with (or rendered with) in the scene.

The UW DJ club is hosting a charity party in the Student Life Centre (SLC) on campus at UW. I will be playing a live breaks/DnB set from 2:30PM-4:00PM. I am quite excited. I have never played on campus before, nor with the UW DJ club. It should be quite fun. I will probably be hanging out in the SLC with my gear in case anyone wants to play, learn, or teach. Just look for a guy with a small midi controller keyboard.

I am guessing most of the other DJs will be playing some popular records with the tables, but I am just going to freestyle it with my laptop and midi controller for an hour and a half. As long as I can keep some beats and breaks going down the without overloading my computer with crazy effect chains I should be good. This will be my second live performance. At an hour and a half long, I just hope I can find enough cool material to draw from to play it out smoothly.

Here is the DJ lineup for today’s FSA Charity Event:

11:30am -1:00pm DJ Tin Lok (Andrew)
1:00pm - 2:30pm DJ Colin Bell (Colin)
2:30pm - 4:00pm The Inner Space Cowboy (Jason)
4:00pm - 5:30pm DJ Laika (Hunter)
5:30pm - 7:00pm DJ soulpepper (Jen)
7:00pm - 8:30pm DJ Adrian (Adrian)
8:30pm - 10:00pm MixMasterAlan (Alan)
10:00pm - 11:30pm DJ Karts (Kartik)

Why I blog this? It is a charity event, so if you are around the Waterloo area today please come out and show your support. As well, please spread the word of this charity event to your friends. All proceeds from this charity goes toward the Hurricane Katrina victims. Oh, and do not forget to go to the Bomber afterwards! And remember, I am playing a live set from 2:30PM to 4:00PM! Come dance!

Ning is a free online service for building and using social applications. I have not got the chance to play with it yet (but I will), but from what I see they have created a framework for users to build their own social applications. Very cool indeed. And, it is getting a lot of coverage on some of the blogs I read.

via TechCrunch, Om Malik’s Broadband Blog, SiliconBeat, IFTF’s Future Now

Why I blog this? This is Web2.0 all the way. Small team, innovative idea, excellent execution so far. Stay tuned to their blog for more details.