Well I went biking at Tiger Mountain (near Seattle) today. With a group of 7 other interns, it was quite above and beyond anything we have out east.
Pictures to the left on Flickr.
-Ben
You can now take a look at / download the not so pretty code for WPI openbook at "svn.wpiopenbook.net":http://svn.wpiopenbook.net.
It is pretty simple, I am thinking about moving it over to Ruby on Rails in the near future.
-Ben Childs
Well we (Cody Rank and myself) have finally gotten our book indexing software to a point where we are ready to go live. If you are a WPI Student you can sign up and get an account at "wpiopenbook.net":http://wpiopenbook.net.
Our goals etc. are outlined at the site, but if you are a College Student (at least in the US) you know how expensive books are. In addition you probably also know how much of a ripoff the college bookstore is when it comes to used textbooks. So we created a site that is designed to cater to individual college campuses to index books for sale so that students can sell books to eachother hopefully more conveniently than with sites such as half.com or amazon.com.
We are planning on releasing the code as soon as we can so if you are a student at a different College and would be interested in using it, please let us know. Feel free to post comments over at our "blog":http://blog.wpiopenbook.net.
Having heard a lot about Ruby on Rails, I finally decided to try it out. What I have seen so far seems very promising, including this new blogging software ("Typo":http://typo.leetsoft.com). I was able to learn the fundamentals and write a Ruby on Rails app in one day putting together a number of tables in a sql database.
My main issues have been with getting everything working on apache etc. Unfortunately because it is so new things don''t always work as expected. Hopefully this will improve as time goes on. In the mean time check out the instant commenting and live search (AJAX) on this blog. If this sort of thing takes off it is really going to change how we use the web.
Well, I haven't posted here for a while now. But in light of the terrible bombings that have just transpired in London I felt the need to post a few thoughts. What I have heard over the past few hours indicates that like many other terrorist attacks, these bombings have brought the whole world into a feeling of unity. All I can hope is that out of this terrible tragedy we can forge some good and really tackle the problem at hand: general inequality and injustice in the world.
The more we continue to exert our powerful military force around the world, the more we create people who resent our presence in the world. The more the United States tarnishes its reputation with acts of torture the more we limit our ability to bring about positive change in the world. It may seem that we, in the west, have nothing in common with the people that perpetrate these attacks. But what we do need to remember is that we all inhabit the same world, that we are all human. Our actions in the past few years have generated a large amount of resentment throughout the Middle East. Rather than burning bridges, we must reach out to those living in poverty around the world and show them that we want to help them. Occupying foreign countries is not the way to do this.
I sincerely hope that through this tragedy we can begin to forge a new kind of relationship with the developing world: one not of imperialism, but of partnership. Most of all we must realize that as Londoners suffer from these threats, so do we all. It is clear that we cannot blame ourselves for these attacks, but what we can do is proactively solve the problems in the world that provide extremist leaders with the people they need to carry out these attacks. My thoughts go out to London and my family in the UK. I know that everybody is doing their best to help those in need, I hope for the best for all those injured and all those who may have lost loved ones in these attacks.
-Ben Childs
In my search for an internship / consulting work this summer I have posted my resume to the right under "Ben Childs." If you would be interested in my services as a software developer you can contact me at "contact@bchilds.com":mailto:contact@bchilds.com.