Science Channel HD is amazing. I love it. This last weekend there happened to be a nice little documentary on network theory, and the Six degrees of separation. Overall I found it to be quite a nice little introduction to the world of network theory. Not that I am an expert in the field, but being a computer science B.S. holder I definitely have enough background to understand the concepts of graphs theory and a lot of the neat problems that us CS types run into with them (traveling salesman anyone?).
Anywho, the documentary proceeds to talk about various real world applications where mapping the small world network in biology is proving to be helpful in finding genes linked to diseases that were previously unknown.
A preview of the documentary can be seen here:
I also hopped onto good reads to find a few books on the subject. Here are a few I added to my reading list which I will have to pick-up sometime soon.
So recently my friends and I have discovered that there are now DCI sanctioned tournaments happening not even 15 minutes from my house multiple times a week. This has if anything only helped fuel my desire to see my damn inventory project near completion. Alas I have hit a hitch in the road though. Lately I have been worrying about design of application, specifically the user interface. Though I tried to copy Google to an extent with their fancy yet completely unobvious navigation bar along the top of the window. I find that this approach is not working for me. In fact I think that quite honestly I have spent more time designing the actual appearance of my application, as seen above, than I have the actual functionality. So I decided early this week that I was going to scrap everything I had done thus far and rework what I have now so that it will be easy to go back and update styling in the future.
This of course now lead to a extremely ugly (not that it was pretty before) black and white web page that may look like its been thrown together by a 4th grader. But dammit I need features and I need them now! So as I begin a possible third rewrite (god I am an awful developer) I have started with a much more concrete plan. I will be staging the application to actually be released in tiers. Firstly the user interface is going to be at best, annoying. This is to accommodate for 90% of the work that will actually be done on the back-end. The following is a list of features that should be 100% functioning when I finish with tier 1 of the development phase.
User Functions: - Registering a user account. - Ability to maintain both decks and collections (this is actually quite general consider everything there is to making and maintaining a collection but I decided to squeeze it into one big category). - Advanced search features for the card database. - Ability to view other individuals collections as well as your own
Administrator Functions: - User/Collection maintenance. (again this is a small sentence but encompasses many features within it). - Card database maintenance, such as adding cards that may not be in the db yet.
I am not even promising a deadline for when this will be ready but hopefully the word soon will really mean soon.
