We’re contemplating having nightly builds for the firefox plugin so users can test the latest development version. Depending on the demand, we’ll implement this as an auto-compile on our servers, available in some specific, public location.
Comments here
We’ve been a little publicly quiet this year (2009~2010 academic year). Most of the effort this year has been in back-end maintenance, improving, code refactoring, documenting, etc. We will announce and address this in the coming months. So, a quick update:
There is an official update to the Firefox plugin in the review process at Mozilla right now. We have a couple more fixes in the pipeline as well (5 API error bug, open in all tabs, etc). There’s also about to a release of a completely refactored IE plugin, hopefully within a week or two.
The 2009-2010 Chipmark team is starting up, and we’re proud to announce progress on a plugin update for FireFox that’s compatible with 3.5, available on our download page. It’s by no means rock solid stable, but it works with Windows and Linux. We will strive to release a more stable Beta in the near future, once our new FireFox plugin team is fully assembled and briefed.
A big thanks to all Chipmark users who have stuck with us through yet another developer-less summer with a poorly timed FireFox update. We hope to accomplish many cool and useful things this year - stay tuned for another blurb that will have more details as to our development plan for the semester.
Happy Chipmarking~
First off I would like to thank our forum bug reporters for their helpful catches, especially you crash.
As of yesterday we have posted the latest version of the Firefox plugin. In this version we knocked out the bugs crippling the use of our plugin. So, ideally you will no longer see time out issues in any of the major functionality. Also Chipmarks with blank names or URI’s will no longer be allowed to add. Our goal for this release was to get the most critical bugs in the Firefox plugin fixed.
We did have to prioritize with this release. We have 4 developers this spring, which is a step up from the fall, however we could not get to every requested feature or fix.
I will be posting more tomorrow regarding the next release and issues with this release.
Word has been passed down from the facilities folks that this outage is canceled. The work that was planned still needs to be done, so there will be downtime at some point in the future (likely within the next 2 weeks), but as of now, the date and time has yet to be determined. We’ll keep you informed as more information comes along.
–Zak
As the title says, Chipmark will be unavailable for a period of time, beginning December 26. The system will be down from 10:00PM on the 26th until 6:00AM the following day. The reason for this is to correct the cause of the previous two unplanned outages: faulty electrical equipment in the system which supplies power to the network closet where the Chipmark servers are housed.
We apologize for all of these outages. Hopefully the cause of all the problem will be fixed, and this will be the last. Luckily they have scheduled it for a time when the impact on Chipmark users will be minimal. I just wanted to pass this message along to everyone, so hopefully nobody will be caught off guard.
–Zak
As many of you already know, Chipmark is run by a team of University of Minnesota Seniors. In past years, support for Chipmark has dropped to a minimum over the Summer. This year, even though the team is graduating, a few of us have volunteered to monitor support emails and keep an eye on the server. Next year’s team will take over the project in early September.
It is currently finals week here at the U. All but three of us made it to the graduation ceremony at Northrop Auditorium last Friday. The parents snapped some good photos of the Chipmark team in their caps and gowns.
We have a few updates to push out before we call it quits for the semester. We will be adding the tour videos, a missing photo of one of our team members, and some minor UI changes. Expect to see those in the next few days.
For our latest release, we implemented a chipmark recommendation system. In no way are the recommendations used to promote other websites or products. The recommendations are generated using an algorithm that examines a user’s existing chipmarks against every other user’s chipmarks. The algorithm was borrowed from the GroupLens research, also from the University of Minnesota. The recommendation system is run once every week, and it takes approximately six hours to complete.
When the thread is awoken to generate recommendations, a script is run that exports each user and their chipmarks from the database to a flat file. A parser then reads that file into memory. Once the data is in memory, the data is divided up between four threads. The chipmarks of user a are compared to the chipmarks of users b, c, d, etc. The recommender finds the user that has the highest number of chipmarks in common with user a, we’ll call him user x. The system then finds five chipmarks that user x has that user a does not have. Those five chipmarks will be recommended for user a. This repeats for each user.
Any feedback on how relevant these recommendations are would be appreciated. Feel free to examine the source code. The relevant code is located in the bookmarks.recommender package.
In response to the flood of feedback regarding the absent sorting feature, a lot of effort was put in over the past day or so to revive it. Chipmarks can now be sorted by name, date added, and public/private designation. They can also be reorganized manually via drag & drop. Any changes you make to the sort order of your chipmarks are immediately saved, and will persist throughout all of the different chipmark interfaces (web, firefox extension and IE plugin) even after logging out. Full-folder sorts work on a folder-by-folder basis. Note that if you make changes via the web interface, you may have to refresh your chipmarks in the browser extensions before they will show up there.
Additionally, any users that noticed a sudden and strange change in the order of your chipmarks will be happy to know that your previous sort order should now be restored!
We realized now the the new WebUI isn’t letting you arbitrary re-arrange chipmarks as to your heart’s content. The fellow in charge of this is being pestered and working for a fix.
Sorry for the inconvenience in the meantime, it’s bugging me too!