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
Both the Chipmark website and plugins have been updated!
The plugins are now on version 3.2.
Here’s what’s new:
-Forum
-Developer API
-Facebook Application
-”Add Chipmark Here” menu item for all folders
-”Open in Tabs” menu item for all folders
-Toolbar Folders
-Easy Import
As some of our users may have noticed, chipmark has been offline during the past two nights. Around
We would like to apologize to our users for the loss of service. We work hard to provide quality service, but sometimes events such as these occur which are out of our control. Please know that we were aware of the situation very soon after both outages, and we worked to restore service as soon as possible. We hope that this will not happen again.
Hello, world! Chipmark ‘07 has arrived and we are working on a nice new release of Chipmark. We have some new features in store, including a Facebook interface, a forum, and some nifty enhancements to our plugins. Our goal is to provide the best software possible, and we want to know what features our users would like to see included in future releases of chipmark. So if you have any suggestions, we would love to hear from you! Please drop us an email at support@chipmark.com with your ideas.
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!
With only some minor hiccups, we have managed to release 3.1 unto the world.
This release contains a complete overhaul of our WebUI and some new features for the plugins as well.
I’ll mention some tidbits from the Firefox release, specifically:
There’s a lot more of course, but perhaps I’ll leave that for some of the other team members to discuss.