It’s been a strange week – it seems that I decided, once I was almost done with the search engine, that it was time to start some more crazy projects. The disease is catching – Eric has his own project, not yet approved, that even I consider to be extreme. We won’t go into it here.
My three projects are, in order of dubiousness of completion: an in-house listserv to be hosted on ogodei, an IRC server, and an analysis system for FIRST team data (not yet online). The first two will both be linked to the Eric’s “Team Management System” – which is what makes them especially challenging. The third is designed to find patterns (defined by me as a lack of randomness) in team data, including sponsors, team size, geographic location, and performance at competition. Obviously there are some trivial patterns with which I can test the system: “hey! most teams in the D.C. region go to the D.C. regional!” My hope is to find something slightly more useful than that: “hey! everytime ARL decides to sponsor a team, Microsoft joins them the next year!”
Read the rest of this entry »