Affinax is Hiring

The Affinax Project is now accepting equity position applications from web app developers and algorithms programmers. Just to remind you, Affinax is a web technology that can predict a person's future favorites in any domain of life. Yes, you heard that right... We have figured out how to predict a person's future favorites in any domain of life: social, career, products, services, media, locations, etc. And we do it without tracking a user's behavior, without data mining, and without a lengthy registration process. Sound interesting? Be part of the next revolution on the internet. Send your CV, including public app portfolio links, to cognase.com, username "ben". Affinax has offices in Tel Aviv and Los Angeles, but is open to remote participation.

Frugality meets Web 3.0

I'm starting to send out beta invitations to a new web application I've just created called "SplitStuff" that should help people reduce expenses and save money. It started as something small and experimental, and has grown into something surprisingly useful. It's time to see if others agree. I'd rather not reveal too much about it at this point except to say that it is a very cool synthesis of well-documented traditional techniques and powerful new collaborative social and semantic technologies.

If you've received an invitation, consider yourself lucky, use it and benefit from it. For the rest of you, you can get on the waiting list. :-)

I think there is a big need for it - Stay tuned.

Famous Jews just got more Friendly

I just published the new version of Famous Jews by Heebz. I took the old static site (still #1 on Google for "Famous Jews") and gave it a bit of database-backed functionality using Ruby on Rails.

Technology Highlights:

• fuzzy autocomplete "search" box - uses n-grams and is very fast.
• jquery and blueprint "frameworks"
• list sort with cookie storage and re-sort
• restful_authentication and rspec
• served by Phusion Passenger (mod_rails)
• mod_rewrite (yes, it works fine with Passenger) and RewriteMap to 301 redirect users and bots to the new friendly URLs
• staging and production environments are on the same Linux VPS, deployed by Capistrano
• Development using the Netbeans IDE on a Vista Laptop (yes, it works great - no issues)

Future Plans:

• better design and logo
• public list sort "voting" via ajax (I already wrote the sort algorithms)
• upgrade authorization system from role_requirement (for admins, etc.)
• forum and wikis per category and name
• photo/video pulling system
• Paypal API integration for subscriptions
• tagging system to replace(?) categories
• spiders to find additional data
• Facebook App(s)

Any suggestions or requests?

Welcome

Hey all!

I'm creating this blog to serve as a nexus of many of my creative projects and activities. I'd like to use this forum to talk about development issues and ideas. Hopefully readers will find something useful in it.

I will try to post context if I can, though I will have to walk a fine line as many of the project under development are in stealth mode. When the time is right I may call for beta-testers and announce new public projects for view.

Enjoy.