Projects

Cognition

Cognition is an online, flashcard-based language learning system. It uses a special algorithm to tailor practice schedules to each user's unique learning pattern and includes support for the iPhone and mobile devices.

The scheduling algorithm takes advantage of a phenomenon known as the spacing effect, which dictates that the best time to practice a piece of information is just when you are about to forget it. After a flash card is practiced, each subsequent repetition is scheduled further and further out, based on how well a user's recall has been for that card and how long they are likely to remember it.

Rugovor

Rugovor is a platform for Russian and Russian-speaking people living abroad to connect with each other, their communities and their heritage by sharing information about Russian events and businesses in their area.

The site has full support for Russian localization, integration with Google Maps and in-line translation of user-generated content through Google's AJAX Language API.

Translatable

Translatable is a jQuery script which makes it easy to add robust language translation services to any website. Once the script is loaded, simply adding a CSS class of .translatable to any DOM element will add links which allow users to translate page content in-line, passing the actual translation work off to Google's AJAX Language API.

rails-templates

A Rails template that adds Blueprint CSS, a custom form builder, Shoulda, HAML, layouts and an optional fully-tested Authlogic user system.

attr_serializable

Attr_serializable is a plugin for Rails that makes it easy to create a whitelist of attributes for models for use in their to_xml and to_json methods.

Evolution

Evolution is a ruby implementation of a hill climbing algorithm that uses RMagick to generate a collection of polygons which resemble a baseline image.

Hill climbing is similar to genetic programming, but differs in that the size of the gene pool is restricted to two: the parent and its randomly mutated child. Instead of crossing genes amongst a large population, an exact copy of the parent's genes are taken and mutated slightly to generate its offspring.

To illustrate how the script works, I used it to render a few album covers.

Stone Free

Stone Free is a Greasemonkey script which helps you discover free alternatives to consumer goods.

After installing the Stone Free script, whenever you visit an Amazon product page Stone Free will search Craigslist's "free" section for listings that are similar to the item you're looking at. If it finds anything, it will post it directly on the Amazon page.

You can find more random projects and code samples on my GitHub page.