BotFu the Blog - a simple blog with lots of kick!

Man I love sleep.

Jul 16 2009

I'm currently three chapters behind schedule with the SimpleDB book. I have a massive and growing list of to-do items for both reviews.com and myidentifiers.com. And there's always a million things I want to do for my own projects.

So, with all that weighing on me, what did I do last night? I laid down in my bed around 7:30pm for a quick rest while my wife was trying to get the kids ready for bed...and then I proceeded not to wake up until 7:00am the next morning!

That's almost twelve hours of sleep...and honestly I could have slept awhile longer today (but someone's gotta get the kids ready in the mornings and take them to camp and school).

I'm not saying it's ideal to waste this much time sleeping...and I'm not even recommending it for everyone...but I do end up crashing like that every couple of months or so.

I think it's just because of the usual day-to-day schedule that I maintain.

I mean currently I'm working a regular 40hr. week for reviews.com, another 16-20 hours a week for Bowker, writing a 250+ page book for Apress, and trying to get my own gawk.it, draftwizard.com, sportsxml.com, supermug.com, and statsfeed.com projects back off the ground. On top of all of that, I try to be an active and involved husband and father to my wife and kids and I also try to stay in some form of shape by working out at least three or four times a week (I usually run for an hour on the treadmill in our basement or run for a half hour at the treadmill at the gym and swim for another half hour - I would love to work back in some weight training but just haven't yet).

Anyway, the fact is, it all catches up with me sometimes. But whatever reason I was so tired was, I def. feel great today and have been able to focus on, and get through, a large pile of work today.

Hopefully I can keep the energy and momentum going for a couple more months before I need another one of these 'power naps'!

sportsxml is a key difference...

Jul 15 2009

As I mentioned yesterday I'm working on a new fantasy game that you play via Twitter...but I'm also working on a handful of other sports or fantasy sports related systems that I didn't mention yesterday...and the one thing that ties them all together is the work I'm doing on SportsXML.com.

Basically sportsxml is both a simple XML format for sports data AND sportsxml.com is a simple web service feeding out that data.

So far I haven't officially released either of those things...but behind the scenes, over the past few years, I've been working quite a bit on both.

You see, "sportsxml the format" was really born out of my experience in running Statsfeed the past 6 or 7 years as well as working with other stat provides like Stats Inc., XML Team, and the now defunct Sportsticker (Stats Inc. bought them out earlier this year).

From those experiences it was VERY clear to me that a drop-dead simple format needed to be defined. Something that would make it very easy for small companies, with very limited budgets (ie. most fantasy sports systems) to both understand and integrate the format with their system.

Sure there's SportsML (that XML Team provides) and there's Stats Inc. proprietary XML format(s)...but both of those take quite a bit of time to really understand and use...and in the end, a lot of the smaller fantasy companies just want to be able to do simple stuff like score against a team win or a team loss (ie. gawk.it)...doing that with either of these formats is actually a massive amount of work up front.

So I've tried to make things as simple and straight forward as possible...and I feel like I'm a pretty good path to actually doing that. Gawk.it is actually the first 'official' service built on top of the sportsxml.com format...and it was a breeze to get at just the stats and details I wanted for our first version of the game (yes I know this is a little silly to claim since I wrote both ends of both projects, I understand it all and will of course think it's all easy -- but I'm trying to be objective here before I make my claims!)

Anyway - I'm pretty comfortable with where "sportsxml the format" is at right now...and so it's about time to really start shifting my focus towards "sportsxml.com the service". And I've got lots of plans for where I want to take this moving forward...but right now I'm just focusing on what it's got to be able to do right now (just to support my more immediate projects like gawk.it, supermug.com, statsfeed.com, and draftwizard.com).

The nice thing is that once I've got the service fixed up to the point that I want it, it will be both an income source (via subscriptions to the statsfeed service) and a key component of many of my own systems making each one a bit more special and unique!

Keeping busy as usual...

Jul 14 2009

Once again it's been a little while since I posted...and it's been WAY too long since I've posted regularly...so time to change things up and try once again to get back on track.

So first I'll start with a little introduction to my latest pet project gawk.it.

Gawk.it is basically the first ever Twitter fantasy sports game...the core of the idea was inspired by a post from Brian Litvack (and as luck would have it he's joined me and a few others in trying to make it a reality and seeing what we can do with the idea).

Right now the first version of the game is just about predicting baseball winners and losers as well as who will get a hit or hit a home run on a given day...but there are a lot of different directions we can (and may) take the game as we work out the bugs, improve the game play, and of course move to support more and more sports...

Anyway - the first version of the game is up and running...so if you get a chance please head out to gawk.it read up on "How to play" and give it try...then drop me a line and let me know what you think (and how we could make it even more fun for everyone).

Eventually I'll take some time to break down some more of the thinking and details about the game...but for now I want to see how well people 'get' it without me doing too much explaining...

In a somewhat related project, I just took a few minutes tonight to set up a basic MediaWiki at tweetwiki.com...I haven't actually modified or customized anything about the experience just yet...but my plan going in is to start a public wiki for Twitter hash tags (a listing of what ones people are using and basic details about what the hash tag stands for).

(If you are wondering how that's somewhat related to gawk.it, it's because gawk.it uses hash tags to determine what type of prediction you are logging)

Outside of all this fun stuff, I'm still trying to plug away on the SimpleDB book for Apress...I'm officially three chapters behind deadline on it though, and I've really got to get my butt in gear to get this thing out the door and into bookstores by the end of the year...so with that in mind, I better finish up this post and get back to writing!

New systems under way...

May 28 2009

In my extremely limited free time I've been working quite hard to get a new supermug.com system put together. It's still a ways away from being ready for real users and leagues, but little by little it is starting to come together and I'm anxious to demo it in detail to a good friend, and fellow fantasy football fanatic, that will be visiting me next week.

As part of getting back into offering supermug.com fantasy football leagues I'll need statistics. That along with the fact that I still get questions about Statsfeed services and prices every few weeks from random people has convinced me to go ahead and start offering statsfeed once again as well.

Of course there are a large number of updates that I need/want to do to the statsfeed system, including scrubbing much of the historical statistics and moving from a Microsoft SQL server database to either a PostgreSQL database or a cloud solution like SimpleDB (moving to SimpleDB makes the most sense to fall in line with the book I'm also working on, but because of the high volume of the service and the costs associated with SimpleDB - I will probably just go with PostgreSQL. It's just too hard to beat free.)

Once I've got the core supermug system built, and the new statsfeed system in place, I figure I might as well go ahead and round out the fantasy offerings by finishing up my conversion and cleanup work on draftwizard as well (at least the basic features and content for this season).

Once I've got those projects more or less out of the way, I'm going to dig back into herobrawl and implement an actual plot...and after that I just might finally get around to developing my cointhief idea.

At least all of that is my master plan heading into the summer (oh not to mention that I want to be done writing all the first drafts of chapters for the SimpleDB book by July as well)...but we'll see what other projects or ideas pop up between here and there and how focus and productive I can actually stay!

Some things I've been thinking about lately...

May 17 2009

If you were ever a regular reader of my blog, and lately you've been wondering to yourself (or out loud for that matter) what ever happened to my blog, well today you are in luck...because I'm finally getting around to posting again, and I'll do my best to catch you up quickly on a handful of things that have been keeping me busy as well as a handful of things that I'm planning on doing to continue to keep me busy throughout the summer!

So first let me recap a little bit...the last time I posted with any sort of frequency I was rambling on about getting focus and finishing up a few small projects, namely fubnub, toptenify, and momentum...

1. I did in fact finish out a new version of fubnub that includes a new API, a new design, and is now 100% perl based in both the front end and back end...however, I still haven't released it to the general public (ie. I haven't replaced the public facing www.fubnub.com with the new site yet. Mostly just because I haven't done enough testing on the new stuff myself yet to feel comfortable with releasing it, but also a little just because I'm not sure it's really to the final state I want to release it in (once the API is out and avaiable, I'll have a harder time making drastic changes to it if I want/need)

2. toptenify, that drop-dead simple top ten list site that I estimated would take me a day or two to throw together...well I still haven't done too much with it...I got the basic structure set up, and I pinged Jason (the guy with the idea in the first place) to play with the tiny bit I had put together...he found a number of holes and bugs (even in the limited dev. stage I have things in)...but he also was able to get a better feel for the workflow and so he sent me some updated details on how to fix all that stuff up...and I haven't had a chance to go back and make any more happen with it just yet.

3. Probably most disappointing of all three of my 'focus' projects right now has been momentum...for the most part we still haven't gotten beyond the basic proof of concept stage...and in the last week or two a couple of other companies have hit the press with 'real time content' search...I think our core idea is still a bit different than what either of those companies are doing so far, but a large part of our system's 'wow' factor was based on the same concepts they cashed in on already (so there goes our initial 'wow' factor)...it's not a project killing thing, but it can be a bit draining for a bit because we now know that it will be much harder to get attention when we are finally ready with something to show the world...

So anyway, with all the lack of progress on this stuff and no posts, you might be wondering just what the heck I actually am spending all my time on then? Well the good news is lots-o-stuff as usual!

1. I'm 98% done with version one of an API for reviews.com (the day job)...and while it's nothing ground breaking, it has been a fairly large project for me the past few weeks/months and I'm excited to be getting it out the door soon and letting other people start to kick the tires a bit...but even more exciting about it is that if it works out as I hope/plan, it's the first step in rewriting the front-facing reviews.com site as well...

2. I finally got started on writing a new (and I think much cleaner) version of the primary system I work on for R.R. Bowker...I've been involved in various roles with Bowker for a little over a year now (first as a consultant, then a full time employee, and now back to a consultant for the past 6+ months)...and throughout that time I've really only been working on one main system. Worse, it's only got about 10-20 features so far...none of which are rocket-science...but because it has to play nicely with historical systems, get things approved through a series of political debates, and is all duct-taped together through a highly abstracted, non-open, obscure CMS...it seems to take forever for anything to actually get done and working (especially working correctly)! So, finally getting to clean up at least one big part of the system is a bit freeing to my developer side...

3. I pitched Apress on writing a new book about Amazon's SimpleDB web service...and they approved the pitch...since I'm always over-committed (and know this about myself), I immediately pulled fellow NY developer guru Tyler Frieling into the project with me...we are still behind, but so far we have submitted three chapters and I have another two almost ready for submission as well...my hope/plan is to be done with the initial chapter versions by mid July, but we've got a lot of writing to do to meet that actual deadline. Related to the project I also grabbed the domain simpledb.info, got my friend Pat to do a sleek design for me, and threw up a version of the blog code I use to run perlquiz.com (another blog I haven't posted to in months! *sigh*)...the plan is to blog on a regular basis about simpleDB once we get a little bit more of the book complete (and of course promote the book via the blog when it's finally in print)...we'll see how it goes.

4. I've been bouncing around pulling Draftwizard.com and Supermug.com off the edge of the dead-cliff with the help of a few friends...but so far most of my efforts to get people really involved in either have faded just as quickly as they have come up...but that hasn't stopped me from doing what I can on each project anyway. Most recently I've been really pushing myself to throw in a few hours here and there to rebuilding supermug.com as a clean and simple league management system (built from the ground up this time, using only my experience and knowledge and no code from it's previous iterations)...I plan to run at least one or two leagues through the system this year, and beyond that we'll see how much it feels worth promoting/pushing...

Beyond all of that stuff, I've also been meeting with a lot of new people and hearing about a lot of new ideas (keeping myself open to the possibility of founding a new start-up with a team - if I can find the right team, or the right set of ideas to get behind)...so far not too concrete has come from any of these meetings, but I have been meeting some really great people, learning about some really interesting ideas, and making a lot more business contacts than I have in my previous 8+ years in NY (amazing how easy it is to hide inside your code with your head down as a developer...but also amazing how easy it is to get out there and make some actual contact and start making things actually happen for once)...

Anyway - that's the whirlwind tour of my past few months of work-related ramblings (don't forget on top of all this I try to spend as much time as possible with the wife and kids doing fun family stuff -- the oldest just started soccer a couple weeks ago and the youngest is going to music classes now so weekends are also always jam filled with fun family events and activities)...

If I find the time and energy in the next few days I'll try to throw together some rambling thoughts on where I want to go next with a handful of my pet projects (ie. I'll try to break down my thinking on supermug, draftwizard, statsfeed, herobrawl, simpledb, perlquiz, halfbite, jivegass, and the slew of other little personal projects I hack on in my spare minutes here and there)...