2015 started a while ago, but I only now managed to polish my draft for 2014 review and goals for 2015. Since we're late already, let’s get right into it.

Last weekend I finally did what I had been planning to do for a long time - move this site off the self-hosted WordPress and into SquareSpace. I had been neglecting the site, and it simply didn't look or feel modern.

Even though I'm no longer working at the university, November was an excellent month publication wise.

Today was my last day at Aalto University (formerly known as Helsinki University of Technology). I've worked there 11 years (and had at least as many fixed-term contracts). Early this Spring, when it started to look like things might come to an end at Aalto, I started writing a blogpost nitpicking the pros and cons of academic work.

The main purpose of the new paper "Quality Of WordPress Plug-Ins - An Overview of Security and User Ratings" was to analyze a set of WordPress plugins to find out if plugin ratings predict the number of potential security vulnerabilities in them.

For a while now, I've been meaning to start a series of articles on JSAV features. The current documentation only works as a reference to the API and does not explain or give enough examples. Also, it does not argue why things are done certain way and writing these things down makes me really think them through. As I recently implemented a support for easy attachment of event handlers to data structures, that seems like as good as any topic to start.

Our company's (ByTheMark, that is) first mobile application is getting closer to publishing. It is a quiz game for learning and testing Python programming knowledge. Name of the app is Quiz & Learn Python.

I finally found the time to complete the binary search tree search assignment that uses the accelerometer.

I've been building an HTML5+JavaScript demo for using the device orientation and device motion events for an educational application. In my case, I'm controlling a ball based on the device orientation. This is easy to do with HTML5 device orientation events.

This summer in the Program Visualization Workshop 2011, I had a paper with a colleague about the use of web services to help algorithm visualization (AV) systems. One potential service we identified and implemented was an OEmbed endpoint for embedding AVs into hypertext learning materials such as ebooks.

CSS3 offers some interesting new properties that could be used for algorithm visualization. Here, I'll first introduce the new properties and then proceed to show and explain some demos that I've created.

I finally got tired of updating my old HTML publication list by hand. I wanted something that would be automatically generated from my BibTeX file, without me having to remember to run any scripts or copy files. So, I wrote bib-publication-list. With it, I can just include the BibTeX into my HTML page and tell the script to turn it into a sortable and searchable table.

The already not so new Firefox 3.6 ships with a way for websites to detect the orientation of the laptop/device of the user. This opens interesting new possibilities for web applications similar to some iPod/iPhone/etc games.

The article "A comprehensive taxonomy of algorithm animation languages" was finally published in the Journal of Visual Languages & Computing in volume 21, issue 1.

Interactive questions in algorithm animations are questions shown to the student. Typically, the questions require students to predict what is going to happen in the following steps of the animation based on the current state and the algorithm in question.

JSXaal viewer, the JavaScript viewer for XAAL animations is now an open source project at Google Code. You can find the project at http://code.google.com/p/jsxaal/.

As I aim to publish XAAL and the related tools for the whole AV community to benefit from, XAAL has moved to http://xaal.org/. The site has all the important information about XAAL.

My article "Seamless Merging of Hypertext and Algorithm Animation" was finally published in ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE) in volume 9, issue 2.

Welcome, I don't know how you ended up on this page, but this is (or will be) my blog. Me being Ville Karavirta. I'll write about algorithm animation, computer science education tools, and post some photographs. At least that's the plan for now, we'll see what it becomes..