Tales of a Running Man

11:58:59 PM EDT It's been almost 10 years since I came to AOL, and almost 9 years since I started working on AIM. It's been a great ride, with a lot of great moments (especially Open AIM), but alas, today is my last day at AOL. I start Monday at Google's Kirkland, WA office.

I hope this blog was valuable - I had fun writing it (when I had time). For the latest AIM information, I highly recommend Greg's AIM blog; you should also check out the blogs of Justin2 and Gus from the AIM team.. If you really liked this particular blog... there will be a new blog at http://juberti.blogspot.com.

If you would like to keep in touch, you can look me up on LinkedIn, or email juberti at gmail dot com.

All the best,
Justin


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2:29:31 AM EDT When I first started working at AOL back in 1997, one of the things that I worked on was "aoltray.exe" for the AOL 4.0 software. aoltray didn't do too much, other than launch the AOL software, but it seemed like a clever place for an Easter egg. I discussed this concept with the product manager for AOL 4.0 (codenamed "Casablanca"), and he gave me the go-ahead to implement an easter egg. (It was the late 90's, when products like Word, Excel, and IE had elaborate easter eggs. But I digress).

So, I got together with a pair of artists and we came up with the idea of having the tray icon AOL logo split open, revealing a dancing running man, all set to a techno music score. The artists did the illustrations and the music, and I coded it up into the aoltray code. This shipped out in some of the AOL 4.0 beta builds, and we all thought it was pretty cool. Well, almost all of us.

Eventually somebody showed it to one of AOL's senior executives, who was most displeased with it. The exact reasons why he didn't like it were never known, but the message was sent down that this sort of tomfoolery was a fireable offense. My career at AOL could have been very short, but fortunately my management chain played dumb and didn't give up my name (thanks!).

Anyway - Jason, Erik, and I thought this thing was pretty cool, and it's a shame that only a few people ever saw it. So here it is, for your viewing pleasure. If you run this application, you'll see an AOL icon appear in your system tray. Hold down "A", "O", and "L", and double-click the icon. Then sit back and watch! (See the 3 screenshots to the left to get an idea of what happens. Note that this thing does play sound, so you might want to turn down the volume if you're in an office environment)

Update 10/07/2006 2:08 PM PDT:
Some people have reported that it doesn't work for them. I forgot, back when we originally did this we noted that some keyboards would not indicate properly that 'A', 'O', and 'L' were all being held down. So I have uploaded a new version, where you can just hold down Ctrl and double-click the AOL logo.
The entire app is contained in the EGGTRAY.exe file, which is only 43 K - to uninstall, just delete the file.
If you can't seem to get it to work, you can check out the (somewhat less cool) web version of the easter egg.
 

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2:11:41 AM EDT A few of us have been working on a new AIM client that demonstrates what you can do with the Open AIM SDK and the Boxely UI toolkit we've developed here at AOL. It's fast, light, and has some great features - including IM logging, SSL encryption of your communications, and support for plugins (including AIM Gadgets).

Check it out at the AOL Greenhouse -  http://greenhouse.aol.com/prod.jsp?prod_id=27. New builds will be posted on a regular basis, so let us know what you think!


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10:20:08 PM EDT A new version of AIM Gadgets (the plugins formerly known as JAMS) is out. This latest version, 2.8, has a number of small but important improvements. Greg did the tedious job of allowing individual installation of all 12 gadgets - so if you only want EzLogger and Colorizer, you don't have to install 10 other plugins you don't want. Greg also made some improvements to EZLogger, including adding a preference for where the logs are stored and fixing a bug with Unicode text display, and I fixed the issue that was keeping Colorizer from working properly with recent Triton builds.




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11:17:50 AM EDT Got wind of a new Thunderbird plugin today that makes using AIM Mail with SecurID/AOL Passcode much easier. Basically, it means you only have to enter your SecurID code one time a day as long as you keep Thunderbird open. Check it out at http://journals.aol.com/godwinbabu/tech/#Entry613


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5:11:06 PM EDT Today we released the latest version of the Open AIM SDK, at http://developer.aim.com. Highlights of this release:
* AIM Bots - turn any screenname into a bot that has higher rate limits and cannot be warned
* AIM Location Services - see where your AIM buddies are in real life
* Improved support for AIM Talk voice calls
* Support for custom clients and bots on Mac OS X, Linux, and Pocket PC
* Support for custom clients and bots written in Java
* More sample code, including VB.NET and Java samples

Also, be sure to check out the stuff that people are building with the AIM SDK:

Plugins
AIM Gadgets (formerly known as JAMS)
AIM Location Plugin
Nalsoft IM Logger
AMIP-AIM
RX-Plugin

Custom Clients
AIM Triton
AIM Pro
Go PowerTools
imstar*
PCD Music Lounge
Super Computer International



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2:09:07 PM EDT Some more cool Open AIM news - the startup Doppelganger just announced a new client called the PCD Lounge that lets you hang out and chat with people in a virtual nightclub, and it's integrated with AIM. There's nightclub lighting and kicking music going the whole time - definitely captures a club feel pretty well. Definitely worth checking out - but make sure you have a fast computer.

Here's a screenshot:


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3:41:15 PM EDT AOL's music download service, MusicNow, just went live with its developer site at http://developer.aolmusicnow.com. Using RSS, you can get all sorts of interesting feeds from the site - top songs, stats on a given artist, new releases - very interesting stuff. You can also make your own MusicNow playlists and listening history available as an RSS feed for others to consume. Here's mine...


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3:01:42 PM EDT The AOL Greenhouse has officially launched. Greenhouse is a site where various employee-created apps, plugins, widgets, and other pieces of software that use AOL technology can be promoted for the world to see. Naturally, JAMS is one of the items available for download from the site.

Other Greenhouse submissions include an AIM Fight Dashboard widget and an RSS screensaver. Another neat feature of the site is its blogs section where you can find AOL employee bloggers and catch up on their recent posts.

Give the Greenhouse a look!


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12:04:12 PM EDT Just got back from the TopCoder Open 2006 finals in Las Vegas. For those unfamiliar with TopCoder events, they are computer programming competitions where contestants have to solve several programming problems in a fixed amount of time, usually around an hour. The problems can be quite difficult; I was eliminated in earlier rounds of the TCO 2006 after missing this problem:

You are given a NxN matrix M, where 1 <= N <= 50, and an integer k, where 1 <= k <= N. Write a function to determine the maximum possible trace value for a kxk submatrix S, created by taking any k rows and k columns from M. (The trace is the sum of the elements on S's main diagonal; the selected rows and columns are not necessarily contiguous.)

Anyway, the final rounds were quite dramatic, with the problems being tougher than ever, the elimination of some of the top seeds, and some close finishes in the rounds to select the competitors for the championship round. In the championship round, it came down to 8 competitors - mostly from Eastern Europe, with 1 each from China, Japan, and Australia.

"tomek" (from Poland) got out to an early lead by solving the 250-point problem (You are given two rectangular solids of arbitrary sizes; write a function to determine the minimal surface area of a box than can enclose them) in just over 5 minutes. However, "Petr" (from Russia) prevailed in the end by being the only competitor to solve the 1000-point problem (Given an array of cables connecting N points, where each cable has a quality Q and a cost C, select a subset of the cables such that all points are connected and the sum of the quality values over the sum of the cost values is maximal). Petr walked away with $20,000 for his efforts; he was also asked at the post-event press conference "What was the most important decision that you made during the competition that allowed you to win?" His answer, naturally, was "The most important decision that I made was choosing to solve the 1000-point problem correctly."

Below are some pictures I took during the competition. At first, it can seem a bit strange to think of programming as a spectator sport. TopCoder does an excellent job though, with multiple screens displaying the standings in real time and mirrored viewsof all the competitors screens so you can see how they are approaching the problems. When the competitors are this good, it is quite exciting to just watch them work.



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