Feedback

In order to get feedback from testers, a new feature was added to the Forecast Exchange today. On the left side you will see a red button saying Feedback. By clicking that you will find a list of suggested new features which you can vote on. All users gets ten votes they can spread over the different suggestions as they please (max 3 per item). The idea is then that the most voted for suggestions will be the next to be developed.

If you have a similar web site you can easily add this feature yourself. UserVoice is the company that does this. Most features are available for free. For an open source project like this you even get unlimited use on the features, in some areas even more than for the professional version. Our link was registered and we had to add a code snippet generated by UserVoice to our main.master file and that was it. Very cool!

Friends with blogs

In this day an age of blogging and Obama I have surprisingly few friends with blogs. Perhaps I'm too old? Here is a short overview of those I know about and their relationship to the Forecast Exchange:

Torbjørn Marø is a software developer who writes a great blog in Norwegian, in which I have contributed a little. It is blog.kjempekjekt.com (in addition he has a Sci-Fi blog at sf.kjempekjekt.com). Torbjørn is the lead web developer at the company I work for and is always eager to start new projects. It is therefore not surprising that it was he who started the coding on the Forecast Exchange in the first place. After a while he took a break from it, to start several new projects, but perhaps now, after the beta-release, he will consider contributing again? I surely hope so!

Pavel Kapustin is also a software developer that works in the same company as me. He is Ukrainian, but also speaks Russian, English and Norwegian fluently. He is an idealistic programmer and has joined the work on the Forecast Exchange on the promise to be able to develop something from the ground up using only the best techniques available. His blog is badbadboy.livejournal.com and consists of a mix of Russian poetry and programming discussions on a high level.

Pål Levang is also (yes, I know ...) a software developer. He doesn't work for the same company as me. Instead he has started his own companies (yes, plural!) and is always full of crazy ideas, a fountain of weird, but also sometimes very interesting stuff. This year he is even part of the Norwegian TV show Skaperen, with a one million NOK first price for the best innovation. He started a blog today, being inspired by this blog. Oh, the ripple effect ... You can check it out at omvendte.blogspot.com.

Ivar Areklett is an old friend helping with the beta-testing. He works for the Norwegian goverment, checking that the Norwegian IRS follows their guidelines. His web page is Ivar Areklett's hjemmeside. It has not been updated for a while, since his computer crashed and burned last year.

Test period started

Today I cleaned up the database and prepared for the first testing period. I set up nine predictions that will all end on or before March 1st. I have asked friends, family and colleagues to test, competing over who will be the best to predict what will happen in February 2009.

It's a girl!

I'm going to have a daughter. Celina and I went to the official ultra sound at Haukeland Sykehus today. It was very exciting! It turned out to show a healthy girl; you could see her kicking and moving around in there, floating happily, having an exclusive party inside Celina's womb.

After putting some kind of blank jelly on the outside of Celina's stomach they dragged, pointed and even stabbed to get the angles they wanted. I was surprised at how hard it seemed that the most experienced woman jabbed the ultra sound device into Celina's stomach to try to get the baby to move so that she could check out the baby's face. I guess it answered Celina's question on how hard she could push on her stomach before it was dangerous. But all in all a very cool experience for a first time dad like me.

First publicly available beta-version

This past weekend I paid to get the Forecast Exchange hosted. I semi-randomly ended up with Netcetera, an English hosting company. For something like £6 a month I get to have web applications running on their machines. I also bought the domain www.theforecastexchange.com after discovering that the domain www.forecastexchange.com was already taken. Good thing the logo says the Forecast Exchange anyway.

I will describe in more technical details later the errors I encountered when getting this to work on the new web host. For now I am proud to present version 0.1 beta available for viewing at www.theforecastexchange.com. You will not be able to log in yet, but at least you can view the application. I expect to clear the database to get some friends to test already this week. If you are interested in joining the beta testing, please just respond to this post.

Hello World!

Welcome to a blog about life, the Universe and the Forecast Exchange. My name is Halvard Hagesaether, I am 38 years old and I work for a small software development company in Norway. Over the last few years this company has undergone extensive changes in their way of organizing development, becoming more agile, dynamic or whatever is the current buzz word for it. Thinking a lot about these changes, reading about cutting edge research and having a general love for counter intuitive ideas, I have come up with the idea of the Forecast Exchange.

With great help from colleagues this has so far ended up with an open source project you can find at CodePlex. Open source means it is free for all, even the code behind it. What it is all about I will come back to soon, this is just a welcome message for this blog.