Ville Karavirta

January 28, 2015

Goodbye 2014, Welcome 2015

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.

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October 20, 2014

Moving to SquareSpace

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.

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July 31, 2013

Leaving Academia and Aalto (at least for now)

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.

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May 20, 2012

Event Handling for JSAV Data Structures

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.

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October 9, 2011

DeviceOrientation event and device orientation

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.

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September 8, 2011

OEmbed Endpoint for TRAKLA2 Algorithm Visualizations

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.

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July 1, 2010

New Publication List with bib-publication-list

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.

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March 9, 2010

Fun with MozOrientation in Firefox 3.6

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.

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September 28, 2009

Interactive Questions in JSXaal

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.

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August 20, 2009

JSXaal Goes Open Source

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/.

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August 17, 2009

XAAL has a new home at xaal.org

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.

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August 4, 2009

Welcome to VilleKaravirta.com

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..

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