September 2006 Archives
Jane Oh, Chris Kairalla, and I are developing a location-based system documenting and displaying emotional response and stimulus. The project is multi-faceted, involving a cell-phone application, wearable input and display, screen-based display, and server-side locating software. Currently, we are focusing on one emotion—gratitude, as determined by facial flush response, or temperature changes in the face. Location will be determined by cell-tower ID and signal strength, as gleaned by the mobile app and server-side logic. We are developing the client app in Series60 Python, implementing the Location api. The tower info will be correlated to both user-inputed geo-data and the FCC supplied database (link). Data will be transfered to the cell-phone via bluetooth, and uploaded to the server. Subjects will also be encouraged to take relevant pictures, and hopefully video for the screen-based informatics display.
Pertinent online resources are archived here.
In a landmark move, IBM, one of the largest patent holders has decided to publish patent filings on the web for peer review. This is a huge step in the right direction, I think, in the effort against egregious patenting. The government patent regulations are slow to evolve, and hopefully this will both speed up that process, and lead to other corporations following IBM's example.
The only mobile app (aside from radar) that I tend to use with any frequency is OperaMini. I've got a Nokia 6682, and the standard web browser is pretty aweful. Mobile Opera provides a light-weight yet option-heavy browsing experience. The proxying really makes web browsing much faster and I haven't run into any huge issues. Really, the only sites I use it for are google, gmail, and the random miscelaneous site checking. I can choose which images I actually want to download, and since I don't have unlimited packet data on my plan, this is a necesary feature.
Hacktivismo today released Torpark, a web browser that leaves on trace neither on the web nor the users personal computer. The browser, released under the GNU general public license, uses TOR, an onion skinning service to seperate the originating and destintation IPs. The browser is a modification of portable Firefox.
Much privacy has been sacrificed in the war against terror and child pornography. I find this completely absurd.
On this subject, Gonzales says
"We respect civil liberties, but we have to harmonize this so we can get more information"
I call bullshit.
Had to neglect the blog these last couple weeks - life has been pretty hectic:
Worked on jumpword.com over the summer, really getting down to the full launch now.
WeRockNYC is still under develepment, though a private beta should be launched sometime in the next week.
Classes have started with a bang. My course list is great, I'm very happy thus far. Mobile Application Design, Theoretical Perspectives on Interactivity, Embedding Privacy, Mainstreaming Information, and Algorithmic Composition.
Also, look for 2 more blogs in the coming weeks, one being a music blog, the other a critical tech analysis blog (taking apart web-apps and services). Each with a couple great people aside from myself.
Sometime in the past few hours, theFacebook—that wildly successful social-networking site for college students—got a massive redesign. I have only so far seen the user home-page, and really, only glanced at that. There seems to be too much information slapped on one page, with no thought to order, but what are first impressions worth, anyways? Will deffinately check it out and extend this entry...
- UPDATE (3 minutes later) -
And on a more thorough glance, this is terrible. Do I really care about Sarah and Farid only recently becoming facebook friends? This all seems too busy, and would be hella difficult to keep track of for the power-users, of which there seem to be quite a lot. Regardless, all of this seems to be getting facebook away from being a positive, social enhancement platform—by this I mean the new architecture makes the use of facebook more important than real interaction between people, or at least taking a significant level of energy and investment that shouldn't at all be there.
Overall grade: F-
