ideas from my dreams

nes/snes/genesis achievements

2012-01-23T01:54:00.000-05:00

Either a physical device (ala game genie) or a mod to an emulator that would add achievements to nes/snes/genesis console games. Bonus points if it can post them up online. Technically it would work the same way game genie did by simply watching spots in memory to see if they are ever a certain value, a specific routine is executed, or any combo of the two.

ipod + cell network

2012-01-21T05:20:00.001-05:00

How about creating a radio device that works over the cell network?The cost of data on the cell network would be covered by the parent organization and radio advertisements. But the device would of course have extensive caching of audio on the device. Now you have a whole new band of "radio" and can show off music not created by the MPAA.

wikipedia cereal

2011-11-29T11:11:00.001-05:00

A cereal where the back of every box is a different page from wikipedia.

Jupiter composition probe

2011-11-13T23:23:00.001-05:00

Use a 3d printer to print a sphere made of metal where the circuitry is also printed and embedded in the sphere in a sphere layout (i.e. not a 2d board). The resulting probe would be able to last longer as it falls into the atmosphere giving us a better view into the inside of the planet.

real life ctrl-f

2011-11-09T20:27:00.002-05:00

Mobile app:take a photo of some text and then then on the phone type in the word you are looking for and it will be highlighted on the screen.

The CEO

2011-09-21T21:00:00.000-04:00

Write a take off of Machiavelli's "The Prince", but discuss corporate mergers and acquisitions rather than countries how how to have them be successful. It could be called "The CEO".

Sukoku photograph solver

2011-06-27T23:10:00.001-04:00

An iphone app that you can photograph a Sukoku puzzle and it will solve it or tell you the next step.

Edit (someone beat me to it):

Generated real estate newsletter

2011-06-23T20:43:00.001-04:00

Sign up to receive daily/weekly/monthly news for your town/area you and the newsletter would take in all new data about the town and generate a newsletter that looks like it is written by a human describing the various changes. School ratings, new houses on the market that are unique or hot. Change in house price values, etc.

Tectonic movement power generator

2011-05-23T23:08:00.005-04:00

In locations where tectonic plates slowly and continuously move turn the movement into a way to generate electricity.

satellite photo counter service

2011-03-21T19:17:00.003-04:00

Use daily satellite photos to count "things". The number of cars/planes/tanks/etc produced at a factory sitting in their lot. The number of cars in an office parking lot (growing or laying off?) or store (how many customers?). The number of cars sitting at a highway tollboth (traffic patterns). The number of "new" houses (construction patterns). The number of houses with solar panels. The number of boats in a harbor. The number of train cars on a train in the yards. The number of oil tankers or cargo ships. The number of trucks sitting at a factory lot (factory output). The number of planes not being used at an airport. The number of cars at disney land. Mounds of coal next to a coal mine.

Edit: also farms, crops and animals

Put any of this together and get an edge on your competition and or buy/sell stock.

Update: Found a company that does some of this RSMetrics

GPS via the stars

2011-02-02T19:39:00.000-05:00

SmartPhone application idea: hold the phone up so the camera can see the stars and it will tell you were on the planet you are.

vocal simulation

2010-12-21T23:20:00.002-05:00

Create a simulation of mammal vocal cord system and use a genetic algorithm to produce a system that can mimic the vocal output of a skilled singer. Taking this output you can than generate singing voice tracks for songs (to the extent you could even generate background music on the fly for games) along with other things like furby's that could actually talk (not pre-recorded).

Morse Code visual decoder mobile application

2010-12-19T19:33:00.003-05:00

A mobile application that uses the built in camera as video input. The application decodes the visual morse code signal the user selects.

Hard drive destruction service via thermite

2010-11-27T19:14:00.002-05:00

Mail in hard drive(s) along with cash (or pre-pay) and receive a video of the opening of the package and melting of the hard drive(s) via thermite.

every floor plan

2010-11-19T20:47:00.001-05:00

Provide a database of every house floor plan in the U.S. to those who are willing to pay

- Make deals with towns to scan existing housing floor plans.
- Provide hardware so they will continue to scan new floor plans in trade for access to the db
- Go to open houses and generate floor plans for older houses

Sell to:
- real estate web sites
- real estate planners
- home repair stores
- many more

simhighway

2010-11-19T00:43:00.002-05:00

Layout highways, number of lanes, on and off ramps, design wacky intersections. The better your highway the more people will live far from the city and the city will grow and more people will move into the area requiring more highways...

- Mess with models of your local city and fix that interchange you use every day that drives you insane.
- Disasters! mudslides, airplanes on the highway, accidents galore, snow, rain, and more!

Have the game live on an ipad for a nice intuitive touch sensitive way of drawing intersections.

iphone traffic cam

2010-05-06T13:50:00.002-04:00

Mount a iphone on a model plane/jet/helicopter. Remotely control it, flying it to traffic accidents and get video back. Cheaper then a real helicopter.

Touch screen keyboard

2010-04-16T11:45:00.002-04:00

Take a phone like the iphone that is a full touch screen, combine with a thin blackberry type full keyboard that sits on top of the screen that you can use to get the physical attributes such as accuracy. When you want the full screen the keyboard can slide down exposing the full screen.

Pool Table Overlay

2010-03-07T23:49:00.005-05:00

Commercialize this: ARPool

Or take it ten steps forward and do the following:

Have glasses that bends light so you can see wavelengths that normal people can not. Have a camera and projector built into the glasses. The camera can see the pool table. The projector will project the result of your cue strike that only you can see.

Walk Across America with Google Maps

2010-02-23T14:03:00.003-05:00

A webapp that would take googlemaps and show you the first person image of a location. You could run or walk in any direction and it would remember where you have been. So every few days you could come back to the site and walk a mile and eventually walk across America.

IDE for ccs3 animations

2010-02-07T01:49:00.000-05:00

Having a fat app ide to help one create wysiwyg css3 animations would be nice.

topic news aggregator

2010-01-02T18:04:00.004-05:00

New aggregator site that groups links into topics for in depth discussions and reading.

For news you have content and aggregators. newyorktimes.com happens to be both the home for a lot of new content and a website that aggregates that content. Other sites like reddit.com and news.ycombinator.com usually don't have any content (besides meta or ask the audience questions). One pattern is that a link to a good article is posted on Monday and throughout the week a dozen other related articles are posted and get voted to the front page. The related articles are not strong enough by themselves, but based upon the fact that everyone has read the first article users enjoy reading the other articles.

The quest is to provide better news. Every once in a while I run across a high quality article and wonder how many articles like it that I miss because it was surrounded by junk and just had a bad title. Really good articles often cause people to post related articles that get posted up.

One examples is when a movie like Avatar is released. There are rich articles on the making of the movie, the history of the technology used in the movie, the actors involved, the reviews, and more.

The site itself would be very similar to reddit where anyone can post links, but the real value/game changer would be that along with a list of links there would be a list of topics that links can get added to. Those who visited the site could view lots of little fun articles, but they could also browse the topics and read more in depth on any topic. Each topic could be a wiki page.

999 ideas

2009-12-05T17:33:00.000-05:00

Ran across this site the other day that lists 999 ideas for starts ups. Lots of fun reading through it debating the merits of ideas or different spin you could take on them.

305: Website where musicians can collaborate on lyrics - Looking around what exists today is extremely primitive compared to what the software world has with sites like GitHub.

158: Create book trailers for small publishers/authors to place on YouTube - Making trailers always seemed like a very fun thing to do and here is an opportunity to do that :)

iphone mechanical watch

2009-11-24T15:08:00.002-05:00

Simulate a mechanical watch from the ground up. Users can look through the watch mechanics layer by layer down to the main spring. Requires the user wind it up every day. Costs $3000. $5000 version includes the ability to wind the watch just by walking and the results of your motion. Go through the list of features high end watches have and plunder.

iPhone app showing your car's MPG

2009-11-20T11:26:00.004-05:00

A little iPhone application + cable that connects to your car and shows the current MPG.

After getting my G35 in 04 I would often use the MPG display and very quickly learned how to drive better. Most cars do not come with built in MPG displays though so if they had this app they could save gas and thus save money which would pay for the app many times over.

Update: found an iphone app that does this :)

"Pay an expert to review my code" website

2009-11-20T11:20:00.004-05:00

A website that would get together people who can review code and people who need code reviewed.

New to a language, library or toolkit having someone review your code can be extremely useful. Paying someone to go through your code and writeup notes on bugs, use of deprecated api, bad api, security bugs, code style can very valuable. When releasing a library having an API expert read through your api or a security expert look over for any issues can help.

It could be karma based, it could be actual $, not sure. Getting people used to the idea that they are writing code to be read by a human and that a human will review everything is a good thing.

Library size profiling tool

2009-11-20T11:18:00.002-05:00

A desktop application that when given a library or application binary will show a big square that is subdivided into areas in proportion to the size of the child objects. Users could drill down and select on an object for more information. This would be very handy for determining what part of your application is causing the executable/library size to be so large. One of those tools no one would make, but if it existed everyone would use.

audio/conversation splitting

2009-11-09T12:57:00.003-05:00

Given a recording in a room of multiple people talking output multiple files each one containing the separate audio stream. Also generate a realtime 3d map of the different audio sources and where they move over time. Would this require 1, 2 or 3 microphones?

Using web ads as a massive computer

2009-07-03T05:26:00.004-04:00

Web ads allow for javascript and even flash these days. Given that you buy million's of impressions (based on a .001% return or something ridiculously small you get a ton of impressions for cheap) you are not only buying real estate on the users screen, but buying their cpu power. Assuming that the smaller the ad size the less it costs I should be able to buy a ton of ads for very cheap if the ad doesn't even show on the screen! Combine this with some problem that is easily distributed and you could get a cheap massive computer.

Update: pluraprocessing.com, cpushare.com and discussion of plura and a biz model around this on hacker news.

Community Live Transformers Toy Movie

2009-04-19T02:21:00.002-04:00

Expanding on the previous idea of a Live Toy Transformers Movie except rather then having one person (me presumably) do the entire thing turn it into a community project where everyone gets to put together a minute or two of the film in their own style with their own toys. From the extremely ruff and crude to the polished (with votes for what goes in?) it would probably come together rapidly, rally and amuse the community.

iPhone apps

2009-04-11T00:54:00.001-04:00

Bird identifier
- Take a photo or record a sound, tell me what bird it is

Puzzle solver
- Take a photo of the box and the piece, highlight where the piece probably goes.

Pick The BoardGame

2009-04-05T23:33:00.006-04:00

Last year I blogged about pick the transformer which is a site that ranks the original transformers by showing you two toys and having you pick between them. The basic premise of the site is that ranking a large list is best done by having users choose between two items then having users rank each item 1-10. After only a few hundred votes the basic order was found and while the experiment was a success it never had a full blown test with hundreds of thousands of votes.

The past two years or so I have gotten into board games and the ranking list on boardgamegeek often helps determine what games I will buy next. The list looks like it might have some of the problems that were highlighted in my blog. It requiring each user to rank 1-10 for each game with very little help in the way of ranking. While all of the top 30 games are very good I do not think that the data and ranking system can provide an accurate way to rank the them in comparison to each other.

Combining pick the transformer and boardgame geek we can make a site to rank board games. The default webpage would list the top 15 board games. On the right hand side there is an input box to let you put in your boardgamegeek user name with a "Rank Now!" button. After clicking the button it will fetch the rss feed of the board games you have played/ranked and then show you two boardgames to pick between. Using your choices it will generate a personalized ranking of all of your games which can be compared to your boardgamegeek ranking list. The same data will be used to update the main rank of all games.

Live Action Toy Transformer movie

2009-03-27T18:30:00.002-04:00

Take the audio from the original Transformers cartoon movie and then reshoot each shot using the toys. Either the originals, updated versions, customs, and anything in between. There are a fair amount of accessories that are Movie gimmicks. The alternators hotrod has a fishing pole, you can get a Unicron head from the Takara Primus. There are even 3rd party Spike and Daniel with an Exo-Suit set. Close up shots could use the masterpiece toys, shots with the city can use the worlds smallest transformers to go with the Metroplex which wasn't that big. Overall probably pretty doable. It wouldn't have to be stop motion and could very much play on the idea that it is toys being pulled by a string or similar gags. Overall it would probably be a ton of work and entertaining to watch once. As far as distribution goes it could probably only be shown at botcon. The video would be a parody, but I don't know about the usage of the audio.

Less work and a better first attempt would be to just create a five minutes sequence like this. From this it should be clear how much fun a project like this would be.

Board game simulator

2008-12-29T06:24:00.000-05:00

To create a board game from stratch there seems to be several basic steps.

1) Idea!
2) Create board, "borrow" pieces from other games, and design the rules.
3) Play test
4) Goto Step 2, tweaking to make the game better.

Play testing involves playing your game over and over looking for issues. A user on bgdf.com wrote up a quick summary of how to play test. Many of the things listed are things you can only do in person, but something I have been pondering is how you often here the hundreds of times designers have played games. One game I got for christmas Agracola someone said the designer played it more then 500 times before the first production run. Part of the reason a designer play tests is to make the game as good as possible and to find the flaws. Even simple things like the first player can always win could take several games to discover. As different strategies are noticed it would be nice to be able to quickly apply them in a computer in hundreds of runs of the game to see if the game has a flaw and how tweaking rules would help or hinder. Rather then spending two hours playing a game with a fundamental flaw it would be nice to be able to discover that automatically and use the two hours to play good versions of the game. This would hopefully reduce the total number of play tests.

There are a few board game software programs on the internet, but they seem to be leaning to helping you visually see a board game on a computer, or setting up some website where users can play a board type game on the web (such as a quick and dirty flash movie tie in game).

So the idea would be to create a simulator (doesn't even need graphics) where after creating a game and inputing different strategies you can have the computer run the game many times over. Every game would be fully recorded so they could easily be compared. With the computer playing thousands of versions of the game it should help to discover flaws that make the game unbalanced (and thus unfun). It should help spot that a player who does action X ends up always winning/loosing a game. Or even something as simple as the first player always wins. Try tweaking rules and re-running the simulations to see what changes. Or graphing parts of the game such as victory points to notice that the game is mostly over half way through and last few rounds don't matter. All this information would be to help guide and maximize the time consuming real world play testing.

The simulator could not say if a game is "fun", but it could help to discover that the player who doesn't buy "item X" before round 4 will never win the game and even worse will be so far behind that at they will go bankrupt/loose/starve only half way through the game. Then one could tweak the rules so everyone can get a chance to buy item X before round 4 even if there are 5 players.

Of equal, but different value would an online version of this that people can play test the game. All games are completely logged. There will be way less games played, but you can see how often they reference the rules, how long they wait between turns and notice new strategies that are taken. The logged information can be inputted back into the system to more accurately determine play times, statistics and even base simulated game play upon what real players do such as with Bayesian filtering.

Disclaimer: I have never designed a board game nor done much research into this hobby. I have only thought about it from time to time as it seems like something fun to do and having a tool like this would be helpful. If you design board games please feel free to point out why this ideal is silly (or might even be useful) in the comments.

lossy javascript compressor targeting gzip

2008-10-18T20:53:00.004-04:00

There is a website that compares various popular JavaScript compression utilities. The goal is to reduce bandwidth. Looking at the results though you see that just turning on gzip compression will give you the biggest win for your effort and reduces the size of the data that is sent to ~40-20% and beyond that the best compressors seem to only half that getting down to ~15-7%. So it should be a given that you will turn on gzip compression on the server. Looking through the compressors that compress variable names you see variable names such as a,b,c,d,e etc. What if you used a, aa, aaa, aaaa, etc? Because the goal is to produce lossy compression why not tune the javascript compressor to not return a file that is small, but to return a file that can be highly compressed by the algorithms used by gzip? Some ideas to re-write the code so the same behavior occurs include:
- Use a, aa, aaa, or maybe thisthis, thisthisthis or limit yourself to the most common letters used f, o, r, e, t, n, etc Need to test out what would work best.
- Always adding an else statement so the pattern }else{ would always appear
- Making sure spacing is consistent (I think most do this already)
- all if statements use {}
- There is always a ; before a } I noticed that some of the compressors removed the ; after a return because you technically don't need it, but that makes two types of } blocks, those with a ; and those without.

Update: ticket filed on the YUI compressor http://yuilibrary.com/projects/yuicompressor/ticket/2527980

book vending machine

2008-06-07T21:08:00.002-04:00

Book vending machine in a hospital. nuff said

Side Scrolling Game Tools

2008-05-29T19:54:00.006-04:00

Construct a suite of applications that provides the means to easily create fun side scrolling games. The point of this project should not be to create a side scrolling game, but to enable other people to be able to build them. I have seen various level editors for side scrollers, but they are always very limited and very tailored to the game they were built for.

The biggest part of this is the level editor. Way beyond a grid editor the level editor will provide an experience similar to many iLife applications. Simple, easy to use and helps you rapidly create whatever you want without bogging you down with details.

Level wizard: Rather then starting with a blank level a wizard should help you out by generating a world for you from a set of presets. On the ground, underground, in the sky, in water, short, long, easy, hard a good set of defaults should get you started.

Drop play: When building a level you want to try it out to see how it works. You should be able to just right click and drop in the player right there in the level and start playing, hitting a key to exit at any time. The level should be running the engine and there should be absolutely no lag between modifying a level and being able to try it out. Most level editors out there I saw seem to require you to compile the level, start the game, goto the level and play all the way through it just to see how it plays. That feedback loop is horrible! The faster the loop is the more that designers will try out new things and the faster they can tweak the level to make it more fun.

play paths: The game should record every time that a user plays a level. The level editor should then be able to play these games back and load the path of the character in the level editor to be able to quickly spot problems such as places where people never go, guns, ammo and bonuses that are missed and more. The level play of users can be obtained by them submitting them for high score. Play paths of users (not the designer who played it 50 times) is very important. With user reports you can even find the level that half of your players can't get past and stop playing the game because.

Molding: Rather then having to place each and every square on the grid you should be able to grab objects and resize them. If the pipe sticking out of your mario level isn't tall enough just select it and pull it to make it taller. The editor should automatically figure out what to do. But it doesn't just have to work on a rectangle. Another mode would let you grab any surface such as the ground and let you pull up on it to create a little hill. The editor would automatically move up the ground and on either side add diagonal parts. Having a fluid way for level designers to easily create levels should allow designers to make richer and less rectangular levels in less time then the old way of placing each tile.

More then tiles: Going with the idea of molding there should be an easy way to paint titles. Rather then having to place each tile for a pipe on the level there should be pre-constructed objects made up of tiles that can be dropped on the level. For the set of tiles that make up a ledge it would ideal if you could just select the set and start drawing in the level and the editor would automatically use the correct tiles from the set for the different sections. Pretty much the editor should facilitate getting ideas down as quickly and easily as possible. Want to move a big chunk of the world higher up? Want to add a ledge, pipe or hill? The editor should provide the means to easily and quickly do the most common operations.

Tile sets and themes: You would think that this would be a fundamental feature of level editors and engines, but it seems like a lot of primitive ones don't have it. Changing themes should be as simple as clicking a drop down editor to switch your level from the day tile set to the night set.

Misc: The editor of course should let you zoom in/out on the fly, let you script objects, have multiple layers, spawn and respawn points, exits, let you place bad guys, ammo, guns and any object in the game.

Warnings: Have a tool that can run through the level and detect many simple errors such as edges that can't be reached, to many enemies with to little ammo and many other things. An AI could play through the level and find hotspots that might be unfun for players such as jumps that are missed too often.

Various other tools that would be built include:
- Story editor, make it _very_ easy for users to add story to their game such as cut scenes between levels.
- Tile theme editor.
- Animation editor.
- Character generator: similar to the mii generator let users easily create something unique and not part of the stock set of characters included.
- world editor: similar to mario 3 and many other games, the place that connects all of the levels.
- export: simple one click to create packages that can be distributed to your friends or online.

More then a tile editor these tools should all attempt to provide a means to easily create a fun side scrolling game and provide feedback when a game is not fun. Given such a tool it should let you rapidly create side scrolling game with a very small team. With production costs so cheap the games could be sold for very cheap or even given away to promote things like new movies.

Update:
A Mario style level generator using markov chain http://github.com/mackstann/markovio/tree/master

Coloring Transformers toys

2007-11-14T16:32:00.000-05:00

When Hasbro makes a new Transformers toy they will release at minimum two versions of the toy. As these toys get released there are the inevitable debate about the paint scheme, what would have worked better etc. Why not make a website where users can help select paint schemes? The webpage could have a model of the toy and have some basic information about the toy such as what is typically mirrored on the left and right side and any basic breakdowns such as where the hands end and the arms begin. Pretty much anywhere on the toy where it would typically not be expected to have painted with different colors. Now with that up and running generate a half dozen paint jobs for the toy randomly. The user on the website can select the paint jobs that it likes which would be the fitness function for a genetic algorithm on the paint job. With enough users (and there are plenty) you should be able to generate some really nice paint schemes as suggestions for the second (and sometimes third or fourth) versions of the toy.

Can anything ever topple ebay?

2007-10-09T18:02:00.000-04:00

Is it possible that ebay can ever be overthrown? Perhaps with a mashup of the smaller auction sites or a completely distributed auction site. You would think there would be more competition then there is today. ebay itself is a pretty horrible web application. Off the top of my head here are some features they could provide to me the auction shopper:

User tagging: I see an auction for a 1984 Transformers Optimus Prime with trailer, but it doesn't contain any of those words it it, instead it was titled (misspelled) "Transfomers lot 5". I would *love* to just slap a few tags on the auction to help out others (I already have him). The wiki editor in me just screams out to correct basic errors and missing information.

Price history: A bit of a stock ticker, but once you have tags why not provide a graph of previous auctions end price with the same (set or subset) of tags.

Find me good deals: You know my history so automatically highlight auctions that have really good buy it nows. Not wanting to miss out on a deal I will probably click the buy it now right then and there.

When to browse: There is plenty of time information that isn't presented. As a shopper: Tell me what time people post new auctions the most and I will look at the new auctions then for deals. As a seller: Tell me what time people visit the site the most and I will start my auctions then.

Help me spend my money: ebay provides its pulse pages, but they are crude and limiting. Why not show me: what auctions are people fighting over? Why not search for auctions that have bids already (probably interesting). Why not let me see what auctions people click on the most? When I am done looking for the one item that I thought to look up provide like to other auctions I might like. Use any basic recommendation engine and get what Amazon had ten years ago.

Images: Scanning through auctions if they don't have images I probably wont click on them which means everyone looses out. I don't get something I might have wanted. The buyer gets less viewers and ebay gets less money because fewer people fight over it. Sure images might earn ebay 5 cents from the seller (if it sells), but is it worth the lost revenue? (maybe it earns them a lot, but is sure makes me feel like I am not the customer, they are)

blog-embedding: Blogs like to embed youtube videos, so why can't they embed ebay auctions? Supposedly this is in the works, but it has been a hell of a time coming.

I can think of ten more and you can too probably. ebay has a monopoly so they don't have too much incentive to make all of these things happen. And on the flip side it is extreamly hard for anyone to enter the market because to make an auction work you needs buyers and to get buyers you need sellers. A nasty catch 22. The only way I can think of solving it is to first make a very nitch auction site, say for digital cameras or transformers or something small. Make it free and target that market until you are known and successful for it and then move on. Of course then we end up with just another ebay so I don't like that too much either.

Another route would be to create a mashup of all the auction sites. There are plenty of ebay copy cats (even the ugly layout) struggling to get by (why they don't go nitch I don't know) Combine their auctions with ebays and provide a lot of tools and features for users would actually want so that they will want to browse ebay on your site rather then ebay itself. But you are limited to what you can provide and it will still take a very long time (if ever) to take down ebay.

Stepping completely out of the box how about this:
Many of the sellers on ebay are full time people who have their own websites (but not so big as to be a yahoo store). Create a specification that can be use to list auctions hosted on any web site. This could be perhaps as simple as having them create an atom feed. Included in the feed would be a link to the auction house where you can bid on it. The auction house would be the place where you would have to actually log in to bid on the auction. A 3rd party non profit would hold the login information for all of the auction houses (think how google is to all the google apps for login) so users can log into any auction house (no pain for them). With the feeds any auction house could layer features on top such as tagging and history. Auction houses would complete to host the bidding. How would they compete? By drawing in users. How do you draw in users? Create good user interfaces and continue to come up with new features and services that provide value to shoppers. So now you have an easy way for stores to post auctions (even to ebay!) and a way for anyone to make an auction house and begin adding features that users want.

The most underutilized part of programs: what happened in the past

2007-10-04T04:38:00.001-04:00

When sending a sms on my cell phone and I select the person it is going to when the address book comes up I hit "j" and it then only displays names that start with "j". Even though 99% of the time I select my wife "Jen" it never pre-selects it by default, but the first one in the list.

When running a set of auto-tests remember what has failed before and runs them first.

Exiting examples (that seem almost revolutionary):

When launching your browser rather then showing a blank page show the most common page people go to.
- Opera

When compiling a projects rather than preprocessing things over and over store them for reuse on the next file to be compiled.
-precompiled headers (in some compilers, new for gcc 4)

Remember what TV shows I watched in the past and if there is free hd space and I am not doing anything and I have never seen that episode of the series automatically record it for me.
- Tivo

Bugs That Eat Your Desktop (Screensaver)

2007-09-28T19:19:00.000-04:00

A screensaver that consists of little bugs that eat your desktop, have offspring and complete to survive.

Following disney's rules the bugs would be cute and made of a simple circle with big eyes and when moving they would bend their shape slightly. When in heat they would pulsate and as they got older their color would get darker. While sleeping they could close their eyes and ever so slightly "breath".

When the screensaver starts a set of bugs are randomly generated. They start out very small (~1px) and as they eat food (colors) they can grow in size, mate, and have offspring. As the desktop colors are eaten they slowly grow back as though the desktop was grass. The bugs movements would be controlled via a gnome and a genetic algorithm would be at the heart of the screensaver.

Each bug has a set of parameters that determine its attributes:

- What color is the bug itself?
- How fast it can move?
- How much does it cost to move?
- How big it can grow (i.e. how much energy can it store)?
- What colors it can eat?
- How far can it see and what can it see?
- How much it sleeps (does it sleep?)
- Does it reproduce sexually or asexually?
- Max time it it can live before expiring.
- How much extra energy it needs to reproduce.

The interesting aspect of the screensaver is that because it is based upon whatever is on your screen at the time that the screensaver starts different bugs will emerge every time it is run. A little bug that only walks the black border of all the windows, a big fat one that eats a green webpage and a tiny parasite bug that nibbles on bigger bugs.

Update (Nov 14th 2007): Check out this super cool video on PolyWorld.

web logs for desktop applications or why web applications kick desktop applications butt

2007-09-18T18:20:00.001-04:00

When developing any application after you get the core built you begin adding features for the users. Typically you have to guess what would the users want and would use. This results in some features being essentially dead because almost no one ever uses them. There is no way to know what is *really* used V.S. what is used every once in a while.

With a web app:
- You can divide your customers in half. Give something a shot and if it works then role it out otherwise kill it.
- View the logs to see what page they leave one. Rework the text. Ad a link to the bottom.
- Follow customers through your sign on pages and see that 50% stop after page 2 and don't get to page 3
- Every page, every link, every action, even mouse movements can be tracked.

Compare this to desktop applicaiotn. Today you can only track the number of downloads or the number of CD's sold. Desktop applications need a way to log all of the user actions so that the developers can get reports about the usage.

simbank

2007-09-04T14:53:00.000-04:00

Simple version:
If the only bank in the world has only $1000 and loans $200 out to five people, what happens the next year when the five people try to pay it back?

The year is 1914 and you are in charge of a new bank called the central federal bank or CFB for short. All money is now traded in "Federal Reserve Bank Note" or $ for short. The CFB can load money to other banks or the government.

At the start of the game the following are the starting values for CFB that you can change:
- Owns 10,000 tons of gold
- The bank must hold at least 40% of its outstanding loans in gold.
- $ are valued at $20 per ounce so the bank has 16 billion dollars it is allowed to trade for gold or loan out.
- Loan interest rate starts at 1%

Gold production starts at 500 tons a year and increases on average 15 tons a year.

The point of the game is to last as long as possible and to make as much as possible. You make money by giving out loans with interest (such as to the government). Giving a loan creates new notes into the system. If there are too many notes in the system there will be inflation. To much inflation and the people try to revolt and you might loose the game. Too little money in the system and many defaults on their loans causing a depression and you might loose the game.

One of the first goals of the game is to remove the FRBN from the gold standard.

The interesting part of the game is because the majority of money is eventually created from loans (with interest) the system will collapse on itself. The longer things go on, the more interest is owned. It is your job to make it last as long as possible. It is Tetris, eventually you will loose, just a question of when.

Of course games are about fun, taking the above basic parameters create challenges that start out simple, but get harder and harder as time goes on with rewards for successful completion of tasks. Collecting more and more assets before the collapse. Gaining abilities such as tweaking parameters at the banks within the system and buying political clout. Wars, depressions, getting off the gold standard, inflation, new presidents, bubbles and busts, everything that can, does happen :)

Valgrind code coverage

2007-08-31T21:00:00.000-04:00

To obtain code coverage on tests the only real option today is to use gcov. To use gcov you must you gcc and link in a libarary into everything that is executed which can be a pain. Rather than doing that, why not just either a) write a tiny valgrind module that outputs lines touched in a file and jumps taken or b) re-use callgrind's output and then combine that data with proper parser (of your specific language) to generate code coverage reports.

Freedesktop.org web browser

2007-08-10T18:51:00.002-04:00

Make a web browser using webkit and Qt. Host it on freedesktop.org and incorporate anything and everything to make the browser integrate with freedesktop. Using Qt the browser would look good in Gnome and KDE with the Plastique and Cleannlooks themes. DBus support is a must, freedesktop.org mimetype support, and more. Create a standard for storing bookmarks. Use xdg-user-dirs to place things in the Download directory. Would it work? Would it take off? Probably not, people like to bicker to much. KDE users wouldn't use it because it isn't Konqy, Gnome users would refuse to use it because it has Qt. Would it be fun to make? Yes.

Edit: So I ended up kinda doing this one: ttp://arora.googlecode.com/ Rather then for freedesktop it is more cross platform.

Collaborative Documentation Web Application

2007-08-06T15:38:00.000-04:00

A web application that can take documentation, perhaps in XML or another format such as Doxygen's and display it, but the add-on value would be that it would allow users to add comments to any part of the documentation. The application would provides features that would make it very easy for the documentation writers upstream to know about new comments so that they can integrate useful ones into the documentation.

Common errors that are discovered by the users where it would be useful to have an easy way to report include:

Spelling mistakes

Typo's

Broken links

Examples that don't compile

Straight out docs that don't match the behavior of the function code

Documentation that could be worded better

Undocumented behavior

Beyond those users are able to provide quite a bit of value add to documentation when presented with a way to such as:

Example usage

Workarounds

Performance tips

PHP's php.net website was the first I saw that had this built in feature. A good example is str_replace. The users provide a lot of extra value. The problem is that currently php.net is for php and same goes for the few other collaborative documentation sites that are out there. Compare this to the hundreds of Doxygen generated sites out there there this is a project that would have a lot of users.

Making testing enjoyable with parsers

2007-07-24T07:34:00.001-04:00

A lot of people can find writing autotests to be tedious. But once you have a parser for your code there are a number of very interesting projects that you can write to help test your code and improve your auto tests.

The faster you can find errors the less time you will spend later on fixing bugs. The more I can automate things, the more tests I will get and the better the chance that I will find bugs sooner while I am still familiar with the code.

Generate autotests

The first things you should do with the parser is write a tool that will generate a stub auto test for you. Once you have an autotest adding new ones are not that hard, but creating that first one can be hard. Don't stop at just a stub, basic tests that just call every function (to make sure they don't crash) and more are very useful to generate. After that when writing the stub that will test function X the parser should walk inside of X and automatically add comment to the test for each control flow statement. Then all that has to be done is go through and implement each comment. This should remove a lot of the guesswork about what to test.

Mutation testing

Once you have autotests you can run your parser over your code only this time have it modify the code. There are plenty of simple things such as changing if(foo) to if (!foo) that can be done with very little work. After the modification run the auto tests and see if the test still passes, in which case the auto test coverage isn't very good. Record those changes that don't cause any failures in the tests.

Sameness

When adding a feature or fixing a bug one thing you want to do it to make sure that your changes didn't accidently change something that it wasn't meant to. Generate a known set of known things about your object. To start this database use your parser to call every function and record what happens. It doesn't need know if what it does is right or wrong just what it does. After making a change you can compare any differences to make sure you didn't break something you didn't mean to. The more data you can add to the database the more secure you can be in knowing that your changes didn't cause unintended regressions.

Test failure finder

I have previously written about this method here: Test failure finder.

Fuzz

A simpler version of the previous, test failure finder, using the parser to determine what can be called and just call the inputs with random data (from a seed) until it crashes. This is a way to test your code without having to write any code at all and can be run starting from day one.

I don't like to fix bugs, I like to code.

Photo booth with a comment field

2007-07-21T20:05:00.000-04:00

In OS X there is an application Photo booth. It would be nice if your was a very easy way to add comments to the image that would be saved into the images exif data. Then you could add comments about who was in the photo, thoughts etc.

Make an application as simple as Photo Booth (for images or video), but with the ability to add comments and then upload it to flicker or youtube.

Valgrind memory measuring done better

2007-07-19T16:22:00.001-04:00

Create a memory tool similar to KCacheGrind.

Valgrind is a fantastic application with several built in tools. One of the tools is massif, a heap profiler. While nice this tool was quickly put together and leaves you wanting more. It generates two output formats. The first is a pdf file. The data is squished to fit onto the pdf size, colors are reused and in general it is just hard to read. The second format is txt/html. The txt is near worthless, but the hmtl is at least a little bit usefull. With enough time and effort you can get some good information out of it. At the end of the day massif only touches the tip of the iceberg as far as features go.

Change massif to generate a data file similar to callgrind where you get a complete stack trace every time memory is allocated or deallocated. Then a rich tool can be created that can graph the data, you can select the any allocation and get details on what it is and where it was allocated.

Another tool could be run as the data is generating showing a graph of memory usage so when you do something in your application and the graph spikes up you would immediately see it.

A tool like this is missing in open source.

git in a word processor

2007-07-19T16:22:00.000-04:00

Combine git with a word processor transparently to provide a editor that is leaps and bounds beyond what any word processor provides today as far as versioning and branching goes. Be able to share docs and actually merge them.

Make your own social bookmarking site

2007-07-18T18:46:00.001-04:00

Combine reddit.com and blogger.com to get a site where you can create forum/social bookmark sites about any topic you want in two minutes.

reddit.com is a good site. A bit of a forum site, a bit of a social network site. Unfortunately it has grown in size the as it has grown the content that is found on reddit is more general and there is a lot of group think. Overnight there are dozens of articles about impeaching the president or electing Ron Paul or some random big news story of the week. The more users that sign onto redit the more general the topics become. Breaking news is much more likely to survive then a link to a published science paper no matter how good it is. About a year ago reddit started getting kitten pictures and today many programming articles don't make it to the front page anymore.

With tags and filters one would be able to ignore the latest reddit fad, but there is something that tags could never fix. If you submit an article about an interview with a comic artist there is probably more people on reddit who will mod it down then up. Now if you were to go to a comic forum/social site that same article might be the top article and debated in depth. Topics that are not in the mainstream, but nitch don't work too well on social bookmarking sites like reddit. Many people have taken the approach of created there own reddit/digg clone specifically for a nitch. http://truemors.com/ lets you submit rumors and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ lets users vote on pre-identified blogs (including themselves) are just two such clones and there are many more. Some of these sites have been coded from the ground up, but there is starting to be programs you can download and in install to get a digg clone. This is just the next generation of the bulletin boards from ten years ago. You still have to own the domain, hosting and perform all the maintenance on the site.

blogger.com provides a nice service, before blogger.com typically you really had to setup your own domain and have your own blog, but after that in five minutes flat you could have a blog. Heck you could have ten blogs about ten topics if you wanted just as easy. Now if you were to have a site like blogger.com, but rather then making blogs, it would let you create reddit clones. Create a social bookmark site around any nitch you want. If there is a community then it survives and if not, well it was only a few minutes of work to set up.

Slashdot, K5, digg, reddit, one by one they have risen and then what was once so nice, fills up with junk. The community moves on to a new social site. Well they don't move overnight, first someone has to make a new site for them to move to. With this social site overnight a new community could be created. A community can fracture in a nice way. When Ron Paul became big anyone could have overnight made a Ron Paul social bookmarking site where every single link could be posted and appreciated rather then the slow death on reddit where eventually everyone was voting down Ron Paul articles, not because they were bad, but simply because they were about Ron Paul.

The idea that reddit brings is good, good enough to be bought, but bigger then them would be a site that lets you make sites, thats a site that Google would buy.

Update: I have informed of one such site that is trying to do just this (and looks quite reddity): dailyhub.com

Update: And another site http://slinkset.com/ and a site that just for comments: http://disqus.com/

Web browser on a canvas

2007-07-18T16:21:00.000-04:00

Take the browser window and slap it in a canvas. By default it could look like Firefox/Safari etc, but unlike them you can zoom out to find a graph showing your history. If I started out at page A and then click on B and then opened a new tab AA when I zoomed out to the graph view I would see the following:

[A]
|
[B] [AA]

Scrolling up and down there could be lines highlighting the hour/day change making it easy to find where you were. All pages that you visit in your history will be indexed and be searchable. Typing in searching will hide nodes that don't apply leaving the remaining ones that are left easy to browse around.

Because the browser is built on top of the canvas animations and transitions will be very easy to implement. Features that you have seen on the iPhone and in the newer 3d window managers can be done with ease. Going back could have the page scroll off the bottom of the screen and the previous site scroll down and subtly "bounce" into the window.

Developers could add all sorts of features, hit and key and like OS X's dashboard you can flip around a webpage and dissect it, information nodes/boxes could pop off all sides and with zooming in and out of the canvas there is plenty of room for all sorts of addons and details about the site without having to sacrifice because of space.

Or when a webpage is flipped over there would be all the user addons such as the ability to list what filters apply to that site, if cookies should be allowed, etc

Update: Check out what Zack has done with wekit on a canvas.

Transformers stock graph

2007-07-11T09:29:00.000-04:00

With eBay publishing its auctions via rss, you could create "stock" graph of Transformers toys. It would be interesting to see the price of items rise or fall over time, spiking at Christmas perhaps etc. Of course Transformers are just the tip of the iceberg, it would be interesting to see the graphs of many hot items.

Scale with a memory card

2007-07-11T09:16:00.001-04:00

How about a weight scale that you could put a CF or SD card into. Every time it measures the weight it records the time and amount. Then you will get a nice easy and simple method of keeping track of what you weight that can very easily be turned into graphs etc.

Update: Scale with bluetooth! http://www.google.com/products/catalog?client=safari&rls=en&oe=UTF-8&q=bluetooth+scale&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=8355700080147424377&sa=X&ei=X-GHTbPgPKyM0QH1o7SDCQ&ved=0CCAQ8wIwAQ#ps-sellers

Update #2 cheaper wifi model: http://www.withings.com/en/bodyscale

Calculator Wars!

2007-06-19T17:22:00.000-04:00

Who wants a boring calculator that just shows you your answers when you could have it shown to you in an epic battle?

On the top half of the screen is an empty field and beneath it is a empty line edit. When you type "3" into the line edit three blue knights appear on the left hand of the screen. You continue typing "+ 2" and two red knights appear on the right hand side of the screen. Hitting the enter key the knights all trot into the middle of the screen and the colors turn yellow giving you five yellow knights.

Using other operations makes for a more interesting view. "3 - 2" will result in the knight fighting until there is only one left. The same goes for division. Multiplication is a bit more tricky. The family friendly version could have the knights calling for re-enforcement's while the adult version could use animals rather then knights and they would just multiply after a quick climb over each other.

When you add parenthesis the groups would be divided up and you could watch the different divisions attacking to see which color survives in the end. It could either do a random all for one mess that results in the correct answer or the divisions attack in the proper mathimatical order.

This is all about eye candy so there would be many different types of creatures. Subtraction could be Trolls that come over and club or even have arial planes that bomb before flying off screen. Given a little intelligence it would be a lot of fun to watch. The battles didn't need to be short, a long calculation with big numbers could take a long time.

From the Square One TV show, a skit with a similar premise as Calculator wars :)

concurrent javascript

2007-04-19T17:16:00.000-04:00

How about running Javascript code in parallel automatically?

Take javascript code A
Parse code A into a code tree and output into LISP
Parse LISP and separate into separate blocks that can be run in parallel with no worry, insert map reduce code to be expanded
Use a LISP to javascript to generate javascript code which now contains map reduce calls.
execute javascript inside interpreter that has map reduce library hooks.

It might work, it might not. Fun to ponder.

Procedurally Generated Themes

2006-01-01T07:01:00.000-05:00

How about having your desktop widget theme be procedurally generated? And then over time the theme could slowly start changing its parameters and before you know it your widget theme is completely different.

failure finder (or auto tests ++)

2005-09-19T18:12:00.000-04:00

After I started writing autotests I began to noticed that I was still having bugs found in those classes that I had autotested. Every time a new bug was found I spent a fair amount of time trying to determining why my autotests hadn't found it. In the end I concluded that autotests can only get you so far because I wont think to call x(), y(), y(), y(), x() in my autotest even though I did happened to test x(), y(), x(). I can only comprehend a limited set of all permutations of interactions.

To automatically find some of these pairs would be set up. The first half of each pair is actions and the second set are verifiers.
For every action there is a verifier of the "state of the world" as known by that action. For example if you have the following functions:


size();
setSize(x) { last = first + x; mySize = x;}
int mySize;

The action is setSize(x) and the verifier confirms that size() will return last() - first(). With this pair you are then able to randomly verify and set things. Somewhat similar to how you generate genetic algorithm. Once you find a failure you simply perform the same genetic algorithm search, but this time the goal is the smallest set of operations that can still reproduce the failure.
Then when you add function


clear() { last = 0; first = 0; }

the test would find a bug very quickly.

SimAdmin

2005-05-15T16:59:00.000-04:00

icefox: Do you think people would want an SimAdmin game?
blarf2: hrm could I possibly be going deaf
icefox: Place computers, wire them up, add servers, backup servers, switches
icefox: Disaster! virus struck
icefox: Disaster! ISP went bankrupt and you don't have a reduntant backup!
icefox: Congradulates: your company has propered and is adding a call center. Add 100 terminals.
icefox: Warning: users on floor two are complaining about slow network speed
icefox: Disaster: A user has plugged in a cable from network a to network b no data is transfering, find cable and cut
icefox: The possiblities are endless
blarf2: icefox: sounds like something I wouldn't play, but it could be a fun way to create or abuse some sim game framework

3D Programming IDE

2005-05-05T17:09:00.000-04:00

It might be interesting to have a 3D environment be a programming world where each room/area would contain one statement of code.

Variable could be in game items.

type int- Coins/Bills
type string - Scroll/Books
type float - Water/Wines/Drinks

There are two aproches you could take with this idea. The first would be to have each room already defined and by playing the game you would in essance debugging and editing the application so you can complete the level.

Here is a sample level in crud ascii.


[foo=Hello World]
   |
[print foo]
   |
[a = 10]
   |
[if a == 10] - [ a = 1]
   |
[print a]
   |
[while a != 10] - [ ] 
   |
[Exit]

A walkthrough of this level:

You enter the first room and there is a scrool on the floor which you pick up. The scroll says "Hello World" on it. There is a door in front of you. You walk through the door into the second room. On the wall above a door it displays "Hello World". You walk through the door and get 10 coins. Moving into the next room it has two doors. You turn and go into the room on your left. You get zapped and are left with one coin. Going back you go in the other room where it has on the wall "1". The next room has a open door and a closed door. The open door leads to a empty room. Confused you go back a few rooms and get ten more coins and then continue to the last room where the door to the exit is now open.

This way of using the ide is much more game orianted.

The second idea would be that you would be dropped off in a empty room. There would be a console type interface where you can modify the room. You can make that room do anything you want, but it can only do one statement. The room could contain coins or a jug of wine (w = 10.2) for example. Once the room gets a statement then one or more doors will appear. You can then go into the next room and modify it. When exiting the "ide" it would leave a level.c file that can compile and run with any normal compiler.

It might be interesting to open existing source in this environment to see how lost you get.