Projects

This is a list of project ideas that interest me for one reason or another, one or more of which will hopefully allow me to retire early. If you're interested in working with me on any of them, please contact me. Cheers!

Project Ideas

Education

• Clojure/lisp
  • check out memoization
  • implement sudoku or something to get the feel for it

Personal Awesomeness

• Seen iron man? When the reporter he has over wakes up, his home computer wakes up and says everything he needs to know about the day. I want that.
  • weather report
  • calendar review
  • major headlines
  • arbitrary reminders
  • AND it totally needs to make you feel important. "Good morning sir!", "Your appointment with the prime minister is in 35 minutes, shall I call his office to postpone?", etc

Intellectual curiosity / Self Education

Neural Network Creator/Optimizer

• I don't know enough on the topic yet to speak intelligently, but I think I'll play with some variation of simulated annealing, which will be fun even if it fails miserably.

The Next Interface

• This is a fun problem because the next interface has to be innovative enough to throw off the current one. A great example of this is QWERTY keyboards vs Dvorak. Dvorak is the distinct winner in every metric, but it's not better enough. My idea for the next interface is a heads-up display on glasses that provides an interactive 3-d workspace (for instance, you could type on a keyboard projected "in front" of you on your glasses). The idea is this: you wear a "connected" portable device that is primarily a projection system and sensors (to detect your interactions with the projection), ideally it would be a computer with onboard storage as well. A complete, ultra-portable computing solution with an effective, innovative workspace. The hardware projection aspect of the project is way beyond my expertise, and typically I don't like interface programming, but with something this interesting, I'd be all for it.
• Most HUDs are not interactive, this is an interactive projection technology that has some of what is needed http://www.virtual-laser-keyboard.com/
• Crunchgear agrees with me: http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/05/29/multi-touch-the-musical-or-the-next-wave-for-ui/

iPhone Apps

Free Text Messaging

All you need to do is look up the carrier (cache it) and use one of the many services out there to send it. You could integrate the address book, and store old messages. I don't think you can integrate with the apple SMS app, but if you could it'd be sweet, and I bet people would use it anyway.

• service lookups
• * http://fonefinder.net/
• * http://www.freecellphonelookups.com/
• Sending Services
• * http://www.message.com/sendsmsmessage.html
• * http://mrtextmessage.com/index.php
• * http://www.text4free.net/
• * http://www.anontxt.com/
• * http://www.onlinetextmessage.com/
• * http://textforfree.net/

Scientific Calculator

• so I don't have to carry a TI-89 around with me too.

Ebook reader

• obviously

Location aware todo list —courtesy of Dan Harrison

• Never forget to pick something up when you're in the neighborhood again

Location aware advertising

• This is a real winner, I bet google is already on it.

Location aware recommendations (aggregation of available recommendation sites)

• I really like this too, google could do it, but they might not. Consider this: you're in a new town, don't know of anywhere good to eat. You load up our application/site ask it for the best mexican restaurant within 2 miles and you get 1 place rated by zagat and another citysearch bestof winner. Click for details/map. I especially like that you don't even get a hundred million results that you may or may not have to dig through.

Specific Industrial Applications

Metric Analyzer (where bugs occur, who made them, bugs/line, etc) plugin for source control/bug tracking software

• Could be interesting data if applied broadly under different construction methodologies.

Standard Software build tool

• Right now everyone has home-brew solutions, which work, but some of the ones I've seen are really sloppy.

Things I would do if I was google

• Correlate words in news story releases with stock price changes to deliver a secret "Google Fund" product to employees/shareholders. It would basically watch news sites for articles and react to them in real time. I think it could actually work pretty well.
• They're already working on this, but: image analysis to deliver meaningful ads for image searches.

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Completed Projects of Interest

MusicIP based duplicate finder

• Written in ruby utilizing MusicIP executable and a MySQL database, trying to figure out how to integrate into iTunes gracefully