Kyle Mulka's Blog

So… my Dell Lattitude was kinda falling apart. Both of the hinges that hold the screen up broke, so its pretty unusable as a laptop. Just yesterday, about a week and a half late, my new 13 inch widescreen white MacBook arrived. It was it was white, shiny, and ready to go out of the box. After installing a few applications, and setting a few things up, I was ready to go full force. There are so many cool things about the MacBook that I could list here, but I’ll let you go to apple’s website for the details. For example, today in techcom, I couldn’t stop playing with Expose. It’s a feature of the operating system that lets you move all the open windows at the same time to different places. You can press F9 to quickly show them all at once and select the one you want. Press F10 to show all your windows in the current application. Press F11 to move all your windows temporarily off-screen so you can see the desktop. Press F12 to see your Dashboard widgets, a cool feature in itself which I still have left to play with.

I think VoiceXML will be the next really big revolution on “the web”. Of course, its no longer the web because they aren’t really webpages. They are XML files that are read to you and have programmed responses. VoiceXML is an easy way for developers to create interactive voice response systems. Combined with a dynamic scripting language like PHP, these XML files can be very powerful.

Instead of a web browser, people will have voice browsers. These voice browsers will parse the XML, turn the text into voice, and receive specific voice commands based on what’s in the XML. Once a voice command has been interpreted, it sends it back to the server to fetch another VoiceXML page.

Notice how this way of doing things limits the bandwidth across the network and also makes the server extremely scalable because the server doesn’t have to do any processing of voice. Instead of sending voice across the network, we send text which the browser translates to and from speech.

UPDATE:

In response to Dave’s first comment below:

I’m pretty sure the blind already have this kind of technology to read web pages. In fact, I just looked it up and found this:
http://www.nfb.org/tech/webacc.htm

Sorry that I didn’t mention mobile applications in my initial post. I definitely don’t see voice browsers replacing web browsers on full sized screens. People can read much faster than they can listen or speak.

Depending on how small your screen is on a mobile device, it might be more efficient to listen than to try to read the screen. It is definitely faster to speak than to try to type on a very small keyboard if your device even has a keyboard at all. So, this would be perfect for small devices where the other methods of getting information in and out are inefficient.

Also, like you mention, it would be good while you are driving, because you need to keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel. Or, you could just turn on the auto-pilot. Oh wait, we don’t have that for cars yet.

Since I’m working at Amazon.com this summer, I pay more attention to the company than I would otherwise. One recent announcement that I was predicting several months ago, was that Amazon would offer groceries on their site. Just recently we announced our Grocery store along with a new feature… a Shopping List.

One reason I was interested in online grocery stores was because we actually had one that would deliver to the Ann Arbor area, specifically to student dorms at the University of Michigan. It was called Arbor Grocery. I doubt they are still delivering over the summer, but hopefully they will continue next fall. I was actually considering buying the business as it was for sale last semester because the owners were moving on to “real” jobs. It got bought for something like $500. I’m pretty sure they just went to the grocery store and delivered the stuff to you, so its not like they had a warehouse to sell or anything.

I was looking into a few other grocery stores. Specifically NetGrocer and Simon Delivers. Net Grocer actually sells products on Amazon’s website.

One of my professors from last year and a bunch of my friends have been developing Zattoo, a peer-to-peer video streaming technology back in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The client runs on both Windows and Mac and supposedly allows millions of viewers to watch a single live video stream over the Internet without costing the broadcaster a whole lot of bandwidth.

It is a little like BitTorrent in the fact that its peer-to-peer and doesn’t require the original person with the content to have a huge pipe to the Internet. It is very different from BitTorrent in the fact that the content is streaming. Timing makes a difference. If a piece of the video gets lost over the network, there is no need to resend it because you can’t rewind the video. There is no way to save the video to your computer either.

Just a few days ago, the news went out about Zattoo being the the system used for streaming the 2006 FIFA World Cup. That is very exciting news. I’m looking forward to being able to watch soccer over the Zattoo client in June! That is… if they are broadcasting to the US…

Quick-start, Long-play Internet Television Arrives with Zattoo P2P IPTV

Zattoo brings long play P2P broadcasting to Internet TV

UPDATE: Looks like Zattoo has a blog now! Yey!

It’s time to announce it to the world! I’ll be working for Amazon this summer in Seattle for about 12 weeks as a Software Development Engineer Intern starting May 8th. I’m really pumped!

So, my last entry was about Blue Puddle, my research project for the semester. This entry is about my other project for the semester called liveUgli.

What is liveUgli? Here’s the description straight from the about page:

“liveUgli is for finding students who are doing the same thing as you, right now. Find a classmate to ask a question, or a nearby friend to study with.”

Basically, a user sits down somewhere in a study space on campus either with a laptop or at a one of the many computers, logs into liveUgli selects a building and floor, and clicks on their location on a floorplan. We’re working hard to get location detection in place so that this process is semi-automated for the user. They can also tell us which class they are studying for and what specifically they are working on.

While on the site, they can browse through the floor plans and see who is studying what where. If they tell us what classes they are taking and who their friends are, we can limit the view to just their friends and classmates.

So, once they have found someone they may be interested in studying with, asking a question of, or taking a study break with, they can either visit them in person, or instant message them via AIM, MSN, etc. or our own messaging system which has yet to be implemented.

We’ve been in close contact with Jeff Powers who is building Mates pretty much by himself now. We plan on using the services Mates provides to power liveUgli.

The other project Jeff is working closely with is Ping. Basically, it is a smartphone client for Mates.

We like to think of liveUgli as a web-client for Mates, but its much more than that.

I know I haven’t written a real entry in a while. Lately, I’ve been working on my two major semester long (at least) projects for school. They are both websites and they both use the Google Maps API. How cool! I’ll explain the first one in this entry, and the second I’ll leave for another entry.

The first is called Blue Puddle. It is a student-initiated research project funded by GROCS. Basically, we want to be sort of like Wayfaring, sort of like Yellow Arrow, sort of like Map Hub but better in our own little unique kind of way. I think there are a few other sites I could list… If you really want to see them click here.

There are four students working on the project: two grad students in the School of Art and Design: Zack Denfeld and Brent Fogt, one grad student in the School of Information: Nika Smith, and me, Kyle Mulka, an undergrad in the College of Engineering.

Here’s the blurb from the proposal that (I think) Zack wrote that makes our project sound pretty interesting and research-like:

“The Blue Puddle software takes advantage of the Internet’s distributed authorship capabilities to create maps that draw on users’ collective memory and subjective experience of a city. These maps foster the emergence of stories about the city that are richer than any single author could create. The virtual digital environment created by Blue Puddle will serve as a catalyst for engaging the real built environment.”

One cool toy we are using is a digital GPS camera. It records latitude and longitude in the actual jpeg when you take the picture. We (well.. the Digital Media Commons really) bought the Ricoh Caplio Pro G3 digital camera from GeoSpatial Experts along with their GPS-Photo Link software. When we tried out the camera with the software for the first time, we realized we didn’t actually need the software at all. In fact, we are re-implementing a portion of their software using Google Maps which makes it 10 times cooler. I’m not a fan of their automatic web page creator. Although it gets the job done of putting a set of GPS photos on maps, its pretty ugly.

So… if you have feedback on the site, let me know via comments on this blog post, or via email. Keep in mind though, its not even close to being done.

So, I was playing around with my new wacom tablet pen input device that Steve Fentriss gave me to use. It’s pretty sweet. Thanks Steve. The whole pen input isn’t quite the same as normal pen to paper mostly because you have to look on the screen instead of on the pad. I opened up GIMPshop to see if I could make any good use of my new found tool for drawing stuff. Indeed, after downloading the right software and changing a few settings I was able to get touch sensitivity to work which was really cool. So, the harder you press on the pad, the thicker, or darker, or wider your pen or marker, or whatever got. Here’s some quick sketches I made. Don’t laugh too hard. I’m not an artist.

Mmm… scribling stuff on a map…

I call it “Splash of Color”…

So, after several weeks of waiting, Merit was finally able to upload the webcast of the Google Maps presentation I gave at the Merit Joint Technical Staff Meeting on October 11th, 2005.

Just as a warning, the video is 45 minutes long and my not be the most simulating thing you’ve ever seen before. It is basically, an introduction to the Google Maps API on a very high level. I didn’t go into any code. It lays out what you can and can’t do with the Google Maps API, ho

“The space, the social network, thinking tools and the network interface in the same field of view. The boundaries between what is interior and what is exterior intersecting tangibly in front of your eyes.”

If you have interest in continuous computing, location aware devices, social computing, or similar stuff check this out. At least start reading it. I just started, and it is amazing me. It has a lot of good ideas about where we can take the location sensing technology. The PDF is linked to on the left of the main page.

The Headmap Manifesto