Kyle Mulka's Blog

UPDATE: I’m employed this summer… yey! Here’s the old post:

I’ve gotten several emails from people at Microsoft and Google asking me if I’m looking for work. No, they haven’t offered me a job yet, but have seen the blog and wanted to know if I had applied. I’d like to let you all know, that, yes, indeed I am looking for an internship. Summer 2006 is currently free, so that would be a good time for me to pick up an internship.

I’m interested in web services, service oriented architectures, object oriented design, social software, agile software development, developer friendly APIs, location based services, geographic information systems, machine learning, and open source software. There’s probably stuff I didn’t list, but that covers most of it.

You can check out my resume in various formats here.

On the flip side, I am also interested in starting my own business or teaming up with some people to start one or continue on an idea related to my interests. I have several posible ideas which could be very exciting to implement and see people use.

So, if you are a web software company, large or just getting started, contact me if you are interested in working with me.

If you are an individual looking for an exciting opportunity to make a difference on the web and have the technical expertise to make it happen, contact me. Let’s see what we can work out.

So, are we seeing the end of the operating system age? Will most applications no longer be tied to an operating system? Will web applications finally be cross-platform? Will the network be the computer like Sun has said for the longest time? How much processing and data can we distribute through the network?

These are some questions I’ve been asking myself in order to predict what the future of computing will be and where to position myself to get the most out of it. Check out this article out:

WebOS

Whoa… I just found this, and if it does what it sounds like it does, that’s amazing! This says it will compile a high-level language of your choice such as Java and C++ umong others into Javascript and HTML to run in a browser. Also, you will be able to unplug your new web application from the net and simply run the http server on localhost.

Morfik

I took a cue from my friend Jon Cable with his homemade projector and from Jeff Powers and his (presumably photoshopped) transparent monitor and took apart my own to see if this was even possible.

Sure enough, the 17″ ViewSonic LCD monitor came apart into several pieces with the help of a few screw drivers and fingers to pull tape off. The LCD part is completely separate from the florescent backlighting. So, take the backlighting away and bend the LCD away from the metal backing and you have a semi-transparent monitor. Now, the only problem is lighting. So, to start, I hung the circuit boards and LCD panel in front of my window. The sun provides enough light to actually see the thing, but at night, things are going to be different. So, I put some white printer paper on the window and put a light in between the paper and the LCD panel. It doesn’t work so well in the day. I’m waiting for the night to come to see it in action.

My next step may be to suspend it over my desk and shine a light on the wall behind it. That would rock!

UPDATE: So, the whole light on the window thing didn’t work as well as I had hoped… so I moved the contraption into my room. I proped it up with a couple of old textbooks with paper on the desk and a light coming from the back. It works better than in the living room, but it still needs some improvement.

It’s pretty sweet to put stuff behind it on my desk because the object look like holograms in the screen.

I may have mentioned this blog before, but it amazes me once again with its tidbits of genius. It’s called Tricks of the Trade.Here‘s a tip to not stub your toe on the way back to your bedroom from the kitchen in the night.

I just discovered Konfabulator today, and it rocks! I love widgets. I can customize what appears on my screen to the max and make it look cool. Basically, widgets are little things you can download, put on your screen either on top of, or below your other programs, or in a separate screen.

I’ve only been though about 100 of the thousands of widgets available, and I like a lot of them. For example, right now I’m using the battery, wifi, and clock widgets as we speak. They are being overlayed on top of my screen with a percentage of transparency that I can set. I can also move each widget around the screen so I can find a good place for it.

If I press F8, all my open widgets will show up so that I can easily check weather, check to see if any comments were made to my blog, check news, control itunes, umong other things. I can even play the drums with my new drum set.

This was just too awsome not to post:

http://crass.on.ru/flash/pingpong.html

VoIP is comming to the University of Michigan! I’m excited!

VeriSign® Begins Trials of Wireless IP Connect Service to Link Mobile and Wi-Fi Networks at Leading Universities

This was just too cool not to post. Its a flash interface to the arial imagery of Google Maps and MSN Virtual Earth. It has smooth scrolling and rotation. Here ya go: Flash Earth

Note to self… invest in Wi-Fi Phones. I predict you will get back 5 times what you put in in 10 years.

I predicted Google was going to go way up as soon as it came out with its IPO. It has tripled.