Kyle Mulka’s Blog

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.

For those of you that go to UofM, I can’t stress enough that if you have your own computer, and currently use umich web mail to check email, you NEED to check out Mozilla Thundirbird if you haven’t yet. I’ll make it as easy as possible. Ready?

Why is Thunderbird better than umich webmail?

• Pressing the delete key makes the email gone… instantly
• you can select multiple emails at a time and delete them with the delete button
• you can drag one or more messages into a folder, and they go within a second, usually
• its all around faster
• you can get notifications of new messages that popup in the corner similar to AIM

Even if you don’t want to switch, you can still use both. Even I still need webmail when I’m not at my own computer. Umich seems to support Mulberry as another email client, but I’ve only been able to find and/or use it on the Macs in the fishbowl.

You may ask me, wait, so you have to sign up for a Thunderbird account, and get your email forwarded? No, no, a thousand times no. Its the SAME account. You get messages directly from umich. Your email remains on umich servers if you select IMAP, so you can read messages on both the web and Thunderbird and they will always be in sync, unless of course your computer gets disconnected from the internet.

So, ready? Go!

Here is the website to download the program for free:
Mozilla Thunderbird

Here’s the instructions to set it up to talk to umich servers:
Umich Thunderbird Setup Instructions

Enjoy. If you have any problems, questions, or comments that aren’t addressed in this post or in one of the links in it, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or email me. Click “contact me” on the right side of my blog.

-Kyle

Looks like Google is hiring in Ann Arbor… That’s cool. Maybe I won’t have to move after all. Unfortunately, I’m not a fan of server installation, so hopefully they will move into town with more software engineering type jobs. A few newspapers and blogs predict a Googleplex coming to Ann Arbor here, and here, and here. We’ll just have to wait and see.

UPDATE:
After a Google search, I found some more information about this. Looks like its official. Google is leasing office space in Ann Arbor, oddly close to where I worked last summer. What’s even more interesting in general is the fact that the company that vacated the space was also digitizing print media.

This article explains how you can (for practical purposes) put multiple pictures on your facebook profile. Basically you will go from multiple photos to something like this, ready to upload to facebook.

UPDATE: So, I tried uploading my image, but it looks like they are now limiting the dimensions of the profile picture. You can’t have it a whole lot longer than it is wide. Unfortunate indeed.

First, go find a computer with Imagemagick installed on it already, or install it yourself. Fortunately, I had previously installed it on my own linux computer. If you go to the University of Michigan, like I do, you can also find it installed on some of the servers that you can SSH into for IFS. For example, sftp.itd.umich.edu has it installed. For the rest of this article I’m going to assume you are using IFS.

First, find the pictures you want on your profile. Edit them to suit your tastes by taking out red eye, cropping them, and what not. Or, just leave them be. Whatever.

Upload them to a folder on your IFS space. There are several ways to do this. Check here: Connecting to IFS

Open an SSH terminal to that same folder.

Type in the following at the command line followed by the names of the images in the order you want them to appear and the name of the image you want outputted all separated by spaces:

montage -geometry 200 -mode Concatenate -tile 1

For example:

montage -geometry 200 -mode Concatenate -tile 1 img1.jpg img2.jpg img3.jpg out.jpg

Then press enter. It might take a short while. When the prompt comes back again, refresh the view of the folder (View -> Refresh) and download the output image. There ya go. Now, upload that image to facebook, and you are ready to rock! Contact me if you have any questions.

UPDATE: (3/29/06) Mschedule.com and the auto schedule generator have been fused together into one site.

http://www.mschedule.com/

More info

MISchedule, the University of Michigan automatic schedule generator, is ready for Winter 2006 scheduling. (and now Fall too)

I just loaded up the database the other day and it appears to be working. Let me know if you have any problems.

Along the same lines, I’ve switched Mshedule‘s (without the I) default term to Winter 2006, so it is ready too. I haven’t taken the time yet to merge these two websites yet, but you can save your MIschedule to Mschedule.

Paul Graham rocks! If you are at all interested in software startups, check this out. It’s dated 2001, and I think still applies for the most part.

The Other Road Ahead

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.

Using the Internet for social networking is all the rage these days. If you haven’t heard of the facebook, you are living in a hole… that or not in college. I am really excited about it!

In my special topics class on continuous computing we talk about social software, mobile devices, web services, communications, location based technologies, and in general, the current trends in technology. It is awsome.

So, the other day I noticed a sign for an “afternoon tea” talking about mobility and media, and I thought is was relevant to what we were talking about in class… so, I invited the class (only about 15 students) and went. While there we talked about GROCS which provided grant money for student initiated projects. I met a school of information grad student who’s interested in the same things I am. So, I might be doing a project with him next semester. He wants to create tagged maps of the university that are completely zoomable and taggable which means you can associate an arbitrary amount of data with an area of the map. It should have building layouts, sidewalks, common areas, and the like.

Along the same lines… I was introduced to a GROCS project from last semester called Mates. Its a location based social networking tool. It connects users based on location, classes, interests, and friendships. Here is their web site and awsome video.