Kyle Mulka's Blog

So, apparently I have my phone number listed on the internet. Yes, in fact I do. You can see it by clicking “contact me” on the right side of my page. Apparently some girls in Oregon like to search for “random weird” images on Google Image Search. My contact information is in an image and you can find it by searching for that phrase. I’m on like the 20th or so page. They decided to call me up and tell me that my number was on the internet. They were curious why my number was on the internet. I was like… so people know what my number is if they want to call me. I haven’t had any problems yet with my number being up there. I guess that’s just me and my trusting nature. They were suprised that they were the first people to randomly call me like that. If you want their phone number, let me know… I have it on caller ID.

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.

I just did a bunch of internet research, as I like to call it, on a whole varity of calendaring programs. Clients, Servers, Javascript, AJAX, Outlook, iCal, Mozilla Calendar, Publish/Subscribe, etc. So, if you are into that kind of thing check this list out. The top few are the ones that excited me the most.

Calendaring

DeskNow – mail, instant messaging and collaboration tools

Sharing Microsoft Outlook Calendar and Contacts

Planzo.com

Hula Project – Hula

iCal Exchange

iCalShare – Share Your iCalendars!

eventSherpa – iCal for Windows

Web Calendar Software – iCal – Event Calendar

hello.php

CosmoHome

Web Calendar Server – Calcium from Brown Bear Software

nat friedman

Calendar – Standards Based Calendar Client Project

UW Calendar Home Page

Sambar Technologies Home Page

Internet Calendar Server & Calendar Hosting

Sun Java System Calendar Server

CalendarServer.com: Publish event schedule on the Web

Building a Simple Calendar Server with Fedora and WebDAV – FedoraNEWS.ORG

iCal Web Calendar Server download and review – web based calendar/scheduler from SnapFiles

CalDAV Projects

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

I just wanted to take the opportunity to make use of the free wireless internet in the hotel here in Seattle (well… Redmond really) and blog a little. Warning: This entry will be more like a typical blog and less like the stuff I usually post here.

Tomorrow (Friday) I’ll be interviewing with Microsoft.

It was a fairly long (5 hr) flight. It took me most of the flight just to go through the specification of a school project. Then, I started coding up my linked list. Woot! I was thinking about finding the old one I made, but decided that it wouldn’t be that useful since this was in C and that C++. The function names were all different and there are a bunch of extra functions in this with function pointers and void pointers and such. Sweet. Playing with void pointers is fun!

When I got to the airport, I went to the baggage claim. If you’ve ever been there, maybe you’ve seen the cool rotating baggage. They looked like shish kabobs. It’s a pretty sweet display of art. I would have uploaded my photos right now, but I brought the wrong USB cable with me. Aren’t USB cables supposed to be universal? Isn’t that what the U stands for? Weird. I guess you’ll have to trust me until I can show you.

So, I picked up the keys to my rental car and found a silverish two door Monte Carlo sitting in the spot. Cool. As I was driving away from the airport, there were two highways listed on the sheet to follow. I was supposed to follow on for a very short time, then transfer to the other. Welp, I missed that. So, I looked at the map and thought “Hey, that’s cool, I’ll just drive through the middle of Seattle at night.” So I did. It wasn’t that much further of a drive either.

I got to the hotel no problem. Right now I’m drinking my free bottled water, and surfing on my free internet. Thanks Microsoft!

So, you want to replace Google’s aerial imagery with USGS/Terraserver/Microsoft aerial imagery, do you now? Well… I did. For Ann Arbor, Michigan at least, USGS has three extra levels of zoom (on Google’s zoom scale) when compared to what Google offers. So, I just made a javascript file which you can include after you include the Google Maps API to simply replace the imagery. Easy as that.

Please copy this javascript to your own server, and include it just after you include the Google Maps API javascript file.
GMap_USGS.js

Here’s an example page with and without this javascript included.

Thomson West was nice enough to fly me out to Eagan, Minnesota which is near Minneapolis to interview for a Software Engineering Internship. That was kinda cool. The day consisted of 6 interviews each lasting 45 minutes to an hour. It was long, but fun too. I got to learn a lot about the company and how everything fits together into serveral giant software projects including their main one Westlaw.

So, now, I’m waiting to hear back from them. I’m also looking forward to next weekend visiting Microsoft in Redmond, Washington which is near Seattle. I’m supposed to have a phone interview with Google this week too, but they didn’t reply to my email a few weeks ago. I just emailed them again.

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”…

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.