Kyle Mulka's Blog

I got into some more talks today with people about GROCS and projects involving digital media. They are all really cool!

I saw a friend of mine, Greg, at lunch today and we started talking about a thing which is like facebook, but instead of exploring profiles and relationships between people, it allows people to explore places and locations and objects in those locations. Also, it allows people to collaboratively edit and make connections between these places and explore the resoning behind these relationships. Also, onto the web page would go people’s feelings toward the places and things and events which occur there. He wants to keep it very conceptual and fun. Sounds like an awsome idea… now, how do you make a system that encourages this type of activity. That’s where computer science and software engineering come in…

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.

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.

Time has been ticking… Next week Tuesday (October 11th) I visit Michigan State for the Merit Technical Staff Meeting to talk about what I was working on this summer with Google Maps and other Geographic Information Systems stuff.

Most of the people at the meeting will be the top computer networking people from the colleges and universities around Michigan.

So, things that I think they would be most interested in would be mapping out all of the backbone lines and other network cabling. In addition to cabling, they could pinpoint the location of each router and other network devices by latitude and longitude. Putting this data onto a map of the area would be much more helpful than just having the data. They could even overlay campus maps like I’ve done with the University of Michigan.

Each device on the network is probably dumping a large amount of status data which is collected, monitored, and analyzed both in real time and after the fact. A good organization for this type of information would be by location. In computer networking, I assume that you would want to connect points which are close together and therefore around the same location. When there were problems with the network it would be easy to see if they were centralized around one location.

So, every once in a while I check my referer logs that tell me which pages people click on to get to my pages. Here’s a query from MSN:
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=%D9%84%D8%BA&FORM=QBNO

Can anyone tell me what this means in English? I’m really curious why my page would be the top search result for something in a different language.

Over the course of this summer I worked for the Great Lakes Commission on various projects. In this entry I’m just going to list some of the things I worked with while working there more for my own benefit than for anyone reading my blog. But, feel free to contact me if you are an employer or potential business partner interested in these things. Also, if you have any general questions about anything listed below, I can probably help you out.

Technologies
Javascript
XML
Javascript DOM
PHP
PEAR (DB_QueryTool)
Mysql
Oracle
Google Maps
LDAP / Active Directory with PHP
Wordpress
Webcalendar
Mapserver
ArcGIS (ArcMap)
WMS
WFS
PmWiki
Apache
HTML
CSS
VPN

Installed and Configured Software on Development Server
Apache
PHP
MySQL
Mapserver

Projects
Intranet (MySQL hooked up databases, authentication, security, )
Wordpress (connected to Active Directory via LDAP, customized)
PmWiki (customize/style/content design)
WebCalendar (setup, administration, connected with Active Directory via LDAP, staff training)
Contacts (customized system)
Google Maping
Circle Tour (Google Maps demo including geocoding, WFS, GML, XSL, WMS, Mapserver)
MiCorps Data (designed login, search, browse, database backend)
Browsing System (scrapped)
Lake Search
MySQL Database Design
Converted two web applications ASP/Access/Windows to PHP/Oracle/Unix
VPN (Windows Server 2003)
WFS into Google Maps
XML Schema for Google Maps API
WMS Overlayed on Google Maps (two layers)
Documentation for WFS and WMS

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.

eBay to Acquire Skype

Whoa? What? Weird.

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.

I’m extremely excited and honored to be invited to the Fall Merit Joint Technical Staff Meeting on October 11th to speak about the Google Maps API. Most likely, I will also be talking about other related technologies such as geocoding and WMS/WFS using mapserver which integrate nicely with both Google Maps and other online mapping software.

There will be a live webcast presumably available here. That webcast will also be archived on their webpage, so those who can’t view the presentation live are able to later.