Kyle Mulka's Blog

While going through websites I visit daily, such as The Show with Ze Frank, Rocketboom, and Digg, I noticed University of Michigan references in several of them, and thought I would point them out.

Today’s Rocketboom references The Cube at New York City’s Astor Place. (not to be confused with the Apple Store) This is a copy of The Cube at University of Michigan’s Regent Plaza. Also of note, the cube in NYC was turned into a Rubik’s Cube. Wouldn’t it be cool to turn the cube at UofM into a six-sided die?

Also, in the same Rocketboom show, they mention Delutube, a site which hosts deleted YouTube videos. The second video is a clip from Tally Hall‘s Banana Man music video, which apparently is still on YouTube. The members of Tally Hall went to UofM before dropping out to play in the band full time. They are good, you should check them out.

A Wired article about an email sent out to all members of the University was linked from the front page of Digg will the title “University of Michigan Identifying Students to RIAA“. However, the email states, “The University is in the process of identifying and notifying these individuals.” This does not imply that the University is releasing the identity of these individuals to the RIAA. So, the Digg post’s title was indeed exagerated, and the article has been updated. Nothing new is going on here other than the RIAA being even more of a bully.

Yesterday, my friend Zach told me about YCombinator‘s new startup news page, who’s idea is basically the same as Reddit‘s, a successful startup YCombinator funded. Differences include a focus on startups, and no down arrow for stories. Zattoo, a company started by one of my professors, Sugih Jamin, was featured on its front page yesterday. So far no one has commented… hmm.

Ban on using an iPod while crossing the street in New York City considered.

http://www.wnbc.com/news/10948106/detail.html?rss=ny&psp=news

Here’s a map of the bus routes in downtown Seattle. I’m using this to figure out if I can commute to work without a car once I start working for Amazon. The image was pulled from this page at King County Metro Online and Google Mapified using my Gmap Uploader.

Throw a little bit of real location data, a little bit of an algorithm, a little bit of hand selection, and a little color on a Google Map, and what do you get? Google Maps Art!

Content! Duh! Here’s some blogs with some good content…

Left Behind at the Fishbowl

This anonymous blogger sifts through papers left in the printer just before “the Fishbowl” a University of Michigan computer lab, shuts down for the night. Then, they go and critique the essays, drawings, emails, and other print outs. With their trusty blue pen, creativity, and humor in hand, they proceed to mark all over the print out, scan it back in, and post it on the internet for all to see.

TechCrunch

TechCrunch covers mainly news about internet companies, both the big ones and the up and coming ones. So, if you are a Web 2.0 startup, you might want to get on this guy’s good side so that you can get some good traffic from the early adopters like myself.

Google Maps Mania

When the Google Maps API first came out, there were tons of people ready and willing to create mashups. So many in fact, it was difficult to keep track of them all. Google wasn’t keeping track of them, so this blog filled a niche and reports on the new ones as they come out

You know those banner ads that are like little flash games, where you have to shoot the ducky, out lift our president, slap the monkey, play dress up, or whatever? Well, straight from that genre, this is quite possibly the most annoying web advertisement I have ever seen. It’s just a mosquito that flies around the screen making a loud obnoxious mosquito like noise with the only ways of stopping it being either zapping the mosquite with your zapper thing (which is actually harder than I thought it would be) or leaving the page.

Announcing Gmap Uploader, the easiest way to create custom Google Map tiles. Just upload an image and download a zip file with the tiles. Or, just copy the HTML source, change the API key, and just let Gmap Uploader host the tiles.

http://gmapuploader.com

Campus Map Example:
http://gmapuploader.com/playpen/purduepark/

Floor Plan Example:
http://gmapuploader.com/playpen/newcse1/

Photo Example:
http://gmapuploader.com/playpen/4idVS8omtN/

I was playing around with Alexa, and I thought I would plot the charts of some popular social networking type sites. I noticed a few things… Xanga‘s traffic seems to start going down exactly when MySpace‘s goes up. Coinsidence? Also, there is a huge gap of facebook‘s traffic in the last few months of 2005. I believe this is because they just switched from thefacebook.com to just facebook.com, and Alexa didn’t track facebook until the start of 2006. If you plot thefacebook.com, you’ll get the same graph as facebook.com.

Just testing out this schedule iframe thingy with my schedule for this term… although the term is almost over.

How many gigabytes of information does an average human brain have in it?

How would you measure this?

Here’s some possibilities:

A transcript of everything you ever said.

The audio of everything you’ve ever said.

All the words you’ve ever read.