Month: March 2015

Travel and Architecture

  1. There should be an app that will tell you your personal expected travel time at any user given day and time not just the current conditions and average driving time given speed limits etc.  It could be based off of your past history of driving.  So, basically it would need to be a phone app that could record things like acceleration and time to arrival vs the expected average time of arrival.  History of traffic from google (those yellow, green, red lines), speed limits, weather history and weather predictions.  All of this can easily directly affect the travel times of people.  This could be used when you are in a new city that you haven’t driven in before.  They might be able to recommend easier routes.  I have found that TomTom has a terrible web app that claims to do some of what I outlined above, but their user interface is the worst.  Also, Google shows the typical traffic at a particular day and time, but doesn’t give you the option to get directions based off of that information.
  2. Now a variation of this idea I think is probably on my blog already but I again experienced the need for it.  Builders create blueprints which they take to their clients for review.  This is a long and iterative process due to miscommunication between the client and the builder.  Automating this process and obtaining the specs from a client to create a structure seems similar in principle to that of building a piece of software.  Which we are taught, as computer scientist, is a difficult venture that requires a lot of time talking with the client to obtain the specs and their ideas.  Unlike with software I think a lot of the issues with architecture version of the problem could be automated and prototyped in front of the client.  Leading to a faster return time and thus greater revenue from happy customers.  I found this journal, Automation in Construction, it looks like they have been exploring this problem (http://www.journals.elsevier.com/automation-in-construction/).

I’d like to see both of these applications created.  I might in the future discuss in more detail how I would go about implementing them.

VPNs

A friend of mine recommended http://www.vpnbook.com/freevpn as an easy way to get out of uncensored internet.  I also found SoftEther which is a VPN project that provides a few VPN protocols.  That way if one is being blocked you can try another.  Another interesting project I found was tinc.  This seemed a bit old.  However, due to the obscurity of the implementation it is probably not blocked.  A hacker vpn called ChaosVPN also seems a bit extreme.

http://samy.pl/ has some interesting networking tools to get around firewalls and other network and hacking type tools.

All of this is due to the fact that I want to be able to remote desktop to a friends computer on a computer that sits behind a firewall.  Which made me think that oh I might be going to China and I would like to be able to get on gmail while there.  So, I looked into vpns!

Sublime Text 3

I got the sublime text editor (version 3).  I got it because I wanted something cool to develop in for python.

Following this, I installed flake8 (however i don’t think I installed flake8 corectly…), and TrailingSpaces (which I adjusted my borrowed user prefs file accordingly).

I also installed a lot of the things mentioned here. I got the python lang prefs.

Instead of Git I installed sublimeGit.

SublimeREPL installed need to configure.

Mecurial is installed.

May want to consider Javatar for java development.