Author: Drew Wicke

Drew Wickehttp://drew.psib.org

Codebox

I found out about https://www.codebox.io/.  It is an online ide and it supports a ton of langs (including java).  It is open source, so you don’t have to use their services.  It also has desktop apps so you can work outside your browser.  The ide is customizable and you can make custom plugins etc.  Sounds awesome considering it is a two person company (a frontend and a backend dev).  I should see about setting it up.  I’ll probably try it out on their servers and if I really like it I’ll see about setting it up on my server.

Car insurance data

Did you know that auto insurance companies allow you to look up a quote online.  All you need is your name, address and date of birth and they will show you your cars!  That means you can with a little effort find out what cars people have!  Year and Model at least.  That could be valuable info for sales or targeted advertisements.  The crazy thing is that the website does not require you to agree that you are who you filled in the box says you are!  So, technically I don’t think you would be doing anything illegal.  Crazy.

fun autonomous vehicle ideas

Would be cool in the future with autonomous cars we will be able to have events where instead of having stations in a building that you walk to you would be in cars.  And whenever you switched you would change cars.

 

Bathroom car!  Would be too cool to have an autonomous bus/car that just drove around the city and people could request it and you would be able to go to the bathroom in it.  It could connect to the back of your car and you could walk into it.  Sensors would be able to monitor when you needed to go to the bathroom so that those vehicles could be positioned appropriately.

 

Entangled FindSet

Would be cool to use quantum entanglement to do instant FindSets (seeing if two elements are contained in the same set) for Kruskal MST algorithm.

Say each vertex is a photon.  Whenever you do a union you entangle the photons.  Then all you have to do to compare if the photons belong to the same set is to see if they are entangled.

This FindSet operation is already really fast O(lg*n).  However, this would be a constant time lookup.

What would the rest of the quantum MST algorithm be?

 

 

 

tv channel

The animation for the channel number on our tv (you know how when you change the channel it tells you what channel you are now on) changed today.  Made me wonder how that happens.  I thought that was defined by the tv… Strange.

Warblr

This is totally awesome!!  One of my ideas is becoming an app soon.  They just started and are trying to get funding through kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1190241008/warblr-an-app-that-recognises-birds-from-their-son?ref=nav_search.  They seem to have a lot of media support and there app seems to work!  Totally awesome.

Fast Company did an article about it http://www.fastcoexist.com/3037817/fund-this/the-original-tweeting-this-app-is-like-shazam-for-bird-songs.

https://drewsblog.herokuapp.com/?p=1741 my original post on my idea which essentially Warblr.  So, cool.  Can’t wait to try it out.  I’ll have to follow this and see how they do.