I think my car needs a twitter account.
No really, if it did we could actually become a community of drivers and our cars could talk to each other. More importantly, my car could let other cars behind know of road conditions and of course – cops.

I have been considering how to make the cross country sprint – the cannon ball run. Those before me have made this in record time with the aid of advanced radar detectors, scramblers, laser fooling equipment and even an airplane.

I don’t have all that cash and finding sponsors for an illegal race seems like a an exercise in futility, but if my car had twitter – and a community around it, I think it could be done with none of the above.

To win this race against the clock – I need to maintain an avg speed of approx 90mph on the open intertstate. I am assuming that it would be best to attempt this with the most off peak highway hours as possible – drive mostly at night.

I will need to develop a gps aware device that updates my car’s twitter account fairly frequently to let followers (only the predefined and agreed upon ones) know where I am and avg speed.

If my car’s followers are willing to take on shifts that allow them to traverse set distances of the highway looking for police, wrecks, and construction- I will have realtime traffic information and highway clearance as I speed toward the goal.

Imagine this – my car dms a follower who is signed up for a region that I will be in that region in approx half an hour. My dear follower’s car will let me know that it is on the road and will dm my car if there is a slowing situation – cop, wreck, or construction. My car tweets me of the situation and I react accordingly. All this continues one after the other until my car reaches it’s destination. Unharmed and presumably unticketed.

Great for me. But imagine this on a larger scale – imagine hitting a button to let all the highway 81 followers know that there is a wreck in between mile marker 85 and 90.

Luckily most of us have that technology in our pockets – in the form of an android device, an iphone or any other gps aware cellular device.

The app to do this would be a simple interface that was allowed gps location and would follow other vehicles within the same radius on the same highway system 10 minutes ahead or 10 minutes behind automatically. The interface would have large buttons for easy to use while driving and would interpret the tweets of other vehicles with a direction and an icon indicating the status of the obstruction ahead.
blue with a Badge for cop
Red with a + for emergency
Grey with a cloud for poor weather
Orange with a cone for construction

The interface should prompt the user with a big button to confirm or deny the threat as they passed it. The more users that confirm the action the brighter or blinkier the icon becomes.

The more that deny, the lesser it becomes.

customize it:

MSK.

make the computer think it is pen and paper

http://www.engraveyourbook.com/pages/icons

I have yammer for my colleagues and twitter for my friends and online acquaintances. I do wish there was a location specific twitter that ran, like yammer, through a desktop or iphone/android interface that was aware of my location and could be sponsored by a business.
for instance i am in sBux in union square – and need help with a java project. I would love to be able to shoot out a twitter that would only reach the people in this location to see if there is a java pro anywhere near that i could ask a question to.

user profiles would be tied to either twitter or facebook and the service would be tied to the business that owned or otherwise occupied the location if there was one.

those with the application could opt out for specific locations or all locations to remain anonymous and tracking would not happen between the locations. In other words – if you walked into sBux, the application nor the users would be unaware that you just came in from filene’s basement or mcDonalds next door. it just knows that you are here now

Getting a video element on the page (for firefox3.5 anyway) was not an issue. The video tag was easy to understand. It was even fairly simple to begin the construction of my own interface – instead of using the default ‘controls’. But what I am confused about is why?

All this clamor around open video and the new html spec have claimed to remove the ‘walled garden’ that flash is within the context of a page. Meaning that while users can see and interact with the content on the page, machines and code can not.

Now with the new html 5 video tag, spiders and other software can now identify the fact that there is a video on the page.

Can someone please help me understand how that is so much different than flash?

Whether or not the machine or software can identify video embedded on a page is still moot point until we can train that ‘reader’ to parse and understand the contents AND context of the video.

well that was remarkably easy. added the ‘controls’ attribute and specified a width and height and was up and running.

<video tabindex="0" controls id="video" src="http://blip.tv/file/get/Nathank000-postrollTest594.ogv" width='320' height='240'></video>

I am ignorant of a lot of things and with technology moving so quickly I want to get up to speed fast. Every Sunday I would like to pick a restaraunt or apt in ny to have several of us hear sides of a topic and understand what is going on in that realm.

so what if we develop a commited list of informal panelists, ask grace to choose our venue, and invite the best and the brightest to discuss a set list of topics for a few weeks. Remove the eliteism and just sit down with those in the know and get up to speed…

would like to do 15 shows to start – need topics help!

putting together a topics list:

• html 5 video discussion with ogg theora (paging Emmett Plant and Dan Miller.)
• twitter
• tech and small business
• politech
• the future of flash
• print v/s digital journalism
• web show production
• web design methods and resoures
• personal micro manufacturing (maker bot and beyond)

just found this neat little app to help you come up with domain hacks. This little guy rifles through the domains to find all the hip extensions and even lets you know if it is taken and who has it…

Check it out for yourself and see if you may be creating the next top.level.ly (ok, that was bad…)

http://domai.nr/

just a quick note on scaling in as:

myMovieClip_MC.width = 300;
myMovieClip_MC.scaleY = myMovieClip_MC.scaleX;

in reading wired just a few minutes ago i discovered that they were using a url shortening service – like the rest of us – to get users and followers quickly and easily from printed paper to the digital realm with the least amount of typing.

Continue Reading

in setting up a new dev environment i finally found a way to set up symlinks so I work without having to manually change my test pages. to set up the symlink i used this valuable information:

To set up a symbolic link type

    ln -s linktarget linkname

where linktarget is the directory to link to and linkname is the name of the symbolic link. You can type:

    rm linkname

to remove the link. Type

man ln

for more information.

in order to allow apache access on my mac i had to add an extra entry to the httpd.conf file (on the mac @ /private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf – remember to back it up) that looks something like this:

<Directory /where/you/export/your/swf>
    AllowOverride all
    Options FollowSymLinks Indexes
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

now in all of my test pages i can reference

<embed src=linkname></embed>

and whatever swf is in the location that i told the symlink to go to will be pulled in.

Thanks Justin!