Crazy Idea #2

For those who have never met me, let me give you a small window into my creative process.
I see the future as a combination of current technologies. My logic is simple. You build new technologies off of different seeds, and hope you come close to the core or the leaves of the tech-tree that results. (That's where the money is.) You either form the core, by controlling the growth, or form the leaves, thus servicing everyone outside of the tree. ($$$)

I start by taking an accounting of all the "Buzz-words" floating around, past, present, and future. All three types are important. While we don't talk about those legacy acronyms anymore, at their core are ideas that can ground your perspective. This is very similar to brainstorming, idea mapping, and those nifty one sentence pitch lines writers give producers. ("It's Knight Rider meets Lassy.")

Here's what came out of the idea machine: "Distributed" + "Website" + "Firefox". I was about to write a program to randomly join buzz words before I came up with this combination. Translation: A Firefox extension to combine the distributed ideas of Bittorrent and Freenet with standard websites. The purpose is to stop all those people bitching about their websites being inundated once their urls are published on Slashdot. For those needing further explanation, clarification, conglomeration, identification, justification, and enumeration, I will continue. (Don't get the joke? See Alice's Restaurant. Still don't get it? It was a bad joke to begin with. Consider yourself a good judge of humor.)

The idea is to use your internet browser's cache as a source for other surfers to draw from, instead of hammering the server with constant identical requests. Thus distributed the load currently required to publish a website over the number of people visiting and people who have previously visited.

Positive: It would be an immense boost to Mozilla when server operators and companies advocate the use of Firefox, instead of Internet Explorer, to reduce their network load and cost. Peer-2-Peer applications would be seen as having a positive application. And, in general, I would learn about Mozilla extensions and brush-up on my C++.

Negative: While the system would initially reduce server load, it would increase general network load and increase page loading time. Page updates would also have a propagation delay causing untimely, and incorrect, data. Dynamically generated pages would also fail to benefit from the bandwidth savings due to their transaction-based nature. Security minded individuals would be opposed to a server giving away their IP address, like free candy, to all who request a file. With a little data processing, it would be an even shorter jump to link users to webpages then with current systems.

Quote of Inspiration: "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too." -President John F. Kennedy

Quote of Caution: "Paper lends itself well to fundamentally flawed ideas, such as Communism." -Unknown Author

Idea rank: 3 of 5

Life after ZoomFolder

I have now released ZoomFolder 1.0, my simple ZUI experiment. But, what do I do now?

I could buy some clothes. Clothes make the man, and all I have are T-Shirts. What does your wardrobe say about you?

I could work on my resume, and get a job. Getting a job would require nice clothes. Thus, this would be a three part task, resume, buy clothes, and then the jobs will roll in.

I could go back to school. A step that would require the GRE. While hardly insurmountable, it is still a hurdle. And what about all the busy work, all the exams, and homework? Could I still put up with them?

I could start-up another fantastic project A project management, a software bug reporting, or a peer-2-peer TV solution would be nice. I would also be nice to have all three. But what good are these projects if I can't sell them?

I think I may just flip a coin.

I also wonder why people advertise urgency on rentacoder.com when bidding doesnot end for two weeks. I guess it's just not urgent enough to pay a professional coder.