Software Ideas

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14 July 2003 (Originally 9 June 2003)

Genealogy of Ideas
Build a program that traces the genealogy of ideas(references in patents) or genealogy of academic theories (using their references) to show how ideas are developed, and the importance of sharing information, which is not done often in order to attain/maintain market share.
(reference story on amateur rocketry on wired's website)



14 July 2003 (Originally 25 May 2003)

Dealing with Spam
Set up an email autoresponder that replies with a
phone number connected to an answering machine
with a recorded message of the correct email address.
Then delete all other emails that are not to the address
in the phone message.



www.RSVP.com.au
Relationship management program for RSVP to track conversations/relationships?
Better search of database (e.g. by profession)
Logged in users can chat?



14 July 2003 (Originally pre 2003)

Mouse Free Environment

Possible to not have to use a mouse?
Maybe have a vi like key interface (mode for mouse and mode for typing? }
Divide and conquer directions
windows selection screen
need hotkey (scroll lock)
shortcut key to take focus?
menu handling?
buttons and textboxes
hidden window handling for shifting focus?
- cross application boundaries



14 July 2003 (Originally 13 February 2003)


Web Service Idea

Sell updates to phone menu's
People can write software to utilise service on different devices, e.g. phone
Provide web pages to use service
Purchase suybscription $10/year
- for updated services
- provide key for 100 uses
convert phone menus into computer program
What about guided menus to not have to hear the options? Have checkpoints to enter
- help users get to a human being
Users can send scans of phone instructions to add to database



Program to Find Cheap Air Fares

Manage a few web sites to find cheapest air fares



Web Application Generator

The basic idea is to write a program that generates an exe that operates by regularly getting information from one or more websites and displaying it in a single updating frame. It needs an interface to collect information elements from a website, and also to notify the user when the site has changed, though that would be obvious from the thing breaking.
- there should be some kind of scripting engine?
- some kind of interface to drag elements off webpage into interface script?


Generic Relational Database Business Application Framework

Fairly easy to do, you need roles, object creation, ability to swap in/out different persistence frameworks?
What about business rules?
Mapping of objects and relationships to sql queries?
On screen representation? Single record display, one-many, one-one
Code generation needed? Macros would be good. Maybe scripting?
Adjusting business class size without restructuring tables?
One for everything? One table for all data. One for datatypes. One for rules. One for reports?
ID,DATATYPE,CLASS,ORDER,DATA,CREATED,CREATEDBY,UPDATED,UPDATEDBY
How would you index it? Store in memory at runtime?
Datatypes: file,app,integer,string,money,date,datetime,constraint,report,datatype,action,user,class,reporttags,manual,tutorial?,url
Build diagram from table



14 July 2003 (Originally 20 January 2003)

Program to Prepare English Text for Text-to-Speech programs

This would be a pre-processor for languages that are notoriously non-phonetic (hello English!).
I wonder if this just separates the problem that is difficult to solve within the text-to-speech
processors that are currently available.


4 Types of Developer?

There are three types of developer:
Is there a fourth level? Like making a new level of abstraction? (Codeless computing. See Delphi 7)



Disaster Information Service

Instantly configurable place for people to meet online
Notification through radio, possible to broadcast data over radio?
Chat
Messages
Need an operator?
Silly idea at present, because computers and web need power and telephone at moment which are services most likely to be disrupted in a natural disaster, but portable computing is becoming more prevalent.


Jarod Lanier’s Statistical Programming



Database to store/search "Everything You Do"

Get it to collect keyboard presses, websites, files, etc.
Encrypt
Store on the net?



14 July 2003

Justification for XML and Web Services

I have been thinking about what benefit Web Services and XML give to software development that justify the cost in:
I didn't see how XML provides anything new other than having to nest and close your custom tags properly.

Then I wrote a program that went through a web site which contained an online database of unpaid government moneys by parsing the web pages and determining the information through string processing. By imitating a user (with some appropriate pauses so as not to bog down the web server :) I went through a non-searchable database by "browsing" it.

This application will break if the website HTML or struction is changed. However, if the the information provided by the database was provided as a web service, they could configure the browser user interface for users any way they wished, and client applications (or other web services) could still access the information without breaking.




14 July 2003 (Original 29 December 2002)

Spam

I wonder if Andrew Bulhak’s post-modern bullshit generator could be combined with a spam replier to create an on-running conversation with a spammer that wastes their time?


14 July 2003 (Original 29 December 2002)

Auto CD Anywere


18 August 1997

The education system can be revolutionised. Reading an
article by Mr P. Lutus, the writer of the Arachnophilia web
editor, the education system's fundamental flaw subscribed to
by government, religions and big business, is that facts are
taught to people, and the accumulation of facts is said to
equal an education. I don't think it as total as that. In my
education, teachers and lecturers did try to teach me how to
think, proof of learning being to apply what had been learnt
to different situations.

The solution that I had thought of to the potential cheating in
online exams is not to use multiple choice, but to ask a series
of "why" questions. I knew the answer to cheating was to use
questions with long answers, but this makes it clearer. For
example, in a physics course, ask whether days are getting
longer or shorter, and why. The exams can be open book. That
is realistic, and avoids the need to memorise information. It
allows the student to use a large amount of information. Hell,
the students should be sitting an open internet exam, where they
can search the internet for answers to the exam questions.

Two extra ways to prevent cheating are to create the questions for
the exam on the spot to prevent old answers being cut and pasted,
and also to have a clever answer checking mechanism that checks
sentence structure, syntax, number of words, and compares it to
a student's profile, hoping to achieve a unique signature for each
student.

It would be hard for another person to dictate answers to a person
sitting the exam online, and then for them not to understand what
the person telling them the answer is saying enough to word it
themselves in their own style.

Some considerations:

- the amount understood by the student of the subject matter would
  reflect the student's answer signature.
- the subject itself could affect the answer signature.
- there needs to be a control signature: student's could write an
  essay about themselves at the start of the subject. What if
  another person writes the introduction, and sits the exam?
- how would you test this? Online with an appeal through newsgroups.