My posterous

my shared emails and more

Power of design, how to keep yourself productive

Some programmers work 10x more then others

The study methods made me a bit suspicious about the accuracy of results. But nevertheless it is a matter of fact that some people make more progress withing the same time range. It is often is not as dramatic as x10 but the difference is significant enough to be noticed. Some do better projects, have more publications, manage to read more, get better jobs etc. How do they do that?
Moreover, even with regard to a single person the difference in productivity between near snapshots of lifetime is often significant as well. Great when the productivity increases. Suxx - otherwise. Is there any way to keep in constantly increasing? Or at least to have a feeling that this is happening? Is it possible at all?
The reason I have productivity problems is because I do not work product oriented. I am not trying to finish and release something, although it is a natural way to success. Instead I get into and endless process of improvement, iterating over and over on on thing, polishing it. It a shame Yarik. The way to cure this is in forcing myself with deadlines and releasing the work at any stage it is in order to meet the deadlines. The learning process must mirror in the feasible results. Yeah!

Design can turn a crappy low cost project into something pretty profitable.

Interesting example proving how much design matters in any project. Aesthetics must never be disregarded when you are making a project for humans. This example has lots of interesting points applicable to the mobilegamelab. It seems to be a promising project. The idea behind it is quite innovative. But somehting is missing

There are no more free tickets for WhereCampEU 2011

I was lucky to get one for free. Well technically there are still free tickets because you are allowed to chose the amount you wanna pay, but still, I got one for FREE (: Great to the that HS Bremen is so active on WhereCamp! meadialinformatik is getting geospatial!  If the trend will continue one day WhereCamp might find place in Bremen.

Everything that exists is not more than its physical properties
This is the fundamental point in physicalism. Would be interesting to find more about it and how they explain non physical concepts such as luck,


Great quotes from Luke

Luke 11:9
And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.

Luke 12:29
And do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, nor be worried. 30 For all the nations of the world seek after these things, and your Father knows that you need them. 31 Instead, seek his kingdom, and these things will be added to you.

Luke 11:2
Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.  3  Give us each day our daily bread,  4  and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.

New appartment

I have decided to reward myself for a successful finish of the thesis with a new apartment. Here is the list of offers that I have got so far

http://schwarzesbrett.bremen.de/sixcms/detail.php?template=01_markteintrag_d&id=1577326&host=bremen http://schwarzesbrett.bremen.de/sixcms/detail.php?template=01_markteintrag_d&id=1568974&host=bremen http://schwarzesbrett.bremen.de/sixcms/detail.php?template=01_markteintrag_d&id=1567183&host=bremen http://schwarzesbrett.bremen.de/sixcms/detail.php?template=01_markteintrag_d&id=1558971&host=bremen

Your ticket application for UEFA EURO 2012™ has not been successful


Awesome. What a great end of the sunny day. God bless you and your lottery.


Dear Football Supporter, Customer reference number:

Unfortunately your application has not been successful in the lottery for tickets for UEFA EURO 2012™.

It is possible that further tickets may become available for sale at a later stage, or you might be able to buy tickets via the ticket resale platform in July 2011.

If you are still interested please regularly visit the UEFA EURO 2012™ ticket portal on www.UEFA.com.   WARNING!
You have not been successful in the lottery, therefore you do not have make any payment.
If you are able to purchase tickets at a later stage, please be aware that we always send out payment instructions for bank transfers exclusively by post. Please also checkwww.UEFA.com for further information. Best regards, UEFA EURO 2012™ ticketing team
**************************************************************************************************

Find answers to all your ticketing questions on www.UEFA.com.   Please do not reply to this message. Replies to this message are routed to an unmonitored mailbox. To contact us, please use the contact form in the Ticketing FAQ section on www.UEFA.com.
 

 

Face-sad

Applications

During this weekend I haven't spent much time thinking. Nevertheless, I have got (most likely from God) some interesting topics to think about one of which is in application of my knowledge and experience into something that could bring money. In other words I should start seriously thinking about starting my own company and earning "real" money. I have enough tech knowledge by now for implementing something profitable. Another question is marketing and design. Obviously, I suck in both, but it does not mean that I am not allowed to try especially if the God sends me ideas like that.
On Friday I have found an interesting blog article about a website which pays its owner his monthly rent. For a dude like me this a considerable financial help. So I have decided to go ahead and try to develop something profitable. I am quite sure my first attempt will impressively fail but still it is worth trying because of the great experience it will bring.

Application idea #1. A mobile application for the weight watchers.

A matter of fact: there are people who aren't happy with their weight (I am one of those). Weightwatchers is a company, which tries to help those people. They have invented a concept of points for this reason. Each client gets certain number of points per day. These points are like money: you can "buy" food for those. The more calories a product has the more points it costs. Matching points to products happens with a help of a book of an enormous size. The book contains all possible products one could find in a German supermarket. I suspect there is a service online which tells you how many points a given product costs. I have to do a little research in this field.
The application concept is trivial. Implement all functions a weight watchers client has to do as a smart phone application. Using the application one could search for the products, count points, track a log of eaten products, monitor the progress, etc. My biggest goal is to make the weightwatchers buy the application and to sign a contract for a long term support.
The second application idea came from

Application idea #2. Application for farm machines
The idea is not concrete yet because I don't yet know that much what I am talking about. Today I have figured out that in last years machines, which are used on farms, advanced quite a lot in the recent years and make use of the latest technologies such as GPS and mobile ad-hoc routing. This could be an interesting market to apply all my knowledge in mobile computing, networking, sensors. There is something to start from. Bernd tried to explain me a problem with GPS today which I did not get because of language limitations but the fact that there are problems which need professional software engineering is quite interesting.

Application idea #3. location based mobile game
As we talked on Friday night it seems that location based games have quite a good potential to find its market. The problem with these games until now is that not many have smart phones. The trends though show that the future of smart tablets and smart phones comes near. On the other side I am currently working in a project which is focused on the games like these. What I could do is to use the project for developing something cool and promoting it using our media partners.

Idea for the summer of code

In short, I would like to offer to the OSM community a mobile tool for easy geospatial data collection. The main features of such tool is a combination of incredible simplicity, social integration, and great functionality. Additionally, the application will implement simple game mechanics such as rewarding user for each action (POI collected, POI profile updated, repeated actions, etc) with points or badges. In order to minimize required user interaction it is expected that the tool makes use of all possible sensors embedded into modern mobile platforms.

Making such a vision come true, I would like to start from implementing a badge system which could reward a user for different sorts of actions. A main goal for such a system is to provide an encouraging feedback to an OSM contributor. Integration of this simple mechanics, I believe, allows to motivate not OSM members to contribute valuable data to the OSM databases. The idea is inspired by existing successful examples such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook places, etc. All these projects benefit from applying social and gamification techniques which allows them to maintain a constantly growing community of players who contribute up to date valuable geographical data to the system. Same concepts I belive could be utilized in order to fill OSM databases. Controlling the quality and validation of data is, by now, outside of the  application scope, though.

Within GSoC I want to develop functionality which could allow the users to recieve badges for particular, predefined action types, browse badges they have collected and compare their success with their mates. Integration with various socual platforms is also higly considered. I would like to develop a well balanced concept for such system and implement it as an extension of last year SoC project initialized by Pawel Niechoda.

    The concept suggested above falls into the following use cases:

  • login using OAuth OSM credentials.
  • browse a map.
  • add / edit / delete POI
  • receive reward and compare success to other players.
  • collect and browse badges and share them socially

A short example of use could show the idea better. Smartphone users (player) fires up application whenever they spot an interesting place they wish to save for later. Following simple app instructions the user addes a new POI. After a successful synchronization with the server, thes system checks recent activities of the player and rewards them with a corresponding badge. The player selects to share these great news using their facebook and twitter accounts. The badge is stored in the system to allow later reviewing.

The requirements listed above can result in a very complex application  therefore I have outlined the core of such an app and would put all SoC time for building it. This basic functionality can be implemented following this concept. The application consists of the server and client parts. The client part allows a user to login using their OSM account, browse an openstreetmap in order to find a point of interest, take a picture of the POI, upload the  data to the server and, finally, feedback to the user collected reward. The server application is implemented as a web service which allows users to login, register or edit their profiles, browse the statistics of the  POI collected and the badges earned, compare their results to the others,  visualize them on the map and share using their social accounts. The syscronization of collected geospatial data with OSM databases is conducted by the server using the API.

The idea I offer aggregates several ideas listed in the wiki but uses them all in a slightly different way then suggested. Moreover, it extends implementation of similar idea from the previous year. Therefore I would like to start prototyping the first implementation based on  the available last year sources. As I have notices the POI collector  from last year was build using PhoneGap framework which allows for crossplatform application of the tool. Additionally, PhoneGap provides a robust interface for nearly all smartphone sensors which helps in simplification of user interface. 

This is my idea in short, I don't know how deep I should develop, and  what the limits of this section are. If you have any further questions, please write me to iaroslav.sheptykin@hs-bremen.de   

I would die.

>From a paper that explains how a rat can find hidden food:

"For example, given two landmarks
A and D (Figure lB), the animal might store the given
distances BD and BA, as well as either the computed
distance DA, or the given angle a. Some time later, finding
itself at C and wishing to return to A, it must compute
the angle p from the stored information available, add
this to the angle y, which is computed from the current
given input, and then compute the required distance CB
and angle + from a combination of the stored and current
inputs, This exercise is not mathematically difficult,
although it is somewhat of a challenge to imagine how
neurons might compute the various cosine and square
root functions necessary for its solution."

If I was that rat I would die starving.

Nature of the landmark

Nature of the landmark

On the pages of this document I try to understand what the landmarks actually are.

Landmark means to mark land.

Thinking of the landmarks identification techniques I have started from trying to understand what landmarks actually are. As many others I have found a bunch of definitions that describe a landmark with different precisions. Some claim that a landmark is anything in a space including virtual spaces also, some define a landmark as a point where a navigational decision is made. Falling from the top of a variety of meanings I have finally reached the bottom where the basics of the term are examined pursuing the clearest definition.

It’s quite noticeable that the word landmark is actually a composition of other two: a land & a mark. By land is normally understood a piece of surface not covered by the water. This definition is somewhat limits landmarks to the Earth surface. Unfortunately this definition does not exactly feet a modern understanding of the landmark. Due to a variety of uses in different contexts landmarks nowadays stand for something more then just a piece of land marked in some way to aid for navigation. No doubt - it is still used for navigation but areas of navigation have expanded to information space. This makes me think that land part of the landmark word does not fit any longer the term. A space word could be more precise I believe. Spacemark?
The mark part of the landmark word though does still serve the expected definition. To mark something means to separate something from a set of similar. Like we underline a line in a page of text, or bookmarking a page in Internet, or taking a picture in a particular place. We constantly assign priorities to the instances of the environment that surrounds us. We can influence the process of assigning priorities and do it explicitly (we do mark) or implicitly (it is marked unconsciously by us) depending on the focus of our attention. That's why among other definition of verb to mark there is one that means to give someone a grade (in school). The most prominent instance of space that has the highest combination of all sensible attributes gets marked by us "by default".

Summarizing all written above I have reached the following definitions:

  1. Landmark is a sign for spacial orientation on the land.
  2. Spacemark is a sign for spacial orientation.
  3. A sing is an entity which signifies another entity. (can it be a home icon for a root website page in information space for example?)
  4. To landmark is to mark a place on the land aiming to produce a sign.

Trying to make it more clear for myself I have made a little sketch that defines a place of the landmark according to what I think

Spaces
Landmarks can be created and used.

Landmarks are created when a place (location) is marked among others for whatever reason. Marking can be done by either changing or rating the location to produce a sign. Changing happens when a location does not have any native attributes that would significantly differ it from other places. In this case the place has to be changed (a scratch) to become a landmark. There are though cases when a place does significantly differ from surroundings. In this case it is rated very high by its attributes comparing to neighbors which also results in a landmark creation.
Landmarks are used when they are retrieved from a storage for whatever reason. The reasons can be navigation, positioning, sharing, verifying, etc.

live version of the doc on docs.google.com