What I Thought.... What I Read...

Friday, April 25, 2008

Google Movies

I came to know about the Google Movies service from a friend (link). It is cool. It gives all movies running on a selected city. If a movie is selected, it gives the list of theatres screening it. It is a easy and useful tool to plan for the weekend :)

I am wondering how Google build their database for this service. There is a standard that the movies will be changed only on Friday. This will make the life easier for Google - they can get their database updated weekly once. But how do they get it get for multiple cities. I noticed that this service seems to be available for tier-2 cities as well.

I guess Google will slowly integrate Google shopping/product with this movies service and introduce the online movie ticket booking. This may affect current online ticket booking service providers.

I was thinking about the olden days when I started to book online tickets in late ninetees. There was a online service providers called www.clicktickets.com. When I was in chennai, I used to use this service extensively. The guys in that company knew me very well. I used to watch most of the movies on the first week. Sometimes, i used to book bulk tickets (about 25) and watched movies with collegues and friends. Now there are many such service providers and but www.clicktickets.com is no more.

What all ways to make the life easier!!! The power of Google!!

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Cool Technology - TV-GPS

You would have seen that your GPS navigator not working when you drive near tall buildings. With the available GPS modules I could not add location information in the photos taken inside home or indoors. I was thinking that GPS cannot work indoor. There is a solution to overcome this problem. Rosum had integrated GPS and TV signals to solve this problem.

Rosum TV-GPS uses commercial broadcast TV signals to provide reliable positioning indoors and in urban environments. By combining TV signals with GPS signals, Rosum provides seamless indoor/outdoor coverage across all environments. That is cool!!

Check out this link for more information.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Nokia Location Tagger

Image via WikipediaGoogle's picasaweb provides support to add location information for the map. I am too lazy to add location information for all images. I used to give location information for the album level. When I came across this Location Tagger, I was amazed.

Today I downloaded it from Nokia's betalab website and installed it on my mobile. It requires the GPS support either from internal GPS module or through the bluetooth GPS receiver. GPS is not working in my N95 mobile. So, I've tried this with the bluetooth GPS receiver. I have to spend some time and see why internal GPS receiver is not working in my mobile. :(

I tried this from my home terrace. It did a good job by adding the tag in the EXIF file format (header?). N95 supports seeing the image on the map also.

After this, I've just uploaded this in picasaweb. It could recognize the header and display the location information correctly.

It seems like EXIF uses the existing image format JPEG, TIFF etc. An image has information about the camera, time, location etc. What next? Is it possible to add other environment like fragrance/smell? That would be helpful for the next generation entertainment (either image or video). How?? There may be some players in future which can understand this fragrance details from the header, and give the same fragrance when some one watches the media.

Tested Nokia Location Tagger from my home

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Rhythm Reloaded - Electronic Stethoscope

Image via WikipediaA team of electrical and computer engineering students at Calvin College is designing a digital electronic stethoscope running uClinux as its operating system.

It does the following -
* Stream real-time audio from a wireless chestpiece
* Record high-quality audio data from a patient's body
* Store this audio data in a convenient format
* Use a USB interface to transfer the audio files to a computer
* Reduce the amount of ambient noise that a doctor hears
* Be simple, accurate, and easy to use!

Visit their website for more information.
I've liked this team name - "Rhythm Reloaded" also.

These kind of devices are required for the RPM - Remote Patient Monitoring solutions.

The team has prepared a nice presentation. It is good to see this presentation. Nice comparison about the list of OS considered.

uCLinux was selected by them from list list - uCLinux, No OS, FreeRTOS, eCos, GNU/Linux, Nucleus RTOS, uC/OS

I've seen the following listed as part of the challenges!!

Open source software != functional

I think, this is really true when we try to integrate open source software. We may not get the fully functional and stable version of softwares. *Some times* i feel choosing open source softwares may be overhead for a commercial solution.

Embedded Systems Conference India 2008 - Call for Abstracts

Embedded Systems Conference India 2008

Nimhans Convention Center
October 14-17, 2008
Bangalore, India
This call for abstracts is open
Deadline to submit: May 14, 2008

Tracks:
Commercial and Open Source Operating Systems, including Linux
Debugging, Verification, and Test
DSP and Multimedia Programming and Applications
Hardware Design, including Programmable Logic
Multi-Core and Multi-Threaded Processing
Real-Time Development
Security
Software Development
Virtualization
Wired and Wireless Networking

More information available at this link