Monday, September 19, 2011

An Idea: Traffic Ticket Generator


I got a parking ticket last month,  it was a 5 minutes stop. The traffic police usually sticks one of these tickets (on the right) to the window.

Instead of thinking of paying it, I took a minute to imagine how this process works, here is how.

Basically, in Bahrain, traffic police carry a large book of empty tickets. They walk in congested areas, find a vehicle violating a law (talking on the phone, drinking, illegal parking etc), write the vehicle number in an empty ticket with some details like vehicle model, driver details, vehicle registration.

I must mention to get these details the traffic police calls the main office. tear out the ticket and stick it to the window or hand it to you if you are there. Later he delivers the book to the main office and someone enters the tickets into the system manually. A pretty tedious process.


I know you will hate me, but I'm going to propose a design that will make their life easier.

How to optimize this
Lets use the Car Reader we proposed couple years ago. The reader has a GSM chip which can connect to the Internet, send and receive data, can scan license plates and displays basic information about the vehicle. We will add a mini printer in the Car Reader to print issued tickets and add that ticket to the database by connecting to the main office

So with one click I can:

1. Print the ticket with all vehicle details
2. Add the ticket to the database
3. Save 80% more time.
4. More tickets for us!

Perhaps I should delete this post.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Research: A Software to Prevent Cancer


Am not saying not to take the neccessary health measures to prevent Cancer. Nevertheless, Science and Technology are advancing so fast that we are able to connect to, use and control living organs. Here is the latest technology where some group of mad scientists created a robot with a "live" rat brain.

Therefore, it is not impossible to use the Human API idea I wrote 2 years ago to prevent cancer. Here is my proposal.

The Human API is a set of methods and functions that allow developers to write software that can communicate with our body cells and organs through a device. But the Human API V1.0 I proposed 2 years ago can only access each cell individually regardless where this cell is. So I need to enhance this API to identify organs such as Liver,  Colon, Stomach etc.

Prevent It
An Apple a day keeps the doctor away, the first design to cure cancer is to prevent it. So I'm gonna introduce the interface IBodyOrgan and create the classes that implements this interface such as Liver, Colon etc..

Now with this new Object Oriented design we can access each body organ individually as follows.

Lets say I want to access my Liver cells and detect if there are any abnormal cells in my liver. Here is the code to do so using the Human API.

Dim myLiver as IBodyOrgan

'get the liver organ as object
myLiver = deviceapi.getOrganByID("LIVER")

'lets send a signal for the liver to start detoxification.
myLiver.SendSignal(LIVER_DETOXIFICATION);

Dim eCells as IEnumBodyCells

eCells = myLiver.getCells()

'lets access those cells and print if any are abnormal

For Each pCell In eCells
   If pCell.isAbnormal() Then

       'print the location of the cell and its ID on a map for the doctors for investigation
     PrintCellMap pCell   End if
Next


This small software can print a map of abnormal cells in a human liver and quickly hand that to his specialist. Imagine if we can install this application into kiosks machines in public, so anybody can easily do a check up for cancer cheaply. Perhaps with the advance of technology and biometrics this application can be deployed on iPhone or Andriod so people can do a checkup right on their mobile! I'm gonna write another post just for that.


Cure It
One can enhance this application to even cure the possible cancer by killing or disabling the growth of those abnormal cells. Here is a proposal.


Dim myLiver as IBodyOrgan
'get the liver organ as object
myLiver = deviceapi.getOrganByID("LIVER")

'lets send a signal for the liver to start detoxification.
myLiver.SendSignal(LIVER_DETOXIFICATION);

'lets access those cells and print if any are abnormal


For Each pCell In eCells
   If pCell.isAbnormal() Then
         'Send a signal to disable the cell
         pCell.Disable()  '
   End if



I'm sure one day we will hear of an iPhone application that can cure cancer.





Readers Suggestions
Ali Abd Aljalil
How about an army of nano machines, which can be injected and circulated around the human body. They can be programmed to attack mutant cells, viruses and other alien objects? Can be switched on and off, guided to the targeted organs, provide statistics and reports.


Interesting Idea, especially that science is booming into nano technology.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

An Idea: Batelco: CSV Downloadable Contacts for Smart Phones

Batelco is the leading integrated communications’ provider in the Kingdom of Bahrain with a very large customer base. It has a huge telephone directory.

When I want a number of a particular organization or restaurant I dial 181 and in a matter of seconds that restaurant's number is SMS'ed to my phone. Batelco made that service even cooler when they launched the Mobile Telephone Directory. All is free and easy to access. 

I have a suggestion that might make this service even easier and much user friendly. Categorize the telephone directory into groups (Restaurants, Banks, IT Companies etc..) and make them available online for download as a CSV (a standard format for all smart phones Comma Separated values). Now If I'm a frequent restaurant visitor, I can download the restaurant CSV to my Blackberry, iPhone, Andriod even Nokia and have access to all Restaurants in Bahrain directly on my contacts.

We have only one problem, telephone directory is dynamic. It is being updated frequently, so you need to download that CSV every now and then and resynch it back to your phone and you do not know if that file is updated or not. To tackle this, Batelco can create a different page to release only the changes (delta) so it is easier to download and sync. This concept is similar to the database replication .





Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Math and Love

Someone spend time creating these heart functions.

Heart Functions

Monday, September 5, 2011

17 Free GIS ESRI Courses [Professional Certifications]

Upon completion of each of the following free Online GIS courses, you get a professional certification that will help you pimp your resume. All you need to do is to follow the training, then do an small exam after that, if you pass the exam you get the certificate.

I just got certified using ArcPad in a 3 Hours course. You will be needing an ESRI Global Account
Field GIS ArcPad Certificate



Free GIS ESRI Courses with Certification

Duration: 6 modules (18 hours)

Duration: 1 module (3 hours)

Duration: 3 modules (9 hours)

Duration: 8 modules (24 hours)

Duration: 3 modules (9 hours) 

Duration: 1 module (3 hours) 

Duration: 1 module (3 hours) 

Duration: 1 module (3 hours) 

Duration: 1 module (3 hours) 

Duration: 1 module (3 hours) 

Duration: 1 module (3 hours)

Duration: 1 module (3 hours)

Duration: 1 module (3 hours) 

Duration: 1 module (3 hours)

Duration: 1 module (3 hours)   

Duration: 1 module (3 hours)  

Duration: 1 module (3 hours)
    
  

 


Friday, September 2, 2011

Bloggers, Enjoy the new Blogger Interface

Finally after long time of waiting, Google has re-engineered Blogger with some sexy interface,

Posting can never be easier,  attaching pictures is as simple as copy and paste, adsense and analytics are integrated.

Main Menu


All what we need now is a decent Andriod/iPhone app for blogger.

It looks like am sticking to Blogger for a while. 

Monday, August 29, 2011

Twitter shields up with an extra layer of Security

With their t.co domain, any posted URL in twitter will be shielded with this domain. Basically the shortened link of t.co will redirect to the URL giving twitter folks a door to process the link.

This way twitter can track and run security checks on all links on twitter. In case of any malicious links, Twitter can easily delete the reference and protect twitter users.

Of course this created an extra work for 3rd party twitter clients, and URL shorten services like twitlonger, in particular. Clients should now unpack the t.co to get the original URL before processing links.

As I wrote in a previous post added security decrease performance most of the time.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Jobs is now Apple Chairman, Cook goes the CEO

Yesterday the 24th August 2011, Steve Jobs resigned from his position as Apple CEO and jumped as the Chairman of the Apple Board. Jobs has followed a successful base plan for Apple during his time as CEO. He is well-known for the iPod, iPhone, iPad and iMac.

I'm sure that Jobs did not resign before putting down a comprehensive strategic plan for the next 10 years for Apple. If Tim Cook (the new CEO of Apple) well executed that plan, keeping up some strong defense measures towards the raising giant of Android, Apple could keep on shining.

You might already know that Cook ran Apple during Jobs health problems. Will you still see an iPhone6 and iPad4? Will it be as sexy as the previous gadgets? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Maybe even better.

Lets Cook some gadgets.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

The Cloud, when it rains it washes your laundry

In 17 August 2011 an 3+ plus hour outage hits Microsoft Cloud affecting a number of the new Microsoft Office 365.

2 days later Microsoft releases the reasons behind the outage. Although not so convincing, they had to make a statement for the angry customers.

So whats this Cloud fuss? In a nutshell, I send my documents into the cloud. I save storage, I can access my documents and files anywhere I go. I don't maintain hardware. I don't install software. I just work.

Three main things you need to watch out when your documents is out in the wild.

Outages: A 3+ hour outage means 3 hour of idle time. In a typical organization with 300 employees that is more than 900 hours, which is a minimum average lose of 9000$. Office 365 literally means it should work for 365 a year (My own thought). If such outages started to emerge at this early stage, Microsoft should consider toughing up their cloud servers.

It can rain: Whatever these documents contain, from trival orginzation charts to confidential bank statements and ledgers, at the end its your laundry. You are putting your laundry on a cloudy weather. So when it rains, expect your laundry to be washed out. The main problem is that you don't know when it will rain. Hackers in their mothers basement will simply point their machines into breaking into the cloud and it will eventually rain.

FBI: If your cloud is in the US, well the server on which your documents lay out can most likely be taken by the FBI, and it did happen last month. FBI seized over 13 servers for evidence from a cloud provider called DigitalOne. They entered the premises unplugged the server and took them.


Maybe an average user like me want be terrified to push his document in the cloud. But organizations should.