Search
The Way of the Software Engineer

Archive for the 'Software' Category

Semantics II: Advertising

Posted by admin on June 8th, 2007

This is part two of a multi-part series. Part one can be found here.
Online advertising is a multi-billion dollar business. Google has become one of the worlds most recognized brands by selling ads on its search result pages and putting context ads on websites. Yahoo and Microsoft are working hard, and spending [...]

Semantics I: Search

Posted by admin on June 7th, 2007

This is part one of a multi-part series. The series is continued, here
The Semantic web has been touted has Web 3.0 and the next evolutionary step in internet communications. A Scientific American article from 2001 told us what we should expect of a semantic internet. This is how devices should [...]

Good Ideas

Posted by admin on June 6th, 2007

Recently it seems like every time I have an idea for a useful web tool someone has built it already.
With OS X Leopard coming out soon I thought using the new text-to-speech system to make a web page reader would be cool. done!
Wouldn’t it be great if you could convert a wordperfect document to [...]

IP Geo-location

Posted by admin on May 9th, 2007

I’m building a system that maps a user’s IP to a physical location. This kind of stuff has been around for a while, and it’s so easy I don’t understand is why it’s used so infrequently. It’s as though it’s seen as a tool for the mega-corp ad networks like Yahoo and Google/DoubleClick, [...]

jBluez

Posted by admin on April 19th, 2007

About 6 months ago I wanted to pull some data from a bluetooth adapter into a little java app. I did the usual google searching and found (among others) jBluez. Being free and working on Linux, this seemed like the right solution for me.
But there are problems with jBluez. It has a [...]