Peter Fisher's – Phyn3t

First thing first I see Android as the second best if not close to first best mobile platform. It’s open, it’s easy to develop on and it allows for inovation with little to no governing.

I think two of the biggest problems with Android are:

1. To many new and better devices coming out.
2. All devices have different base versions.

Devices coming out quickly might at first seem like a good thing. We should never stop inovation! But if I was an Android user that purchased a Driod and a month or so later the “amazing” nexus one comes out I’d be pretty pissed. And this happens constantly (HTC). I think for consumers this gets very confusing on what Android phone they should get. And for all the nerds out there this would just piss you off if you don’t want to constantly buy a new phone.

For the second issue of different base version; it seems every Android device is on its own little special version of Android. And there is always a better version then what’s on your phone. It also seems the major milestone releases don’t even work on hardware that’s a YEAR old. Most contracts here in the US are two years. I wouldn’t want the latest build of Android to not work on my phone that’s < 2 years old…

I’m going to create an application in Java that will sync your Kindle Clippings with Evernote.

To get a better understanding of what Clippings are it’s any of the following:

1. Highlighted text in a book
2. Typed Notes
3. Bookmarks

The above three types of clippings look like the following:

Highlighted Text:

Typed Notes:

Bookmarks:

Notes

These clippings will be synced to a note in evernote. Each note will be  considered a book. And all future clippings will be appending to the existing notes that contains previous clippings.

Synchronization

Synchronization will happen as the following:

Load each Clipping into a hashmap with the Key equal to the Title of the Book and the Value equal to everything else for that clipping.

Once all clippings have been added to the hashmap we can then iterate through them checking to make sure it doesn’t already exist. This isn’t efficient at all  and Ill think of a better way to do it when I get to this point in the program.

GUI

And lastly I will need to create a GUI for users to login. Later we or I can add stuff for such books or clippings not to sync etc.

Source Code and Project Planning

You can find the github page here: http://github.com/peterfisher/Kindle-sync-with-Evernote

There is also a Google Wave page that will be used for todo and stuff: [Syncing Kindle Clippings with Evernote]

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Anyone is free to join in! Since I will most likely be the only one working on this it will be slow since I work full time and also attend college full time!

Well I removed Windows and put Ubuntu on the machine. After reading a few blog post that seemed to propose everything worked great. But sadly nothing really works (what a surprise I know).

So it seems to work when you first install Ubuntu but the Wifi gets disconnected every few minutes when you are actually using it (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=8891341#post8891341). It also seems to have a hardware fault and completely freezes up every hour or so. You have to restart the machine by pulling the battery out its pretty bad. So far I can’t find anything in syslog or messages about what’s casuing this but it seems like it has to do with the CPU and intel not providing good drivers.

So if you are thinking of install linux on your Nokia Booklet 3G I would hold off. As of the latest release of Ubuntu and latest kernel nothing works. Even with the backports, everything is still fail.

If its not already apparent we are moving more and more towards the cloud each month.  If its not some new online application its a blog or something similar. The first thing we do when we get onto our computers is start some type of online application. Most young people these days don’t even have a use for a computer that isn’t connect to the grid in some way.

As we move more towards cloud computing and living online, system administrators need ways to control this. All of the legacy user account permissions are becoming  irrelevant now that everything is becoming more internet based. The web doesn’t care that you are a limited or a root user. It’s going to serve you the same content regardless of your group.

This is where services like OpenDNS.org and other such providers come into play. DNS services will soon be the front line of defense against malicious websites and prohibited content. opendns is well before its time, and in the future could be the leader in providing protection against the wild west (internet).  I think there is going to be a big market in the future for DNS providers such as opendns.org and other related services.

The current DNS providers are also very limited in the services they provide. In the future I think we will see more customizable DNS solutions. Such as:

• Giving some users different access to the web
• Allow access to only certain parts of a domain (apps.facebook.com)
• Limiting non web browser traffic, such as IM and other protocols
• Actual applications running on a machine to filter traffic based on domain

It’s just a matter of time before we are going to see such services booming as administrators scramble to secure their network clients.

Please note I in no way think there should ever be a filtered or internet. Such as in China.

Flash has been around for quite some time and has been very popular by developers for games and other applications on the net. I’m sure it got its popularity from being available on all host platforms and allowed developers to deliver innovated applications at the time. Such as MP3 streaming and many other new exciting web content. Now though flash is falling behind and becoming out sourced by HTML5. For good reason, flash is a horrible platform now.  It’s a resource hog taking up far more resources then it should. Even if the developer of the flash application is at fault, Adobe is the one that’s going to pay. They shouldn’t have APIs that can destroy a users experience.

If Adobe flash doesn’t work well on desktop PCs how it can be useful on a mobile platform is beyond me. People wonder why the iPhone and the iPad don’t support Flash, well it’s really simple. Apple isn’t going to allow anything other than the best on its platform. They want the best user experience for its customers. Apple would rather go out of business than ever release something they don’t believe to be working in good order.

So to conclude I hope Adobe Flash is phased out by HTML5 soon.