Janitha Karunaratne

Looks like it's high time for me to rewrite my whole website from scratch. Just as a update I am in San Jose working at Cisco, but will be back in College Station in August.

Lot of people carry around battery powered electronics such as laptops, camera's and cellphones. One problem with all of these is that you need to constantly be charging them or replacing the batteries. Another interesting characteristic of all of these items are that they move around a lot. For example a cellphone moves and shakes as the user walks.

Why not have a simple mechanism similar to automatic watches where this motion can be used to charge the phone. This doesn't need radical design changes either.. rechargeable AA batteries can have something very small like this embedded inside, or in already common cell phone battery designs.

Sure it won't power the whole unit all the time, but at least extend the battery life considerably. Worse case is that the battery is totally dead and you can shake it until it's charged enough to use it to make a quick emergency call or take that breathtaking view you just discover right when you run out battery power on the camera.

1. Motion Powered Battery
2. ???
3. Long time Battery life

I don't get much comments, at least not these days, but for posts that do get many comments also have a interesting characteristic that they also get re-posted in many other websites. For example if X writes an article P which is very interesting, websites like Reddit and Digg and other people Y and Z will also post the same post. The problem is everyone will have a set of comments that are not in the same place.

My suggestion is to have a new method where along with the post you also have a traceback for comments.

When I finally have a need and I am looking for a tool/system to accomplish that task, I tend to be extremely picky and very demanding of certain features. This happened when I finally made up my mind to consolidate all my photo's in to one central system and organize them. Pictures started coming out the woodwork, now I have a jumble of hundreds of folders with thousands of pictures.

On the bright side, they are all on a single partition now. This is compared to before where they were spread across many machines, hard drive, backups and whole bunch of flash memory cards laying around.

Now on the hunt for a good program to organize them. So far I have tried F-Spot, Picasa, DigiKam. They were alright, but didn't fit my needs, and I doubt there is anything out there that would. So the features I need are

• In Place file access - should not require the program to import the pictures to it's own backwards folder structure
• Restructure folder tree - For example all your pictures are a mess, but with this you can tell it to put all the files in folders according to date or category name
• Categories, Keywords - All the programs I tested did this pretty quick
• Automatic Categorization according to date and other information

So the automatic categorization is the most important feature I want. Picasa does a good job at this.. but it simply clumps pictures that were taken in the same day together. What I want is for this to happen in a more elegant algorithm that uses the timestamps to figure out and distinguish between different events.. but allow the user to easily merge or split categories.

I think I will put to my work stack to develop such an algorithm, does not seem to hard. I am thinking it would make sense if you graph the amount of pictures taken per day, any grouping of pictures can be thought of as a single event or category. Lets see where it goes...

But for now considering I haven't had any rest at all for the past few days, I think I will let all my photo's chill for a while.

Ok, so almost all the blogging and CSM systems do all their processing server side (For example WordPress). Why not a system that works client side using JavaScript. You would say Ajax? No, that still requires a special server side software (even more process intensive now that you have both client and server side processing).

My suggestion is to use the server side only as a file store. I will be using a blogging website as a example. On the server you would have text files.. one per post. Then on the client side there would be a javascript that would use the Current URL as to recognize where in the blog you are currently.

Root: Display the last

Ok I need a break from my finals studying. Just 5 minutes. Here is my to do list of things.

• Study for Finals - Just two more days
• Cisco Systems Internship - Again this summer, need to pack up and go
• Canon SD1000 - Play with the chdk firmware.
• WRT350N Bricked - Poor 802.11n router, need to bring it back to life
• Organize local files - Several TB over about 20 hard drives makes me a sad panda
• Organize online files - Makes me sick looking at my web hosts root directory
• VoIP - Put my SPA3102 with my Asterisk box to good use
• Box of Networking stuff - Need to bring them back to life
• Bye WordPress - Needs replacement or upgrade
• Web Photo Album - Any ideas on Flickr, Picasa Web, maybe I will just host my own
• The list just doesn't end...

Back to cramming... wish me luck.

In the tech world, there are a load of religious wars waging currently. Emacs vs. Vi... Linux vs Windows vs FreeBSD... and taking sides really defines you. Everyone involved takes a side, and it really defines who you are. This is me by preferences.

Emacs > Vi
0.5mm metal mechanical pencil > Anything else
Linux > Windows
OpenOffice > MS Office
Firefox > IE
Thunderbird = Evolution > Outlook