AtomJump newsletter e-mail subscription available

You can now subscribe to this news page to receive e-mails whenever we send a post.   This should keep you more in the loop about progress on AtomJump products.

AtomJump Timulator site updated

We’ve created the new front-end to the site to explain what a timulator is more effectively.  We now feature the ability to try the timulator on your site immediately.  We hope you like the new design!

See the Timulator quick interface, or full description page.

Augmented reality shopping using LightRod.org’s engine

Thundre and Layar have released the augmented reality local product finder today, which uses the same core engine as the open source augmented reality server LightRod.org.  The tool allows mobile users with iPhone 3GS or Android phones to enter a search term for the product in a local shop that they’re looking for.  The display then overlays the products on the real world and shows photos of the products, prices and which shop they’re located in.  At the push of a button, the shop can be called to check availability, or directions can be found with the help of Google maps.

The application is currently available anywhere in the UK, but is global in extent, with retailers able to add their product details in any location worldwide.

LightRod goes online, an open source augmented reality server

AtomJump have repositioned their Geosearch project as an open source augmented reality (AR) server, LightRod to complement the burgeoning augmented reality browsers market appearing from Layar and others.

The product could form a key element in the need to serve up ‘where is my nearest’ requests in a scalable manner from within AR applications.  The server has been tested with databases of half a billion geo-located keywords, and the software will scale further if required.

See

http://www.lightrod.org

AtomJump rumoured to release an Open Source Augmented Reality Server

The AtomJump Geosearch has all the prerequisites of fulfilling the needs of an open source augmented reality server.  It serves up point of interest data from large databases in a local manner, suitable for display in Layar or the other augmented reality browsers that are just coming to the market.

However, as of yet the name of the service is not disclosed, but the geosearch software is downloadable from

http://www.atomjump.com/mediawiki/

AtomJump Timulator has custom templates added

The AtomJump Business Timulator, a product that adjusts the business open hours to a site visitor’s times-zones has had templates and an XML feed added.  These new features mean that the look and feel of the product can be quickly adjusted to exactly match that of the host website.

It is an exciting development, and opens the road for a whole variety of different roles for the timulator.  The templates are written in plain HTML/CSS with the addition of several time related variables.

AtomJump time zone converter upgraded

The AtomJump time zone calculator or timulator as it is known, has had it’s business structure developed further.  Under the new subscription arrangement, there are now two versions: a free personal and non-profit edition, and a business edition for profit-making firms.  This is inline with the fact that it is an ongoing service that AtomJump are providing for it’s customers.

The software comes in the form of a link that dynamically identifies where a site’s reader or e-mail recipient is from, and displays the open-hours of the owner in the time zone of the reader.  This helps avoid the inevitable confusion that different daylight savings times and different time-zones have on communication across large distances.

The tool is already in use on dozens of websites, and hundreds of e-mail users have signed up.  Key business users of the tool include hotels, e-commerce sites, and travel companies.  Many firms have open hours that don’t span 24 hours, and they are losing customers to their competitors during this off-period if the call is not answered.  Other small home-run firms are tired of getting calls in the middle of the night.

The timulator is available to business users at a standard rate of $US20 per month, but if you’re reading this post there is a discount code of ‘maxtrade’ which offers an ongoing 20% discount.

The link is here http://time.zone.converter.atomjump.com/

Subversion problems on wireless broadband

This post is not a solution, but more of an observation, and I welcome your suggestions.

On one of our projects we’re running subversion (incidently git could be a better tool – it is a distributed version control system), and I suddenly found that I couldn’t commit to the project.

svn: Commit failed (details follow):

svn: Server sent unexpected return value (400 Bad request) in response to OPTIONS request for ‘/svn/…[my path]‘

I then remembered that I was on wireless broadband, and on plugging back the wired ethernet connection, it could suddenly commit once more.  What is causing this?  It isn’t a different IP – but something in the local set up seems to be causing the problem.  This was on Ubuntu linux, but I had a similar problem on a Vista client.

Update It turned out to be Vodafone which has a firewall at their end.  The workaround was to pass it through ssh – not as difficult as it sounds, but you need to check out the repository again with ssh as the transfer method used.  In fact, this is more secure, although it requires you to enter a password each time.

AtomJump PHP geo-search public

It is early days, but the open source geosearch is up on it’s own wiki, and available for download.  For people struggling with  proximity search code, this is your answer.

Designed to complement Google Maps and other mapping services, this software can be used on your own servers to create a full proximity search, letting you keep all of your geo-data private should you wish, and allowing your services to scale.

Follow this link

Build a free PC

Many consultants and people in shops won’t explain that it is perfectly possible to build a free Windows PC nowadays – with all the required software being free (with the exception of Windows itself). Of course, it depends on what you want to do with the PC, but generally a machine built on open source software is perfectly adequate for most tasks.

ZoneAlarm firewall

Clamwin Anti-virus for anti-virus protection

OpenOffice for documents and vector drawings, or Inkscape for vector graphics if you already have MS Office and don’t want a large download

GIMP for bitmap graphics manipulation

Thunderbird for e-mail

Firefox for web browsing

NVU for web-page creation