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

AVG Version 8 warning

Like 80 million Windows users, I had AVG Ver 7 installed happily on my Windows XP PC. The software was free, functional and unobtrusive. From the end of this month this version will stop being updated, according to the software itself, and therefore an upgrade to Ver 8 is required.

My experience with Ver 8 to date has not been pleasant, and I can no longer recommend the AVG package as an anti-virus solution to my clients. The problems started after installation, when bringing up Windows Explorer ground to a halt, and a number of virus warning screens appeared. The software was taking over the machine with it’s checks, to the point of making it no longer function. The final straw occurred when I booted up Google search in Firefox – usually the fastest results on the Net, only to find that every result had a painfully slow anti-virus check being carried out alongside it – visibly destroying the display. This can be switched off in Tools->Add-ons, but the software didn’t even ask me if I wanted it included.

This release is a prime example of unnecessary feature-creep, and goes to show that you can make a mistake and lose your user base. I hope they correct the software, although it currently looks too bloated to make any modifications without a radical change in direction. Until this is fixed I am recommending the open source ClamWin Antivirus that seems quite limited in comparison but appears functional and doesn’t push itself onto you.

Sometimes the anti-virus industry appears to use scare tactics. The chances of clicking on a virus-laden link on Google are low if you take the common-sense approach of only clicking sensible looking links.

HP Photosmart C7200 not connecting error

This was on Windows XP, and the Vista machine didn’t have a problem.  The wireless printer had connected through to the wireless LAN, but the XP machine was not detecting the printer and there was no particular error.

It turned out to be the Windows XP firewall that was the problem.  When I switched off the firewall the printer connected.  In the time I had on-site I couldn’t find how to open the Windows firewall to that specific network, so I installed another firewall instead and left the Windows firewall open.

Improving a search engine’s ranking on Google

Many people assume that a search engine by it’s very nature attracts users. However, if you own a new search engine you have to market that engine to your target audience. You can gain users through advertising, word-of-mouth, PR, link exhanges, or SEO (search engine optimization).

SEO on a search engine can be done in two ways.

• You can target your homepage by aiming to meet searchers on the main engines looking for your type of search engine e.g. ‘real-estate usa search engine’
• You can redistribute your content in a useful fashion to the main engines

We used the latter method to multiply out traffic to our local shopping site. It is in Google’s interest to have quality content from a smaller search engine merged in with it’s data-set, and they even make this service possible with Google Sitemaps. However care needs to be taken that there is still some added value in the method of searching once a user comes from Google’s page onto your own, or else none of the users will return to your engine, or even worse – you will be considered a spammer purely after advertising money.

Google’s webmaster tools provides an XML format to submit up to 50,000 URLs in one file, and more can be submitted by spreading your data-set across multiple files. It can take a few months for Google to index this quantity of pages.

The principle involves selecting a number of query terms from your data-set (in our case it was product names)

http://YOUR_SEARCH_URL?q=red+hat

http://YOUR_SEARCH_URL?q=garden+fork

The title of these pages needs to be relevant to the query terms. The descriptions of the products on your results pages will then be indexed on Google, and anyone finding you will be introduced to your engine as a second tier results page.

It is best if there is a call to action to modify the search using your more specific search facility.

Note: I feel a careful decision needs to be taken before embarking on such an effort. There are many people using this sort of technique to introduce a page of adverts which people then click through on. It needs to be for a genuinely unique set of data that is actually useful for an end user.