Totally new Mail

I think the email system is quite outdated. No security functions, no intractability, no web2.0nes. Why not design a totally new email system. That feels more 'new' For example you could embed security functions I mentioned in my last post. You could add some sort of feedback. How many mail's do you get 'Are you attending' etc... And then some pri... clicks on reply all and you have a whole thread of 'yes', 'no' and 'maybe' mails. Just put a little click box in your mail and off you go. This of course relies on security first.

Secure Mail

After hearing a talk from Ed Gibson I thought all this security spam thing could be solved with public private key system. Just imagine how many mails you get from people you don't know. So the idea is: If you want to communicate with someone you send him a 'Communication Invite' You can attache a little message to this with some explanation. Quite like all the social networking sites do it. Attached to this is a public key that is created for one specific email address. If you accept the invite you do the same, you send him a mail with 'Invite accepted' with your public key. Then you both can sign and/or encrypt your mail messages to another. I don't know why ebay, banks, paypal and all the rest don't have a signing scheme? I can imagine my inbox to be structured something around the lines of
- Secure Inbox
- Communication Requests
- Unsecure mail
With this, I would soon have a list of my friends key's and I would know that they are not spamming me.

Image recognition program

I am quite sure that the internet is full of recurring images. How often have you seen this little fellow in some Office doc, web page and so on. So why not write a little web crawler that finds these images and then indexes them. This would be quite useful if you have a copyrighted image for example and you want to find out who is using it. Or just to see how many people are using your clip art. If you scale all the images to the same size and allow some minor differences you should be able to write a filter that does this quite easily. Of course you would have to filter all the different images out of ppt (Power Point something) files and web pages. But all this has been done somewhere before.

Windows Install service

One of the things I really like with Linux is the package management tools. I install a new machine and if I want Emacs, I just type one command (apt-get install emacs; yum install emacs; pacman -S emacs; ...) and voila I have it. Now on my windows machine this is a little different. I have to Google the emacs web page. Then look for the Windows binary then look for some gtk port for win32. And this goes on for ever. I am not trying to make a point about open source here. Windows is closed source face it. No it is far more that when installing a Windows machine I have to go off to 20 different web pages and download the install file and then wait till it installs. Why can't I have a little program that does that for me. A list of packages I can install and then I just select n packages and it will go of fetch them and then start the installers. Could add some basic dependency resolution. I suppose you could write a full featured deinstaller too, update mechanism and so on. Everything a nice Linux package manager can do.

google image search image color

Somethimes you want to search for images where one colour is dominant. So you want to to search for a picture of a globe where green is the dominant colour. Now (in google) you can only search black and white or colour. Would be cool if you could say green and blue too. Just a quick though

Social surfing

Remember the times when you where programming some shitty little page with php and all the book started with a counter somewhere on the page. This was a counter on how many people visited today and so on. Further the next chapter was a counter on how many people are currently on your website and if you really wanted to top things of you wrote how many logged on users and how many guest where online

From http://www.phpbb.com/community/
Who is online
In total there are 1427 users online :: 96 registered, 4 hidden and 1327 guests (based on users active over the past 30 minutes)
Most users ever online was 8680 on Mon Mar 19, 2007 1:28 am

So why doesn't someone take this to the next step and make a browser addon where you can see who is browsing the page. Something that integrates into the status bar and tells you how many people of your community are looking at this page right now. You can leave a comment, you can chat with other people viewing the page, add some tags or rate the page. This would be like browser social networking. Of course you would have to sign up with a little picture and some information but I suppose you could get this out of facebook and the lot. You would further have to blacklist some pages. Like gmail, google search and so on, you don't want to chat with all the people that are reading theire email do you.

Make a coffee machine that talks rfc2324

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_Text_Coffee_Pot_Control_Protocol

erd2db

I am looking for a tool in which I can create a nice erd diagram with all the relations and then this will output SQL, ruby migrate syntax or what ever. There is something like this called toad but there is nothing open source. Further there are some dia converts that take in some dia pic and convert it to something, but this doesn't work. So please would someone write something like this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_database_tools

Wireless PXE

Why not get your pxe image over wireless.

Google custom message changer

I change my google chat or talk message quite frequetly. I would love to publish this message on my website. But I can't really find an api that will let me read this message :(

Shell Captcha

Lots of internet services use Captchas to authentikate there users. So after 3 failed password attemps you get a little script generated image that a machine should not be able to read.
So now my idea is to port this to my shell and get rid of all those pesty ssh bruce force attacs. First enter the captcha if you can't solve that you are not allowed to enter your passwd into ssh. Or something around thouse lines. More to come (like always)

A new db

So time for another crazy didi idea. While writing dbook I was thinking about using sqlLite to save my data. After some though though I realised that this would be quite hard as the data would be very dynamic. So I thought of using a object oriented db. But this seamed to be a little unflexible and I would have to ship with another dependency. So I took a pice of paper and seched waht I call a hashDB. It is basically very simpel every data entry only exists once in the whole db. Then entries have links to other entries. So If you would be described in my db. You would have a name this would link to hair and this would link to blond. So with your person there would be the tupels links describing that you have blond hair. I am currently writing a little prototype maybe then it becomes clearer.

command line social networking

We all agree myspace, facebook, etc.. are shit. You spend your time looking at stupid stuff and you give a big company all the data it will ever need to create a product exactly for your needs with automatic advertisement buyer. So how can a little geek like me keep in contact with this friends and find out what really matters.
The idea: A command line tool that connects to a server and then you have your personal profile with what you are currently working on you can join the group "C++ developers" or "Linux is BSD without brain" and to be honest what to people like best "flame wars" what a better place to put this and take it away from the mailing lists.
Further everything is done like cvs/git so you can see what your friend has changed etc...
You might have your software backup somewhere or something like that.
I have to think about this a little more. But please comment

What it needs :

• Profile page
• Friends list
• Fotos?
• Groups
• Mail
• Who viewed my profile last
• Current activity
• Link people to content
• Pinboard
• Change log
• Mood indicator [hacking/sleeping/...]
• Encrypt a file amongs many users with secret shareing. So only when all users click on share the file can be read
  
• ??????

One big problem with social networking nowadays is the security issue. So when you add a friend to your buddies list you exchange public keys. So you can sign every message you send. And only with this key can you read his profile :)