So our COGS group has decided to do a Google-maps based site that allows the visitor to find nearby restaurants (maybe stores, etc) that are open at different times of the day.  We’ve set up some framework stuff (SVN, domain, etc) and need to start getting things together.

By Thursday (1/31/08) we will have mapped out the data for the following locations.  This means we need to go to those areas and grab all of the data about the various stores (name, phone, address, hours) and submit it to Google’s database (or verify that they already have it.)

• Chris: Costa Verde shopping center
• Evan: Ralph’s shopping center
• Rodolphe: Whole Foods shopping center
• Marc: Einstein’s Bros shopping center
• Vivien: Vons shopping center

Our in-progress feature list:

Must-Have Feature Set

• Default time should approximate the user’s local time
• An interface to allow the user to change the time displayed
• Search for locations based on name and/or time

Would-Be-Nice Feature Set

• Mobile-access compatible (iPhone, etc)
• Heatmap of neighborhoods to display density of locations open at the given time

The first assignment for COGS 121 was due last week.  I worked up a simple site on Practical Chinese for Nerds.  The content leaves a lot to be desired, but that was essentially filler for me.  I was focusing on two things while I built this site.

1. Building a completely image-free site by hand.  Something I haven’t done in a while, considering all of my recent work with point-of-sale and e-commerce.  The verdict: I’m in love with Rails, not HTML.
2. I wanted to really get a feel for the differences using SciTE on my laptop versus Textmate on my desktop for the same, small project.  The verdict: my next laptop will be a Mac, purely because I love using Textmate.  If you’ve got a mac, but haven’t tried it out, I sincerely urge you to.

The thing I’m really looking forward to playing around with is OpenLaszlo.  It looks very powerful, and I’ve got a few ideas for projects where I could implement it.  The most interesting would be to use Laszlo’s DHTML output to create an interface to a Rails app.  Muhahaha.

Update:

Two very kind users have repackaged the driver for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. The old package is still available below, but the new one is here: starcupsdrv_2.3.0-1ubuntu1_i386.deb

Old driver
Finally! After very popular demand, I’ve managed to post starcupsdrv_2.3.0-0ubuntu1_i386.deb just for you! Since WordPress is not nice about uploading .deb files, I’ve put it on a separate sub domain with a direct download link. No special scripts or sign-in required.

If you download and use the deb file, I’d appreciate if you could leave a quick comment on this post to say hi. If the deb is really that popular, I’ll work on expanding support for it.

Once you’ve downloaded the deb, you can install it with the following command:

dpkg -i starcupsdrv_2.3.0-1ubuntu1_i386.deb

So in my 5th and final year at UCSD, I’m finally getting to take a class that I’ve had my eye on for years: Human Computer Interaction Programming. Part of the class assignments are to maintain a blog of what we do in (or related to) class. Since I’m lazy and don’t want to set up a whole new one, here we go!

This should also motivate me to continue my regular postings. For those readers that have been patiently waiting for the printer driver I talked about here, it will be posted this week.