Wed, 09 Nov 2005

MindCamp

MindCamp was COOL. I am working on a post mortem for the issues we had with WiFi. In short, our social experiment involving mesh networking in the client space failed. I will explain more later.

The backup plan was to use OLSR in the distribution layer, and use access points in the access layer. This allowed us to deploy a wifi network with *no* cable plant. AND NO WE DID NOT USE WDS FOR GOD'S SAKE. It was a success--although it could be greatly improved. Matt, Rob, and I will be putting some serious cycles into making this an even better solution.

I would have to say the notable experience was a few hours spent offline with Michael Laine after his Space Elevator presentation. Michael is working on something great, and it should bring countless other, more "down to earth" (he he), innovations.

An unlikely innovation in the DVD arena captured my imagination. Since I first set eyes on a DVD player (ultimately the menuing system, and the apparent extensive scripting capabilities), I thought it would be cool to have a movie that either had a different plot every time you watched it, or perhaps a plot that stopped at various decision points.

As someone who has experience in the whole video scene, its difficult enough to write one plot, let alone 2^n plot deviations with just two choices alone. I have never had the time or the ability to make such a complex story line.

Make My Day (DVD) does just this. Its a choose your own adventure DVD!! The viewer is given almost an endless amount of choices as the video progresses. The disc is a comedy, and naturally has a very indy film feel to it. I thought this DVD project was so amazing, that I am going to buy it for christmas.

Near the end of the camp, I figured id show up to this one talk about "Cell phone programming". I almost didn't go...it sounded like someone explaining how to bypass phone subsidy lock codes so they could be provisioned to operate on other carriers. Thankfully, this was not the case! UIEvolution has just launched something quite amazing called UJML.

UJML is a programming language done in XML. I have no idea why the hell anyone would want to use the XML framework in a programming language, but they pretty much just use them all as functions and ditched the brackets.

UJML is a VM that rides on top of BREW or J2ME, and all code is platform independent and automatically scalable. While it is not multithreaded, it has an extensive system for handling events (like a VBL, etc) which makes its perfect for games.

UJML has all the "meat" of J2ME in a very easy to understand format. Anybody can crank out some amazing software for mobile phones using this system. The best part: Everything is free. The IDE, the compiler, the emulator, even the system that does OTA installs of your software.

Since UJML makes apps that are truly platform independent (unlike the slight variations seen with J2ME and BREW VM's), you can use the same code, graphics, and sounds from a java-enabled plasma TV, to a Treo, to even a low end 120x120 color cellular phone.

UJML also has XML call systems, plugin library support, and even a method of retrieving UJML code on an external internet host and executing it after download. This allows the coder to create very large applications that work on even the smallest of memory restrictions.

Overhead is there, but minimal. The system will handle multiple sprites and events without any issues.

It sounds like I need to stop development on my WAP MMORPG and move this over to UJML. I might have one heck of a killer app on my hands.

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