W.A.R. - Widespread Augmented Reality

Imagine leaving your images, comments and content hovering at or above real physical locations. Imagine others nearby interacting with your marks through their cameras. In fact, imagine scanning the horizon or your surroundings with your own mobile camera to reveal the floating marks left by others. Well stop imagining and do it with this app. The possibilities are endless with the sky as the limit. The Android app is in beta at the website SpiderOnFire. One can use the website to place markers at locations without having to be there. The Android app's camera view reveals content beyond your line of site. After testing and adding more features, the app will be published to Google Play with mad props out to MixARE for providing the augmented reality engine.

ChromeOS - Vanilla

As luck would have it, a buddy just finished a legal briefing that took most of the day, forgot to e-mail himself a copy, and now sees a blank screen when he turns on his laptop. The bad luck part of this has to do with me reformatting my ChromeOS bootable USB drive just yesterday, so now we are both staring at a blank screen and the restaurant is too noisy to listen to the hardrive and speakers.

It's now time to revisit Hexxeh and donate to Builds by Hexxeh so I can boot the laptop into Chrome and hopefully find the document.

But of course it could just be that the screen is out, which would require more than a bootable USB.

Content Management Systems

I answered an ad requesting help with PHP and MySQL. Upon accepting the task, I learned that Wordpress is a black box with a bunch of pretty wrapping paper pasted on top.

Problem: A carousel element was disappearing when clicked on.

Resolution: After synchronizing the staging and the production sites, the problem disappeared.

Phew... Apparently the shop knew enough about Wordpress to know that its guts are MySQL and PHP, but good luck trying to change any of that. An on-line magazine should not use an off the shelf CMS like Wordpress and be concerned with modifying PHP scripts and MySQL tables. Focus on content and just pay for a Wordpress plugin professional.

Unrelated perhaps, but here is a very good blog article on Drupal injection.

Augmented Reality Potential

Imagine being able to post your own Points of Interest (POI) for friends in your clique to see when they are within 3 miles of the target location. If you can get past the cumbersome site and the shopping network, that was the potential for Graff-It. But never mind the website as the Android app was the real treasure find at Google Play. Clicking on the marks in the camera view would bring up a marker on Google maps. Imagine further hooking up that mark to Google + video chatting. I compiled slides of augmented reality in action at www.xqzmoi.com. The reason for this compilation is that Graff-It is shutting down soon and I want to remember what could have been.

Graff-It and Augmented Reality for the masses

According to the owners, Graff-It and its sister Android app at Google Play will be shutting down before year end. This system placed the power of creating points of interest (POI) markers in the hands and minds of private citizens instead of relying on the "Man". For example, one could use the desktop browser to place a mark (art, photo, image or text) at a location on the world map. Folks within three miles of that location would see that interactive mark as they scan their surroundings through a Graff-It enabled device. This mark would be floating in the sky above the target location like a virtual billboard. As you might have guessed, the Android app and the GPS would allow members to upload marks from an actual location in real time, essentially leaving an interactive "I was here" for other members to see as they travel within three miles of the upload spot. Pair this with real time social networking through the Augmented Reality view and you have the sky as the limit, not to mention one hell of a world wide scavenger hunt. Why the shut down? Don't shoot me as I am just the messenger.

Zend server and PHP Errors

If you have Zend LAMP installed on your local PC and you are able to view pages with http://localhost/yourFile.php, then you can view errors in the following directory: C:\Program Files\Zend\ZendServer\logs\php_error. Enjoy.

Syria Shutdown

How it was done.