NetFlap.com - {the tech blog}

Anyone with a big DVD collection should seriously check out this site called UTRACK Movies, it’s pretty sweet.  The site is basically a online system for tracking your DVD collection.  Now if you’re one of those people with 10 DVDs, this isn’t for you, but we have a LOT of DVDs and therefore we need to keep track of what we own, who borrowed what movie, and so on.  It’s done with a lot of Web 2.0 techniques so it is pretty fast to respond and it is great for organizing your collection.  The feature I like the most is that it will send an automated email message to people who have borrowed your DVDs after they’ve had them for 30 days.

Anyways… it’s cool.

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So I was reading in the news today about this NetFlix competition where they are offering a million dollars for the first person/team to improve the accuracy of their movie suggestion algorithm by 10%.

Now, NetFlix is a pretty big company and I’m sure they have some pretty smart people working for them.  The question for people entering this contest is, just how smart are the Netflix engineers?

From a business point of view, this move by NetFlix is extremely smart.  It will make thousands of people try to solve an extremely difficult problem.  Since the problem has been worked on for years now and little progress has been made recently, it is more than likely that the next major advancement will come by moving away from the current top solution and using a completely different technique.  This contest should fuel new thought and innovation and I believe NetFlix should be commended for funding research in this way.

Now the question is… should I try?  A seemingly impossible task with a million dollar reward… that’s right up my alley.

I’ll have to look into it a little more…

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A lego rubber-band chaingun which fires at 11 rounds/second.  I really don’t think there is much else to say.  For those who need to hear more, don’t bother, and for those who understand the cool factor here, check out the details here.  I have to say, that is some mighty fine Lego work.  Be sure to check-out the video that goes along with it.

Also, I’m heading out on vaction tomorrow, I’ll be going to California and will be stopping by Legoland.  I’ve never been before, so I’m hoping they will have some additions for my new Mindstorms NXT set.  I’m going to need more supplies if I’m going to make a better device than the chaingun.

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So I was walking through Toys ‘R Us yesterday and saw the new Lego MINDSTORMS.  I already have the last Mindstorms set, but this one is new… and how can I resist new robots?

The best new feature is definitely the “Ultra Sonic” sensor.  It allows the robot to judge depth and see motion.  It’s way better when your robot can see how far it is from the wall rather than having to bump into it before it knows it is there.

If you enjoy spending many many hours trying to accomplish a small task (like me), then you’ll enjoy this.  Even though you are somewhat limited with the sensors you have, you can still do some very cool stuff.

So when I got my set, I built the basic robot.  This took a few hours.  The basic robot allows you to put a ball in front of it and it drives straight at it and then picks it up with its claws when it gets to the ball.  That was neat for about 10 minutes.

I then decided I needed to try and do something myself so I thought, how hard could it be to modify the robot to make it locate the ball first and then go and pick it up.  Well… about 6 hours later… I finally got it to do this.  Going through an excercise like this shows the complexity of robots and gives you a lot of respect for the guys who make robots that actually do useful things.

Anyways… here is what my robot ended up looking like.  The design was only slightly modified from the one in the instructions, but the program I wrote was completely different.

More robots to come…

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