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Your route planning idea is fine, except where are you going to get the raw data from? Regular mapping programs use people who drive around with a GPS, but there simply isn't the budget for enough of these to provide any sort of real-time (or even recent) monitoring of road conditions. You'd have to have devices built into the cars to track average speed along each stretch of road during each time segment. I'm sure some company somewhere is working on this already.

Trust me, I've been thinking about this for over 8 years, I've done my homework, even if I don't know GIS systems. (but I do have a friend from high school who works for ESRI). State transportation boards keep metrics on their road systems, so that they can do long term planning. There is also a community of people who are obsessed with roads... there used to be a few road related usenet groups... if you can get them to 'adopt' an area, they'd probably be more than happy to tell you what the conditions are like. You can use human psychology for those aspects (like Amazon's "top X" reviewers), or try to get funding from an organization to provide cash/prize incentives. (there are lots of companies who would love to have this information...maybe some trucker's union could help, or someone like Mobil, who do travel guides)

And I'm not talking about real time -- although there are groups that track that sort of thing, I'd like to be able to integrate, I'm more interested in the beginning of just dealing with formulaic information -- like don't drive the DC metro anywhere near rush hour, unless it's a holiday.

I also expect it to have some growing pains -- CDDB and IMDB sucked in their early days, until they had enough people giving input for it to become worthwhile.

Your recipe idea could work, assuming you had enough people to collect recipes and enter them according to your rather detailed specs. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to enter a type of food, a cooking method, a time limit, and a list of main ingredients and get a list of optimal recipes. The allergies and food intolerances would be easy to add later, since those are based on ingredients and food types and probably won't need any additional data entry.

The requirements are actually based on shortcomings of the various systems -- you need to use ontologies or something similar, so that you can translate to foreign languages, or even regionalized dialects of the 'same' language. Most Americans wouldn't know what 'castor sugar' is, because it's sold as 'superfine sugar' in the US. Likewise 'icing sugar' is sold as 'powdered sugar' or 'confectioners sugar'. Even within the US, 'all-purpose flour' in the south isn't the same as 'all-purpose flour' in New England (different protein content). And what qualifies as a 'large' onion. Eggs are regulated, but most other items aren't.

And I've already planned out a potential sponsor for this one, too... if you could get someone like the Food Network to back it, then you could have the database link to the various DVDs they sell -- maybe even ship the software on the DVDs, so that it'd know that it could prompt for the disc, and queue up the right scene, if you wished.

As it is, many recipies could probably be automatically be parsed, and then have someone review adjust/whatever them. And you'd probably want to accept recipes that aren't so anally organized, but then you couldn't use alternative display formats or do unit conversions, scaling, etc. (scaling is trickier, as it adjusts the time, but not typically linearly -- you might need to adjust pan size, or do multiple batches, or it has no significant effect.)

The memorable passwords generator has to do with how the mind works more than anything else. This sounds like the most interesting puzzle to solve.

Take a look at the link I gave to the proof of concept -- it uses sentances (currently based on fortune, but I want to seed it with movie/tv quotes, song lyrics, books, etc) as a mnemonic, and then generates a password based on the input.

(and, if nothing else, I've probably convinced people that I'm obsessive compulsive, as I said earlier)


In reply to Re^2: If I had a Free Two Months... by jhourcle
in thread If I had a Free Two Months... by samizdat

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