some stuff

I have been learning rails for past few months.  You probably know it if you read my blog because there were a few things I posted as I learnt new things. I think the best way to learn is to build something. So, I built something finally! It is a dirty clone of ratemyprofessors.com and it is catered for colleges in India. And the name of the site is (roll the drums)

thecollegestuff.com

Yeah, I know. It is really simple with some very ordinary looks (there is a reason I do backend work for a living). But I feel good that atleast I have some product I can look at as a whole .  Anyway, I will work on my css skills and improve the look and feel.  I already have 20 more features lined up. The things I am more excited about are related to technologies and tools I want to try out like couchdb, memcached, some monitoring tools and so on. The whole idea of the site was for me to play with these things. If I get some users to my site, that will be a bonus!

If you have any ideas, find bugs and so on feel free to let me know. I am totally excited about it! A big thanks to Naveen and Harini for all the help with the ideas and ironing out issues.

Now, go ahead and play with the site and spread the word will ya?

A couple of my friends were asking me about ideas for final semester engineering project. I thought I will document some of my ideas here so that it will help some student some day who is keen on actually doing a project which is not the same old railway booking system or the insurance management system (atleast those were the hot projects during my time).  The ideas are raw. So, feel free to fork, transform or do anything with it. If possible, post your own ideas in the comment section.

Here goes my ideas:

0. Efficient routing of buses
If you travel by bus a lot, have you noticed that buses on some routes seem to be always empty and some are always full? Have you observed that buses just come one after another sometimes and there is none for a long time after that? Find a solution to that problem. Go to your local public transport authority and ask for the bus routes and maps. Figure out how to efficiently route the buses so that it covers more ground or gets you from point A to point B quicker or add more buses in areas which are identified crowded during peak hours. Just make it better than what it is now. Go ahead and implement that. That will be one heck of a project I tell you. You can start with lot of assumptions and then slowly start adding constraints.

1. Ugh, those traffic jams
I am from Bangalore and I sure know what this means. If you are from any of the metros in India, I am pretty sure you know what I am talking about. During peak hours, you are stuck in the traffic for hours. Can you somehow fix this? Get the map of the city and come up with an algorithm to direct the traffic in different routes (don’t care about the shortest distance from A to B because people are ok driving a few more kms instead of just idling there). Also, figure out where the bottle necks are, at what time they are and automatically generate an advisory for people (like suggesting the time at which people should go so that they hit less traffic and so on). I am being vague here because I can keep going with this but I just want you to run your imagination wild. Again, the goal is to make it atleast a little better than what it is now.

2. Sort the grocery store list
So, there are two scenarios here I care about. One is the grocery store where you just pick up stuff and take it to the counter and another where you just give the shopkeeper the list and he does everything for you. I want you to collect the data of where each product is (which aisle, which section and so on). Then, based on that data you should sort the list so that it is easy to pick up all the things in order starting from one end of the aisle and going around in order. For the second part where shopkeeper does the work for you, he should be able to sort multiple lists such that he can service multiple customers efficiently (as against doing each list in order).

3. Car parking lot problem
How often have you gone to a parking lot and have been looking for parking space. Last time I was in India and tried to park my car in the parking lot in the mall, there were literally 5 people managing it and they were so confused and disorganised, I sat their waiting for them to find me a spot. Seriously, how hard is it to come up with a solution where they know exactly how many spots are there to begin with and you assign numbers to each car which gets in so that the customer can just go there and park. And you basically recycle the number as and when people come in and out.

There are some more I have in my mind but still needs work. I will update once I have something concrete. Until then, feel free to post your ideas in the comments section.

Have a good day,
Mahesh Murthy