Problem: Sometimes frozen food melts and refreezes.

Refrigerated trucks don’t.  Freezer doors stay open.  The freezer case goes out.  Groceries get left in the car for a long trip.  The power company decides to play power line roulette.  Later, the problem is fixed, and the food freezes again.  It’s hard to know if food thawed out and was then refrozen.  For some foods, this can be dangerous.

Solution: Fancy Ice Cubes.

Put a small “safe to eat” ice solid inside each back of frozen vegetables.  If it’s missing or unreadable, the vegetables have been thawed and refrozen.  The ice solid is made from water with two or more food colorings, so pick colors like the food.

When ice melts, the liquid will mix.  If you make ice cubes out of two or more colored waters, the two colors will mix.   For the simplest example:

1. Fill an ice cube tray so that each hole is half full.
2. Put in one drop of yellow food coloring into each hole.
3. Freeze.  You now have half height yellow ice cubes.
4. Fill the rest of each hole of the ice cube tray with plain water.
5. Put in one drop of blue food coloring into each hole.
6. Freeze.  You now have ice cubes that are yellow on the bottom and blue on top.
7. Leave the ice cubes in the freezer.  Have a three day power outage and then restore power for a day.
8. You now have green ice cubes.

That’s the core idea.  You have a way to tell if the item was refrozen.  From here, you can get fancy.

• Adjust the surface area ratio to signify how much thawing is acceptable.  Use thin slices when less thawing is allowed.
• “Print” tamper proof cubes in multiple colors.   You might ship cases of vegetables with a thin slice with the date and company logo in different colors.  If it the slice arrives a melted mess, don’t accept it from the trucker.
• Use multiple fluids or widths to make a ‘gauge’ to show exactly how melted the shipment got.

This could easily commercialize as a money saver by identifying truckers making expensive mistakes or as a premium brand spiff by making the ’safety tag’ inside each bag.
Shoo, go make money.

Problem: People Fail To Understand the Whole “Gays Can Marry” Thing

Solution: A T-Shirt!  It’s Always The Solution

FIRST THE COLOREDS…

THEN THE WOMEN…

NOW THE GAYS?

LIBERALS AND THEIR “RIGHTS”

Problem: Hard to Get People Not To Smoke

Solution: Pressure sensitive ashtrays

Some people smoke in non-smoking areas.  Sad, but true.  How about putting ashtrays for their pleasure?  These ashtrays cough loudly when you rest a cigarette on the edge of ashtray.  If you mash your cigarette in the ashtray it screams “Ahhhhhh!!!! It Burns!  It Burns!”

There are worse things to build on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Problem: People balk at having online access to seldom used financial, insurance, and service accounts.

Financial and insurance institutions want consumers to access accounts online.  It lowers costs and provides consistent service.

People note the potential for high cost losses, the one-sided user agreements, and complete lack of recourse for most fraud.  Some may choose online access for primary banking; the convenience outweighing the risk.  Many more will avoid online access to a 401(k) plan.

Solution: Provide information only accounts by default.

Information about an account is less valuable than the money in it.  Being a little careless with your account, such as accessing it from a computer, becomes similiar to throwing out printed statements without shreading them.

These accounts would let people see their balances and fees, make most routine changes, but not make ones that severly compromise security.  For example, transfering money from savings to checking is OK; changing mutual funds is OK; adding a newborn to your insurance is OK; changing your address is not OK; disbursing money to outside accounts is right out.  The risk of catastrophic loss decreases.

There are some implementations approaching this solution, aimed at preventing catastrophic losses.  Bank of America provides alert notifications by email when selected activities occur, such as adding a new Payee.   E*Trade uses separate passwords for viewing information and trading securities.

This idea provides lower costs to institutions, more convenience to consumers, and less loss to fraud all around.  What’s not to like?

Problem: I’m a guy. When I try to cook, it uses these things called “in-gradients”. I am supposed to have little boxes, cylinders, and packets full of baking power, baking soda, and yeast.

Solution: I’ve already got a spice rack. Put ‘em in there.

Seriously, is it so hard to package baking powder into a spice jar? Or little packets of yeast in a spice jar? Every recipe wants a teaspoon or two. I don’t need a new shape in my three dimensional Tetris of cabinet space. And don’t get me started on bullion cubes!

Problem: I want a web browser plug-in that can edit the FavIcon for my bookmarks.

Solution: Build one.

There exist dozens of online FavIcon editors on the web. The FavIcon is the small graphic in the corner of the address book; the one for this site looks like this .  Some tools, like FavIcon Picker 2 let bookmarks be reduced to just the icon, making a compact tool bar of bookmarks. Unfortunately, not every site has a favorite icon, and different services help on the same favorite icon. For example, Google, Google (Linux) search, and Google Analytics have the same favicon.  I want to make my own icon as a minor variation of the single standard icon.  Alternately, I want to make dirt simple favicons for sites that have none.

My feature list for such a program would include:

• Take an existing favicon and alter the colors.  The red “G” might be search, the “blue” might be analytics.
• Add a letter overlay onto existing favicons, so my “Google Linux” button has an “L” on it.
• Create a one or two character favicon so that the cool Widgets site with no icon could get a “red Wi” favicon in my bookmarks.

None of this is particularly odd or difficult.  It’s a matter of a GUI front end, some data files, and some shelling out to ImageMagick to do the actual work.  Hmm….

Problem:  The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO Laptop coud get viruses

The XO laptop will be a perfect breeding ground for viruses.  The system is monolithic, with an expectation of identical hardware and operating systems being deployed across entire countries.   IT support is expected to be non-existent.   The machine networks heavily and promiscuously.

The primary defense against the spread of viruses is the built-in BitFrost security system.  This assemblage uses virtual machines to restrict certain combinations of rights and attempts to prevent some of the higher harm viruses from occurring.  One can expect many installations to disable any security measures found burdensome, as occurred with the rights based security in J2EE.

Solution:  Make a bootable, read only, USB key to validate that all installed software is open source.

On the other hand, the OLPC has a few truly special features that allow effective anti-virus software to exist.   All, or almost all, software on an OLPC is expected to be open source.   It becomes reasonable to validate that all possible changes to configurations, applications installed, and binaries from a known list of ‘good’ applications.  While “enumerating badness” is a doomed strategy, enumerating allowed systems is possible.

Consider a repository that keeps track of all known contributed applications and language packs in source form.  An automated script builds these into sugarized files and keeps track of the file system effects from installing these onto virtual machines.   The results are placed onto a self-booting USB key that boots up, examines the file system of the XO, and declares it to be clean or infected.

This does require some tricky programming, mostly in reducing the combinatorially exploding possible configurations into a linearly growing set of rules for allowable configurations.  The problem is engineering, not requiring perfect implementation.

This feels like a good PhD Thesis for someone.

Problem: Ubuntu troubleshooting is scattered about useless message boards

Solution: Rate messages for useful information

Ubuntu, the popular Linux distribution, discusses problems in message boards. Someone poses a problem and various people pose possible solutions. The total volume means that great posts detailing the actual way to set environment variables or handle XYZ Mark 32.42 video cards are lost. Users spend way too much time digging through chaff.

One simple solution is to rate the value of posts, ala Slashdot and others. As a user is browsing through the discussion forum, she can tag an answer as especially clear and well written. Alternately, she could tag a message as a question or otherwise content free. Later users might set a minimum threshold to search for well written explanations.

Problem: Good or Cheap Internet Hosting Companies

Solution: Good and Cheap Internet Hosting Companies

The cost of casual web hosting has dropped through the floor and one can expect it to remain there. If you need to host a dozen domains, downloading about 500 gigabytes of bandwidth each month, storing some hundreds of gigabytes of graphics, handling email accounts, and programming with a full Unix shell including tools like Subversion, Python, and MySQL, then that will set you back about $8 per month. DreamHost’s feature list (sign up here) would be unheard of five or ten years ago. With minor variations, so does everyone else. The catch? These servers are not 100% reliable; more like 98% reliable. I noticed DreamHost had about two or three days of outages or severely degraded performance last year.

Hold it, you think, we handle nearly 100% reliability with unreliable hard drives, unreliable communications channels, and even unreliable employees. Why can’t we handle nearly 100% reliability with unreliable web hosting? What can we do?

Redundant Arrays of Independent Service Providers

Tactic 0 — Sharing the Static Load

Web hosting companies slow down or run out of bandwidth quota far more often than actually crashing. Also, graphic files and other static data account for the bulk of the data served. One common tactic is to serve the the static files from several different domains. One can use an Apache plug-in to rewrite outgoing html, a periodic (cron) program to occasionally rewrite your images directory location, a client-side JavaScript routine to display from whichever server provided the picture fastest, mirroring downloads onto a new server, or several other methods. The effect is that loading a web page may load data from more than one domain.

Only the smaller main page needs to be served from the primary ISP when it is slow. All other data comes from faster, inexpensive ISPs. Similarly, a graphics intensive site, such as Girl Genius, could use this method to serve many terabytes of data for about a hundred dollars per month.

Tactic 1 — Dumb DNS Failover or Load Splitting

Another tactic that commonly works to failover to another site. Using various tricks with DNS or BGP, traffic to a downed site can route to a backup or traffic from different geographies can route to different servers. The site is mirrored, but the the URL remains the same.

Tactic 2 — Failover with Transactions Intact. Distributed ACID Transactions.

The hard part of failing over is making sure the important state is preserved when a site goes down. There are ways to do this, with varying degrees of bandwidth efficiency and latency. Each service would need to notify other servers in some scheme in order keep databases intact. Lots of trade-offs present themselves. It is doable, but requires a fair amount of custom work.

Summary

Getting the high availability out of these redundant ISPs is just work. More complex tactics require more engineering. The business model, as always, is to mask all of the complexity of these tactics so that the customer’s problem just “goes away”.

One could provide a service that set up all the failover options, signed up for the ISPs, wrote the scripts to maintain transaction state for a flat fee. Alternately, one could simply sell themselves as a “high availabilty, high transaction volume” service provider while actually running the service off a number of inexpensive ISPs.

There is money sitting there people. Go pick it up!

Problem: Constantly packing and unpacking your laptop, the power brick and chargers for your devices.

Solution: Modify a backpack to have the the chargers all plugged in and an easy to handle extension cord. Just plug in the whole backpack at the next coffee shop or airport.

This is a simple enough idea. Leave the bulky power brick in the back, have a place to stuff your phone where it charges, have an extra outlet right there if you have more things to plug in or need to sync your Palm. This may involve a wireless USB hub. Optimize for the time to sit down, plug into power, put your cell phone in the charger, pull out the laptop, and get to work.