Thursday, November 16, 2006

Feeding the White Rabbit

So now that, for my birthday, I got my own Nabaztag, a white WIFI rabbit that can move its ears, display light signals on 5 RGB LEDs and play digitized sounds, the big question is: how to keep the funny bunny happy?

I guess by feeding it properly.

The default services offered for free by the vendor are pretty basic: weather, stock exchange, email account watcher... And the coolest: rabbit Tai Chi! Hey, what do you expect: they are free, right?

Since the animal has an HTTP based API that allows controlling its ears, lights and sounds (including a nice TTS feature), I do not see any reason to subscribe for the advanced paying services! It will be much more fun to write services for it!

So I came with the first one today, an appetizer for the white rabbit: the service connects to the GMail accounts of the family members and builds a vocal summary of the emails waiting to be read. And that's already cool ;-)

There are many other funny things to do: a service that would report the daily statistics of my open source projects could be fun. Another one that would connect Maven to the animal and that color the poor thing in red whenever a build is broken or unit tests are not A-OK, would be terrific.

You might wonder what is the moniker of this new family member? Knowing that if you know his name, you can make it speak and that the thingy sits in the middle of our living room, where any sentence rated above G are not welcome, I would say that we will call it "secret". For now.