Hurricane Ike
This hurricane is unlike anything I have experienced before, just look at what this one is bringing to shore...
Random and Fascinating stuff
After having my mind blown away reading the Stuff you can't believe you just figured out thread on SA, I decided to share a few that I found really fascinating...
The word Car is a short form of the word Carriage.
The tune of Pachelbel's Canon is present in so many songs I had no idea about before, including many Greenday, Aerosmith, Beatles, Bush, Bob Marley, U2, Dragonforce, Bowling for Soup... and the list goes on. A funny video rant about this with examples.
The word Teen is intended for ages that end with -teen such as thirteen, fourteen up until nineteen. How did I not catch that for this long...
Every wrist watch advertisement out there shows the same time, 10:10.
Few of the ones I read up made me feel really dumb, like the teen thing, for not realizing them for this long, on the bright side now I know... There is a lot more but not really feeling like typing more, hopefully will start posting stuff more regularly.
The word Car is a short form of the word Carriage.
The tune of Pachelbel's Canon is present in so many songs I had no idea about before, including many Greenday, Aerosmith, Beatles, Bush, Bob Marley, U2, Dragonforce, Bowling for Soup... and the list goes on. A funny video rant about this with examples.
The word Teen is intended for ages that end with -teen such as thirteen, fourteen up until nineteen. How did I not catch that for this long...
Every wrist watch advertisement out there shows the same time, 10:10.
Few of the ones I read up made me feel really dumb, like the teen thing, for not realizing them for this long, on the bright side now I know... There is a lot more but not really feeling like typing more, hopefully will start posting stuff more regularly.
CG Too Real
The demo from Image Metrics is so real, it's borderline creepy knowing that she is not real. Take a look at the Video. Computer Graphics have come quite a long way, feels like what I did 4 years back in CG almost ancient compared to this.
Watch the Video to believe.
Watch the Video to believe.
Farewell Cisco
I guess all good things must come to an end... after 3 summer months, I just concluded my internship at Cisco for the second time, which I thought went extremely well. My project was to port the ASE (Automatic Signature Extraction) system from a plain linux platform to the Cisco AXP which was quite an interesting experience. Porting ASE was the easy part, it was porting libc, apache, postgres, mysql, php and a boat load of tools and dependent libraries the more interesting part.
Other than work which felt more like a fun project, I really enjoy the people I got to work with, very laid back and chill group. On top of all that, there was always something to do with the rest of the Interns, so many interesting folks to meet. The social mailer list was extremely active and quite hilarious, and I think the Intern forum I had set up at internmix.com was quite sucessful.
The area... the number of parks and natural getaways around California is crazy. While I was in Cali, went camping in the Big Basin Redwoods and it was quite a relaxing getaway from the busy life down at Silicon valley. On top of that, there were many hikes and picnics up the closer parks which I really enjoyed. Several times I just jumped in the car with just a gps in hand and drove to the mountains east of San Jose with no destination other than looking for windy roads... and in one such journey I accidentally came across the Lick Observatory. When I got there, it was totally empty and I even got a full private 1-on-1 tour of the place. The mountain where the observatory is located is surreal, it's calm, relaxing and completely free of civilization, only the windy roads. It was so windy that on my way down, I had to stop for about 30 minutes because it was making me dizzy (imagine a 1 hour roller coaster ride) Map.
And to end this all, I drove a epic drive from California to Texas in two days. 1900 miles, 14 hours per day for 2 days. I have driven this path before several times, but for the first time it was green along I-10 in Arizona and New Mexico! I think the mild weather along with the nice scenery is what made the drive bearable. It's been a whole day since I got back, but my body is still recovering from sitting still for so long.
In my opinion, this summer went way too fast. All these together makes for a kick ass summer experience. New people, new experiences, the work was fun, so many things to do... just perfect. You never know, I just might wind up in San Jose again....
Other than work which felt more like a fun project, I really enjoy the people I got to work with, very laid back and chill group. On top of all that, there was always something to do with the rest of the Interns, so many interesting folks to meet. The social mailer list was extremely active and quite hilarious, and I think the Intern forum I had set up at internmix.com was quite sucessful.
The area... the number of parks and natural getaways around California is crazy. While I was in Cali, went camping in the Big Basin Redwoods and it was quite a relaxing getaway from the busy life down at Silicon valley. On top of that, there were many hikes and picnics up the closer parks which I really enjoyed. Several times I just jumped in the car with just a gps in hand and drove to the mountains east of San Jose with no destination other than looking for windy roads... and in one such journey I accidentally came across the Lick Observatory. When I got there, it was totally empty and I even got a full private 1-on-1 tour of the place. The mountain where the observatory is located is surreal, it's calm, relaxing and completely free of civilization, only the windy roads. It was so windy that on my way down, I had to stop for about 30 minutes because it was making me dizzy (imagine a 1 hour roller coaster ride) Map.
And to end this all, I drove a epic drive from California to Texas in two days. 1900 miles, 14 hours per day for 2 days. I have driven this path before several times, but for the first time it was green along I-10 in Arizona and New Mexico! I think the mild weather along with the nice scenery is what made the drive bearable. It's been a whole day since I got back, but my body is still recovering from sitting still for so long.
In my opinion, this summer went way too fast. All these together makes for a kick ass summer experience. New people, new experiences, the work was fun, so many things to do... just perfect. You never know, I just might wind up in San Jose again....
Gallery2 and Facebook App
So a few weeks back, I was really frustrated realizing that there were two places I needed to upload my pictures online, once to my personal Gallery2 album and then again to Facebook. Uploading identical sets of images twice was unacceptable for me, so I decided to write a Facebook app that would integrate the two. After fumbling around the Facebook API and Gallery2's db, results were good.
In simple, the Facebook app pulls the album list from my Gallery2 db and publishes them as thumbnails to my Facebook profile. The hardest thing was finding my way around Gallery2's SQL Database, what a mess.
Now my problem is solved, and on top of that it was pretty cool learning how the Facebook API works, quite an interesting mechanism.
Update Dec 4, 2009: I took the onsite Gallery installation down after security concerns.
In simple, the Facebook app pulls the album list from my Gallery2 db and publishes them as thumbnails to my Facebook profile. The hardest thing was finding my way around Gallery2's SQL Database, what a mess.
Now my problem is solved, and on top of that it was pretty cool learning how the Facebook API works, quite an interesting mechanism.
Update Dec 4, 2009: I took the onsite Gallery installation down after security concerns.
Reconstruction 3
So I have decided to re-write my website from ground up after so many attacks on my previous Wordpress installation (to be fare it's been on-line for 4 years, countless security patches, upgrades, and various hacks of my own).
My implementation will be functionally the same as Wordpress, except much more lean in comparison, but at the same time customized for my needs, such a tight integration with facebook, gallery2, twitter, my asterisk voip system, and a few other things.
One thing I will be keeping from Wordpress is the URL format since changing that would break all the links from the outside world. I am also not developing any support for themes/templates other than simply through the css stylesheet, just to keep things simpler.
I also have plans to experiment with a new caching system idea that was brewing in my head, but that's for later.
Wish me luck on this project.
My implementation will be functionally the same as Wordpress, except much more lean in comparison, but at the same time customized for my needs, such a tight integration with facebook, gallery2, twitter, my asterisk voip system, and a few other things.
One thing I will be keeping from Wordpress is the URL format since changing that would break all the links from the outside world. I am also not developing any support for themes/templates other than simply through the css stylesheet, just to keep things simpler.
I also have plans to experiment with a new caching system idea that was brewing in my head, but that's for later.
Wish me luck on this project.
Fadeaway Ink
I just saw a old fax printout and realized that the ink on those fade away with time, most would consider this an annoying glitch. But think from a different perspective. Why not use it for our advantage?
In almost all settings today (office or home) people print things out to use only for a very short period of time (maybe a week) just so they don't have to stare at the computer monitor for long periods of time. If Fading Ink is used, you could simply print it out, use it for the short duration and after a few days the ink will slowly start fading away.
So I call on all your crazy chemists, know of anything that we can use as a ink that with time will start changing colors or simply fade away to transparency (either by a chemical reaction taking time, or simply a reaction with gases in the environment). Even if it changes to a color such cream or light blue, that would be ok... (we can just print on a light blue piece of paper and continue to reuse that).
Of course other than the tree/paper saving advantage, you can do some really nifty tricks with this. You could print a message out using a ink that fades away due to oxidization, and immediately after printing put it in a sealed envelope and send it. This way the recipient only have a short amount of time to read it and the message will effectively self destruct (unless they know what's coming and quickly make a copy of it, of add some more chemicals to change the color of the ink yet again).
Simple enough?
In almost all settings today (office or home) people print things out to use only for a very short period of time (maybe a week) just so they don't have to stare at the computer monitor for long periods of time. If Fading Ink is used, you could simply print it out, use it for the short duration and after a few days the ink will slowly start fading away.
So I call on all your crazy chemists, know of anything that we can use as a ink that with time will start changing colors or simply fade away to transparency (either by a chemical reaction taking time, or simply a reaction with gases in the environment). Even if it changes to a color such cream or light blue, that would be ok... (we can just print on a light blue piece of paper and continue to reuse that).
Of course other than the tree/paper saving advantage, you can do some really nifty tricks with this. You could print a message out using a ink that fades away due to oxidization, and immediately after printing put it in a sealed envelope and send it. This way the recipient only have a short amount of time to read it and the message will effectively self destruct (unless they know what's coming and quickly make a copy of it, of add some more chemicals to change the color of the ink yet again).
Simple enough?
