Bored on the Internet?
Sometimes you’re just bored on the Internet so you go looking for interesting things online, or sometimes you write code. And, sometimes you write code that helps you find things on the Internet when you’re bored.
Behold, the Twitter public timeline link farmer! Feel free to follow me on Twitter as well.
Filed under: Code, Ruby | 1 Comment
This semester, I am a TA for CS194: “Software as a Service” (read: Ruby on Rails; LOL), and today, we are having final project presentations. I will be live-blogging about the students’ projects starting at 5PM. If you read this in time and want to come out, we will be in 306 Soda Hall.
Here we go! (These aren’t actual quotes by the way. I am EXTREMELY paraphrasing what the groups are saying.)
(Update: Pictures will not be posted because they came out incredibly bad due to the lighting in the room.)
5:07PM: “Everything’s ready as advertised…”
Flash-It – Sanja Curgus, Wesley Hinkle, Matthew Kocher, Colleen Lewis
5:12PM: “It’s kind of a pain to make flash cards, so wouldn’t it be easier to make flash cards online and then share them with your friends?”
5:12PM: “Let’s make a new set of flash cards.”
5:13PM: “Now I’m ready to make my set of flash cards public.”
5:13PM: “Now we can play with our set of flash cards.” Ooooh, nice AJAX and statistics.
5:14PM: “We can tag sets to make them easier to find and then search over them.”
5:15PM: Question: “Is there anything out there already that can do this?” “Yes, but it sucks.” Someone else mentioned quizlet.com.
MissingPets – Armen Khodaverdian, Eric Paik, Gautam Wilkins
5:17PM: “Our site allows people to post lost and found pets.”
5:17PM: “Using the Google Maps API, you can add lost and found pet notices visually over a map.”
5:18PM: “You can find similar descriptions of your lost pet over all locally found pets and search over them.”
5:20PM: “You can even send messages.”
5:20PM: Question: “How do you determine what descriptions match?” “By species, color, location, in this case, zip code.”
5:22PM: “Our service wasn’t designed for horses in mind.” Haha, someone asked about horses.
smart investor – Volodymyr Kalish, Henry Su, Zi Wang, Xixiang Xing
5:23PM: “Our goal was to provide a community where investors can compare portfolios and stocks, and discuss financial matters.”
5:24PM: “We have both private and public portfolios, which contain information about valuation and net gain/loss.”
5:26PM: “You can look up stocks, which also get queried through Google Finance when stored in a portfolio.”
5:27PM: “There is a typical forum feature.”
5:28PM: “Back to stocks; stocks can be rated based on community investment in the stock or by popular vote as well.”
5:29PM: “There is also note-taking functionality. Notes can be both private or public, and sent like messages.” Oooh, also some nice AJAX drag and drop and sliding functionality.
5:31PM: Chatter about portfolio privacy.
5:33PM: Question: “Why not Google Finance?” ”Lack of community features and statistics.”
HostComic – Esther Cho, Elliot Chow, Rohan Dhaimade
5:34PM: “HostComic is a web comic hosting solution and also a community to find web comics.”
5:35PM: “Comments can be made on each user strip and each comment can be rated, providing a way for the community to contribute.”
5:36PM: “Web comics are sorted by pre-determined categories.”
5:37PM: “There is also a search feature over web comics by title, category, or date of posting.”
5:39PM: Question: “Why use this site?” “We want to foster a community for both artists and readers.”
Courses Snowman – Ben Lau, Victor Lin, Randy Pang, Gerard Sunga
5:42PM: “Courses is an integrated course solution. Every semester you need to sign up for classes, our site will make it easier to integrate picking and choosing classes.”
5:42PM: “Schedule finder replacement for schedule.berkeley.edu. Information is scraped from there.” Oooo, some AJAX information and auto-complete fields.
5:44PM: “Course descriptions are pulled from the catalog on berkeley.edu.”
5:45PM: “Integration with CalMap if you don’t know where a building is.”
5:45PM: “We can pick the courses we want to take, then schedule activities.”
5:46PM: “Now we can generate a bunch of schedules, sorted by least amount of time gaps.”
5:47PM: “Finally, we can export to iCal, gCal, and Outlook.” Haha, they actually tried to load Outlook. Oops.
5:48PM: “You can share links to your schedule or just save it for future reference.”
5:49PM: Question: “Why snowman?” “For fun. Why not?”
5:49PM: Question: “Are you going to publish this?” “Maybe.”
A poll to the audience showed that maybe a quarter of the students in the room are interested in using it.
MedicalMooz – Mohammed Aatif Ali, Sami Eljabali, Hannah Hu, Mike Iskander
5:51PM: “Our users are boarding schools in developing countries. These schools are away from hospitals and don’t have doctors immediately available to them. They don’t have money to have database management systems to hold patient’s medical records, which are also inconsistent and unformatted.”
5:53PM: “We have different user roles: administrators, patients, and doctors.”
5:55PM: “We store a database of conditions, allergies, vaccinations, medications, and visits.”
5:56PM: “Patients have a full medical history and miscellaneous remarks associated with them.”
5:58PM: “We worked to make the system accessible to medical staff and doctors as well.”
Discussion about live deployment to 3 boarding schools in the near future.
postings.at - Sean Ahrens, Tommy Chiu, Michael Zhang
6:03PM: “postings is a local news service, like Digg and Reddit. Starting at colleges, for example: postings.at/berkeley”
6:04PM: “User registration must fit into a network.”
6:06PM: “Posts are ranked Digg-style and sorted by date or popularity.”
6:07PM: “Posts have link validation.” Neat feature.
6:07PM: “Users can comment and contribute to the community.”
6:08PM: “Posts are categorized by news, deals, discussions, and events. Networks are created by administrators.”
myCal – Shoeb Omar, Suhaas Prasad, Arjun Singh, Yuly Tenorio
6:12PM: “We’re also a course scheduling application, like Courses, which presented earlier. The difference is Courses helps you find what you want to take, however, we assume you already know what you want to take and help you figure out your schedule.”
6:13PM: “We can sort by different preferences, such as minimizing time gaps, setting nothing before a certain time, and nothing after a certain time in your schedule.”
6:15PM: “We can search for courses as well, with a similar interface to Courses.”
6:17PM: “We’re set up to handle custom events, but there is no front-end interface to create the custom events yet. Also, the schedule comparison feature wasn’t finished.”
6:18PM: Question: “What algorithms did you use to figure out the schedules?” “Eliminate conflicts early to reduce the amount of searching that needs to be done to optimize results.”
Campfire – Aaron Beitch, Spencer Fang, Wendy Kan, Marcelo Velloso
They’ve got a nice layout.
6:20PM: “Campfire allows you to write a story, and then allows others to branch off and add lines to it.”
6:21PM: “You can write haikus, prose, or limericks.”
6:22PM: “You can comment and rate stories. Moderators have the ability to moderate the site for inappropriate content.”
6:24PM: Question: “Have you considered making a Facebook plugin or application?”
6:24PM: “There is a print view that allows for easy reading of entire stories. Stories are also published under the Creative Commons license.”
The Cal Project – Danish Khan, Hammy Lin, Cuong Ngo, Shane Wey
6:26PM: “The Cal Project is a forum designed specifically for Berkeley students to communicate.”
6:26PM: “We found significant missing features from most forum sites, like tagging for example, so we implemented it.”
6:27PM: “There is a specialized question and answer thread which can have either a definite answer or rate-able answers.”
6:28PM: “We integrated Gravatar so people can have avatars and profiles linked across multiple forums.”
6:28PM: Question: “Do you support images or attachments?” “Not at the moment.”
6:29PM: Question: “Are there are any Berkeley-specific features?” “We planned to have a marketplace, as well as class-specific forums, but haven’t implemented it yet.”
hearsay! – Denise Ngai, David Reichbach, Sam Zats
6:30PM: “Hearsay goes off the idea of community gossip. You can post any entry about anything.”
6:32PM: “There are specific categories, but customizable tags.”
6:33PM: “Entries are pictures and text and can be rated. Comments can be anonymous if preferred.”
6:34PM: “Entries are also sorted by location, currently limited to the United States. Entries can have attached or hot-linked images.”
6:36PM: Comment: “Seems like a natural thing to plug into social networks.”
eMotion – Stepan Grigoryan, Wesley Wang, Wenda Zhao
6:38PM: “eMotion incorporates location with social networking, so you can see where your friends are. We are working on an Android implementation at the moment.”
6:39PM: “You can set your status and location by dragging onto Google Maps, by free-typing a location or by choosing one of many previously selected and saved locations.”
6:40PM: “You can see where you friends are on the map as well.”
6:40PM: “Real-time updates of locations!”
6:42PM: “How are we better than Loopt? You don’t have to have a cell phone to participate.”
6:43PM: Question: “How are the live updates done?” “Through the Google Maps API.”
And that’s it! Hope you guys enjoyed my first-ever live-blog.
(Update: If you’re interested in any of the projects, take a look at our class wiki for more information, source code, and other ideas.)
Filed under: College, Ruby on Rails | 7 Comments
If you know me in real life, you’ve probably discovered that I have a tendency to complain a lot. It’s just that I wish someone could have told me what the hell I was getting myself into before I got to college. How am I supposed to know that college is the ultimate test of time management skills?
As I was doing the dishes, waiting for the laundry to finish drying, I thought about the ideal way to budget a typical day. Here’s how the ideal today (yesterday now technically because it’s after midnight) should have broken down for me:
Living
- Total time spent taking care of myself (showering, brushing teeth, bathroom, etc.): 1 hour
- Total time spent eating (including cooking): 2 hours
- Total time spent cleaning (dishes, laundry, etc.): 2 hours
Total: 5 hours
School
- Total time spent in class: 3 hours
- Time spent hosting office hours: 5 hours
- Time spent doing CS161 homework: 2 hours
- Time spent traveling to/from/around campus: 0.5 hours
- Time spent studying for CS162 midterm: 2 hours
Total: 12.5 hours
Total time needed: 17.5 hours
Ideally, it would have taken me 17.5 hours to get everything I wanted to get done today including the overhead of living. This leaves 6.5 hours left for sleep, assuming everything else worked out exactly to the nanosecond. Great! However, based on empirical evidence, I actually need about 10 hours of sleep to function properly.
So what happens is I get tired and worn down. The first day that gets piled up with more things to do than realistically possible (comes rather early in the semester too; I think I made it half a week this semester) ends up causing an exponentially increasing problem over the course of the semester. I get sick. Things get done half-assedly. And this goes on for 16 weeks in a row, twice a year.
So what’s the catch? Is it worth it? I don’t know yet. Ask me in a year when I’m out in the real world. But I will leave you with this: you have to be motivated. If you aren’t motivated, you will not survive. Maybe you don’t even know what your motivation is (because I don’t know what it is right now) but if you’re motivated, you will survive and maybe learn a few useful things along the way.
Filed under: College | 1 Comment
