Finding Momentum

For those of you who are watch­ing the McCain-Obama debates tonight, you can check out Twitter’s elec­tion feed at http://election.twitter.com.

You’ll basi­cally be watch­ing Twit­ter­ers react to the debates in real time–pretty amaz­ing, if you ask me. It’s like watch­ing a national con­ver­sa­tion unfurl right in front of your eyes. Try it out tonight!

This semes­ter I’m tak­ing IEOR 190A — Engi­neer­ing Entre­pre­neur­ship. We are made up of a bunch of busi­ness types and engi­neer­ing types and business-engineering types who come together to fig­ure out how to start a busi­ness in the tech sphere.
Here’s how I’d explain this class: come up with a busi­ness plan for a com­pany in […]

I spent a good four hours today dig­ging through Word­press code, try­ing to get our Cal Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship Web site back up.
The prob­lem: the page seemed to freeze when load­ing page con­tent. The request would time out, leav­ing a half-loaded page sans con­tent. I dug into the theme at first, try­ing to track down which function […]

So for our CS188 (Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence) project, Capture-the-Flag Pac-Man, I’m respon­si­ble for writ­ing a script that does some pro­cess­ing and analy­sis on a game board, sim­u­lat­ing a Pac-Man agent (my other group mem­bers are respon­si­ble for far cooler things, like infer­ence and heuris­tics, but humor me here).
I most def­i­nitely need at least sev­eral hours of computation […]

I shook Joe Hewitt’s hand today (psst, he’s the guy who did tons of Mozilla stuff but most notably built Fire­bug). I stam­mered a lot. But that’s okay, because I shook Joe Hewitt’s hand.
“Fan­boy” says the Face­book engi­neer behind me, under his breath.

Dis­claimer: about 95% of you won’t get this. The other 5% should con­sider get­ting a life.
So we’re in CS lec­ture (this is with Prof. Papad­mitrou), and one stu­dent in the front raises his hand and asks, “Isn’t the Trav­el­ing Sales­man Prob­lem not yet proven NP-complete?”
Papad­mitrou turns around with a con­cerned expres­sion on his face. “No, it […]

So Hsiu-fan and I had floated the idea of doing a hack for Yahoo! Uni­ver­sity Hack Day. We had even polled some of our friends about it, and the con­sen­sus seemed to be “We’ll see what we can do with the time we’re given.”
Well it turned out we didn’t have very much time. Today I opened […]

What gives you more geek fuzzies than see­ing an Evite com­peti­tor with an ASCII logo?
Crusher web­site ~ Send invites for free
Fun, sim­ple, bare-bones, every­thing you need and noth­ing you don’t. We like that philosophy.

I restored a data­base by hand from the Rails pro­duc­tion log and the con­sole. We had for­got­ten to run a backup cron­job (and good thing we’re stealth! Oth­er­wise folks would have our heads ) Shall never do dumb things like that (or run with scis­sors) again.
Wejoinin Blog » Blog Archive » Lessons learned

Rule: Always give your users an out.
Check out Imeem’s modal win­dow. No close but­ton? No back but­ton? What’s a trapped user to do?