I'm featured on Google Student Blog in their Googlers Beta series! Tehe :)

http://googleforstudents.blogspot.com/2009/11/googlers-beta-2009-edition-lu-chen.html

I really, really dislike gates. And transistors.

I've been swimming in D-latches, mutiplexers for the last two hours, and I still don't understand how to implement a 16-bit shifter or the FSM on this homework.

I have an exquisite bruise from paintball. It looks like a bullseye on my leg.

Happy fourth of July!

On Friday the 3rd, a small group of interns (Jeff, Kate, Tom, Mark, Andrew, Jo) and I drove up to Point Reyes for some hiking. I think there was also a third car going up, but we didn't hear from them so not sure if they ended up going or not.

On the way, our car (Mark, Andrew and I) stopped at Stinson Beach shortly to meet up with the car. Finding one another was crazy; we kept on calling back and forth with vague descriptions (You're near the people flying kites? There are people flying kites down the entire beach? Wait, are we on the same beach???)

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Last Friday I went indoor skydiving on an intern trip. The place we went, iFly, has a vertical wind tunnel in the center enclosed by clear plexiglass walls. There's a wire mesh floor where you step in; down below you can see a lot of metal machinery which (presumably) generates the wind upwards. The tunnel also extends upwards, though I never looked up to see how far it went.

General process though was: arrive, sign some waivers giving up my right to sue (yay), watch the previous group in the tunnel. Then my group got called: our "flight instructor" (fancy title there) was a guy named Ryan with an accent that was slightly difficult to understand. We watched a short video about the proper skydiving position, and also hand signals that would help adjust our position while in the tunnel: pointing up for 'lift your chin', two fingers straight for 'straighten legs', two fingers curled for 'bend your knees' and finally, the hang loose hand sign for 'relax' ;)

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Pictures from when I went up to San Francisco two weekends ago. Like the classic nerd I am, I visited the Exploratorium (which is surprising huge and awfully cool for a science museum) and then walked around Pier 39 to visit the sea lions and do tourist-y shopping. (I now have three hacky sacks that I shall use in my attempts to learn to juggle!)



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Crossposted:



more...

Cross-posted @ http://incoherent-logic.blogspot.com/

Note: Writing comprises of my personal opinions and does not necessarily represent those of my employer or its employees. Also, there is a lot of stuff I'm not permitted to discuss, thus it has been ignored or omitted. :-)

June 1 - Google First Day!

Having walked the route the day before, I did not get lost walking to the Caltrain station Monday. (Insert happiness here!) Nooglers (new Googlers) were supposed to arrive for 8; my shuttle got there at 7:30-ish.

To kill time, I walked around the center of main campus -- the Googleplex is essentially several buildings that form a "main campus" cluster plus nearby satellite buildings. The outside of main campus is public access, so anyone can pretty much visit and look at:

- the dinosaur skeleton (dino is no longer pimp'd out with so many flamingos as of today...)
- list of (filtered) live searches, in Building 43's lobby
- volleyball court
- vegetable/herb garden, the produce gets used by the cafes
- I think from the public-area you can also see the treadmill pools :) (The 'swim' kind, not the pool with cue balls.)
- cafe seating area outside - you can see the colored umbrellas in the middle
^ Swiping image links from Google Image Search)

There is also a small nature trail adjacent to main campus. I took a brief stroll down there, and discovered a lot of real snails! Yes, the kind with a shell, and two antennae-thingies. I've never seen a proper snail like that in New York.

Anyways, around 8 I went back to the lobby and began orientation with a ton of other Nooglers. Some full-time, many interns. Set up accounts, got a badge, had breakfast. Met a few other interns, including one Ryan from Yale, an Andrew from Duke, a Mike from Columbia, another Andrew from WashU, a Seth from Bowdoin, a Charlie from Mexico... and I've forgotten the rest of the names by now.

After breakfast, we crowded into a large presentation room and were treated to a series of presentations (Google history, policies, blah blah). That was followed by lunch, then dreaded paperwork.

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Cross-posted @ http://incoherent-logic.blogspot.com/



Note: Writing comprises of my personal opinions and does not necessarily represent those of my employer or its employees. Also, there is a lot of stuff I'm not permitted to discuss, thus it has been ignored or omitted. :-)

Quick Facts:
Office - Google Mountain View
Team - Blogger
Position - Software Engineering Intern
Badge - check!
Noogler Hat - check!
Started working on code? - err, kind of!

Sunday May 31:
Woke up at 5am for my flight out of Albany International. Southwest is a particularly interesting airline: first, they allow two checked bags without additional fee (which is pretty awesome) and second, they don't assign seat numbers. Instead, you're in a "boarding group" and you just sit wherever you want.

Despite the early start, I was one of the last people to board but still got a nice window seat towards the front. My favorite part of plane rides: looking out the window and seeing the clouds below you. Pure awesomeness. Connection at Chicago Midway was smooth. I was in the first boarding group for this flight, so I grabbed a nice seat in the third row back. Strangely enough, two people (a mother and daughter) come and decide to crowd into my row, instead of picking any number of empty rows further back. (The pilot comes out and informs us that the plane seats 150 and there are only ~70 of us on the flight, why are we all squished in the front? ... That's what I was wondering too.)

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I am temporarily migrating my entries to Blogger (considering that is what I will be working on this summer at Google!).

http://incoherent-logic.blogspot.com/

^ Random stuff will be posted here :)




As my luck would turn out, on Monday I got a call for a second-round interview for Pixar's undergrad program. *headdesk* at my timing, as I had already accepted Google. I feel I made the right decision, as even if I had held off on Google there would have been no guarantee that I'd be offered a spot in PUPs... but I'll always have this itching "what if" feeling.

I'm interning at Google this summer! :D

LOL: "A hundred prisoners are each locked in a room with three pirates, one of whom will walk the plank in the morning. Each prisoner has 10 bottles of wine, one of which has been poisoned; and each pirate has 12 coins, one of which is counterfeit and weighs either more or less than a genuine coin. In the room is a single switch, which the prisoner may either leave as it is, or flip. Before being led into the rooms, the prisoners are all made to wear either a red hat or a blue hat; they can see all the other prisoners' hats, but not their own. Meanwhile, a six-digit prime number of monkeys multiply until their digits reverse, then all have to get across a river using a canoe that can hold at most two monkeys at a time. But half the monkeys always lie and the other half always tell the truth. Given that the Nth prisoner knows that one of the monkeys doesn't know that a pirate doesn't know the product of two numbers between 1 and 100 without knowing that the N+1th prisoner has flipped the switch in his room or not after having determined which bottle of wine was poisoned and what colour his hat is, what is the solution to this puzzle?"


http://www.cartalk.com/content/read-on/2008/08.23.2.html

Trickier than I thought... I kept on missing special cases. Even if you think your logic works, TRY IT and see :D

If the numbers 1 to 5 are written out in words: one, two, three, four, five, then there are 3 + 3 + 5 + 4 + 4 = 19 letters used in total.

If all the numbers from 1 to 1000 (one thousand) inclusive were written out in words, how many letters would be used?

NOTE: Do not count spaces or hyphens. For example, 342 (three hundred and forty-two) contains 23 letters and 115 (one hundred and fifteen) contains 20 letters. The use of "and" when writing out numbers is in compliance with British usage.

This is Problem 17 from http://www.projecteuler.net

Haha. So I had a phone interview with Google today, and I showed 0% aptitude in computer science. The fellow had to walk me through the entire algorithm.

*fails* :(

I think I just confused a bunch of computer science students, who have an exam tomorrow.
I told them they wouldn't need to know how to code insertion sort or binary search, and then we get an email from the professor saying "Actually, insertion sort is fair game."

... Oops.


Also, I should really get better at public speaking. I don't seem to explain code very well.

Yay @ presidential election results.
Grr @ California's passing of proposition 8

Check out the awesomeness! Actually, it still needs a bit of final touch up work. I want to do some texturing rather than coloring in the faces.





I voted today, but didn't have a chance to run to get free Ben and Jerry's due to class ;( Also, a flash site that I helped build over my summer internship finally went live tehe: http://www.tamarkinco.com

I'm going to be in Alaska until September 1st. Cell will be with me for emergencies.

Will be visiting: Sitka, Juneau, Ketchikan (sp? something with a lot of Ks), Victoria, Seattle. I've finally got my own camera now (though I'm not a big fan of it... Kodak's auto/focusing is so-so) so I hope to come back with some nice pictures and do something like my Hawaii photo tour. I'm probably also post them up on Facebook, since I don't think I have any photo albums there LOL.

I hate being without internet. I'm bringing my laptop with me to do development work locally, but images won't be loading so layout is going to be a pain. Plus no jQuery docs, nor API for Java prepwork. Total nightmare. Hopefully I can get a few things done though -- this is supposed to be a vacation, so I ought to enjoy myself. (Except programming makes me happy xD I sound like such a geek.)

One of my friends is in Cali doing Camp Cocoa. I'm really jealous >D I'd like to get a macbook pro for portability at some point, but right now it's just not that affordable. I went ahead and bought a few of my needed textbooks, plus a new backpack (this one better not fall apart after a year), and new shoes, and a new bag since I've never really had any sort of purse/bag. I'd just feel plain guilty splurging on a new computer when I don't really need one.

I was at Staples yesterday and saw those Roll-Up Keyboards for sale. Fascinating stuff.

I was originally going to post about my three weeks on campus working as a residential TA, but I got lazy and never did so D: I really enjoyed it though, and in hindsight, I think the part I enjoyed the most was being able to be on campus, hang out with friends, but have no homework or work essentially. I'm excited to go back for fall semester, but with classes, it's not going to be the same :(

RIP Randy Pausch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

A quick update. I'm only in NY for another two weeks, and since my host's eldest daughter packed up and left for Boston last week, they suggested I move into their apartment (as opposed to living with her sister-in-law, who lives across the street, where I've been for the past five weeks, occasionally being feasted on by mosquitoes).

1. Sucky wireless. I strongly dislike the wireless in this apartment. It goes up, it goes down, I get a 54 mbps connection yet the signal strength is low and I get no connection. Wtf?? Roadrunner ought to be better than this. I think I might actually prefer the landline in my former residence, even if I had to share that once in awhile.

2. TV There is some weird indian pop music video on the TV. Hmm. *change channel* I watched Wipe-Out and the I Survived a Japanese Gameshow or whatever on ABC last night. Arguably, watching people wipe out is akin to watching funny home videos - it generates a few chuckles. But both shows overall were pretty lackluster once you got past the humor and I can see them getting boring really quick. ("I survived" was really lame and random.)

3. Breakfast There's no microwave here, only a stovetop, so I can't have my morning oatmeal :(

4. Wiki I wrote a neat Poll extension for the Wikimedia installation at work. Of course, after I finished writing it, I thought of a much better way to structure the entire thing >< Anyone know how I would query to get the wikitext content of an article? Right now the polls and votes and being piped directly from mysql, but it would be much more flexible if the question and choice values were generated from an article (which would allow more dynamic user editing and preserve change history, which my current extension doesn't do).

5. Animated GIF frame extraction I'm still looking for some sort of script to break down an animated GIF into frames. I know that pretty much any animation program can do this, but this will need to be done dynamically, on-the-fly, preferably by PHP or some sort of server side process. The closest I've found is http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/3163.html which actually can pipe out frames, but the problem so far is that it ignores alpha transparency, so the frames aren't of the same size and contain only the non-transparent changes between frames (from what I can see). I'm going to try and decipher the source and see if there's a fix around it, but I'm pretty sure I'm not smart enough for that.

Ideally, it's be something like this: http://demo.chestysoft.com/aspgif/entergifurl.asp (which works perfectly for what I want to use it for!)
The script used there is .asp though, and it isn't open source nor freeware :(

6. Why does mysql keep on dying? It's fine for three pages and then it crashes midway through parsing a page. I've been testing its stability on my art gallery and it is okay for a bit, then starts to lag and die. Avlog doesn't stand a chance. My favorite error so far is something along the lines of "mysql gone away"... it makes it sound like the MySQL server just decided to quit and walk out or something xD On a related note, I have some new images to add to the art gallery once things stop dying.

7. firef.ly http://firef.ly/ - I think this looks really cool. It allows you to chat on a site without the need of a program, and it's very user friendly in human-computer interaction terms. This sort of chatting surpasses the tradition tagboard model by far.

8. [An error occurred processing this directive] - Ran into that this morning, was curious and Googled to figure out what causes it, and found this blog - http://anerroroccurredwhileprocessingthisdirective.com/. The blogger is very engaging and I really liked reading his posts. Additionally, his exploded i-pod (that still works) is very intriguing: glacier ipod dun dun dun


My wireless is dying again. I sure hope this entry is getting autosaved.