Blog of My Life

Importance of Online Privacy

Your online privacy is important. Nowadays, more and more people are making purchases online. Because of this, it's a lot easier to collect, share, and analyze your personal purchase pattern. Why is this bad for you? If you've taken econ, you should've learnt the concept of price discrimation. What it means is that the seller is trying to sell you products at the maximum price you're willing to pay. Every piece of information you give to the seller is another hint the seller can use to achieve that goal. In the end, the consumer loses and pays the difference.

Optimizing Web Application

For web applications, one neat way to minimize the use of server resources is to write all of your html's and js's in such a way that they can be cached in the end user's web browser. If you can separate static code from dynamic code, you can store the static code in a user's browser's cache. This way, the next time your user visit the site, your application gets loaded immediately without the need to request it from the server. However, there's one problem that you have to be aware of, and that is: if you do not develop a way to update cached version of your code, your users may be stuck with an old copy until they reset their browser's cache. One elegant solution to work around this is to tag the version of your code onto the name of your code file. Then, update the init/loading page, (i.e. index.html, default.aspx...), to point to the latest copy. In this way, if you have a newer version of the code, the browser immediately recognizes it. On the other hand, if your code hasn't changed, it will just be loaded from the cache. In addition, since we need the flexibility tell the browser which files to cache and which not, we would want to have a generic web application, e.g. cachefeeder.aspx, to feed our code to the browser, so that the http response header is properly set. Note that for small application, this technique should not be used because it reduces resource usage at the cost of simplicity and maintainability.

Perfectionism

If you are a pixel perfect perfectionist, read this article:

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=184008

ICS - Extreme Computing - Second Place!

Patrick and I recieved a big fat check from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science for placing second in the Extreme Computing Product Competition.

(Thank you Janell for being our mentor!!! You helped us so much! Thanks!)

Me with the FAT check!

the FAT check!

After the split, Patrick and I each gets $1,250! I plan to use that money to buy my dream laptop!

Btw, it was nice talking to the founder of FileNet!

Very Fun Flash Game

Play Tontie (ver. B) now!

High score: 38,920 (Level: 12) NEW!

Kinda busy, kinda lazy.

Kinda busy, kinda lazy. No time to blog.

I'm participating in two competitions (both related to computers). I hope I win something.

More to come.

I'm 21.

Today is my birthday. I've turned 21.

Thank you all for the birthday greetings!

Thanks!

*BIG SMILE*

Holy Cow! I got a Gmail invite!

click to enlarge

The invitation was from Blogger.com.

Take a look at the sneak preview screenshots here and here [from google].

This made my day!

Happy Birthday Tommy and Jessica!

Happy 21 goes to Tommy and Jessica! The evil twins!

Me: what are your 21 year old resolutions?
Tommy: to rule the world and have a harem!
Me: what are you going to do with the harem?
Tommy: hahaha .... nasty and unspeakable things
Tommy: and i won't share
Tommy: hahaha
Me: you are quoted
Tommy: WHAT?!
Me: hahaha

Once again, happy birthday!

My Work Ethic

First of all, let me admit this: my work ethic is "sick". There aren't many people who'd prefer coding than play during this break. Everyone's going down south (S.D., Mexico) and having a blast, while I'm here in front of my computer coding some random idea that popped out my head last friday (the last day of last quarter). Worst of all, I enjoy it!

This is bad. Maybe I should join the Work Less Party.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I recently watched the movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." If you got some time, you should definitely go watch it. View the trailers here.

Learnt RDF a year ago and forgot about it

Wow. Looking back at my old LiveJournal entries, I realized, I had learnt the basis of RSS (RDF Site Summary a.k.a. Rich Site Summary a.k.a. Really Simple Syndication ) almost a year ago (3/25/2003).

Drive Safely

Don't drink and drive. If you do, you might ram into an old car in front of you.

Economics is boring!

I'm glad I'm done with my Econ final, it's so boring. Unfortunately, there are two more to go: Algorithms and Networking.

I don't like this quarter. All these classes suck. Didn't get any programming assignments. I wish we had some so I get to see the concepts we learn in action.

All I can think of is Web technologies these days. Here's a list of things I look foreward to play with in the coming days:

1. MovableType plugins
2. .Net .Text
3. PhpBB
4. DotNetNuke

No going back to Alhambra for the Spring break. All weekdays will be occupied with 8 hours of work at Unisys.

"Psychoacoustics of a Chilling Sound."

Nails on a chalkboard and squeaking of styrofoam are said to be universally irritating. For me, I'm only affected by the former. However, there's another thing that annoys the hell out of me, and that is CORN STARCH. Whenever I try to scoop a spoonful of corn starch, even though I can't hear it, I can FEEL it. It annoys me the same way how nail on chalkboard does. I suspect the friction between each fine corn starch particles generates the same annoying nail-scratching-board sound but at a higher frequency (like the different octaves of sound).

I suggest people should study more into this subject. If people are annoyed by a unique frequency, the military can possibly be able to create a weapon out of this. In this case, the weapon holder may use it to generate piercing sounds without annoying themselves.

A team of researcher has done a research on this and titled it "Psychoacoustics of a Chilling Sound." Here's a summary:

It appears that the sound (and certain other sounds at the same frequency) plays havoc with a middle ear muscle known as the stapedius. Normally, this muscle contracts just before we speak or chew, and helps to protect the inner ear. If something disrupts its function, the piercing sound goes right through to the sensitive eardrum.

Anyways, if you TOO feel the same way about CORN STARCH, please LET ME KNOW!

Domain Registration

Well, I was trying to register an expiring domain. Unfortunately, there's a wait of up to 40-or-so many days before an expired domain is released back to the pool.

I'll be monitoring it for the coming month. I know I have the choice to back-order a domain, however, back-ordering cost like 3x the amount of regular domain registration.

I need to start acquring domains again! Maybe...maybe... a ".cx" domain... ;-)

A Personal Mission

Today is a special day. I am going to do something, I'm not sure when, but I'm going to do it. I hope it will go through! Sorry, can't tell you more about it until tomorrow...

I'm in Orkut!

Wow! I'm in Orkut! I have finally recieved an Orkut invitation; thanks goes out to Siqi! Orkut, in case if you didn't know, is a Google-owned Friendster-like invite-only social-networking service. It's significantly faster than Friendster and provides more "hand-holding" features. Anyways, message me if you want an invite.

Blog is Interesting.

I'm going to start blogging again. Hope I can turn this into a habbit. Stay tuned, there's more to come...

The Start of Another Journ(ey/al)

Hi, welcome to my blog.