I haven’t posted here lately, which doesn’t bode well for the future continuity of this blog, but hopefully my post velocity with respect to time isn’t a simple linear function.

I actually had the distinct pleasure of having my four wisdom teeth removed this morning, an experience that turned out far less unpleasant that I’d anticipated. The procedure itself was completely painless, since I was asleep during the painful bits. My only real complaint is that I’m unable to eat any real food for a few days, but it’s not nearly as bad as when I first got my braces on (two weeks). Until I get the stitches out, I’ll be resting and relaxing at home, consuming as much ice cream and mashed potatoes as I can stomach.

Other than that, I’ve spent the past week or so alternating between working at my UROP, sleeping (including napping), and frantically trying to paint my summer room so that I can finally move all of my worldly possessions at MIT into it, which doesn’t leave too much time for blogging. At least, that’s how I rationalize it in my head.

My UROP has been going well; I actually physically go to work at CSAIL now, instead of sitting in front of my desktop in my room in my pajamas. It helps keep me disciplined and focused, and it’s nice to be able to interact with the other UROPs working under my professor. I’ve got a bit of a head start on them, since I’ve been working at Simile for an entire semester already, but I suspect that they’ll catch up quickly. Timegrid is coming along nicely. I recently tore out the rendering algorithm and completely rewrote it, due to a realization that my old design made a few features impossible or difficult to implement. The new algorithm essentially renders events and gridlines as absolutely positioned <div> elements in a container div, instead of relying on a <table> element to render lines and cells for me. The DOM actually turns out much cleaner, at the expense of a bit more code complexity.

Painting my room was a whole different venture entirely. I had actually agonized about the design and color scheme of the room for at least two weeks before actually painting, and my poor friends had to put up with some of the most ridiculously hideous combinations of color that my imagination dared bring into existence (”How about lime green, pink, and dark blue?”). I eventually settled on a comparatively tame design, with walls alternating between green and blue themes. Each wall has a larger top portion painted a light shade of the theme color, a stripe of white, and a smaller bottom portion painted a dark shade of the theme color. I still picked lime green as my light green shade, but overall the room gives off an interesting vibe laying somewhere between “responsible adult” and “oh my god, my retinas are on fire.”

I’ll take pictures once the room settles into a happy equilibrium.

This summer, I’m working as a UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunity) at MIT’s CSAIL. I don’t think I’ve ever made a post about my actual project, Timegrid, so I think I’ll do that now.

My task is to design and develop a client-side Javascript framework that takes event data in some format (iCal, XML, etc.) and renders it out to a number of different, configurable, dynamic views. What kind of views will Timegrid support? For starters, it will support all of the views that Google Calendar is currently capable of: weekly, monthly, etc. Timegrid is more flexible than Google Calendar though. Imagine that you want to render a table of events happening in various locations, and you want each column to represent a different room, and each row to represent a starting time. Timegrid will be able to handle that as well.

Timegrid is designed to be easily configurable, incredibly flexible and customizable, clean, and beautiful. Good thing I have all summer to work on it.

Timegrid Project Page

Delicious, warm, flaky biscuits, but without any gravy, unfortunately.

I got my first B ever today, an event whose supposed significance is surpassed only by its actual complete and utter meaninglessness. I guess that means that my tiny inner Asian is dead after all, or just that the forces of apathy have captured him and placed him in an uncomfortably small, toroidal cage. In all honestly, I tried my best in the class, and I don’t really think anyone is going to be too miffed about a B+ in “The Art of the Probable,” a class so ill-defined and cross-curriculum that I had difficulty explaining what it was to others not because they wouldn’t understand, but because I myself didn’t understand.

So now I’m sitting in my room at home, listening to some downtempo lounge electronica in my pajamas, and wondering how much of a blog post I can honestly write about absolutely nothing without feeling genuinely guilty. It’s been nice to be at home after an admittedly difficult semester; I think I’ve put on at least a few pounds in the past few days, something I’ll have to remedy once I head back to campus. Man, this electronica just got really blippity and bloopity all of a sudden. I’d skip the song, but it’s Pandora, and they tell me that every time I skip a song they brutally slaughter an infant of some adorable animal species. Oh, it just changed on its own. Guilty yet? So far so good.

So after about nine months of trial and tribulation, my first year at MIT has been vanquished. I’d be lying if I said it was easy, but I’ll skip the cliché and spare you all the reasons why it was hard.

I’ll probably have more to write later; I’d like to resuscitate this blog over the coming summer, and probably consolidate it with my LiveJournal as well.

I had hot dogs for lunch today, which I heated up on the stove and consumed on some toasted hot dog buns with ketchup. As I was reheating my meaty treat, I realized something: you can cook a hot dog in just about every way you can imagine, and it will still taste just fine. In fact, more often than not, they wind up tasting delicious. Just off the top of my head, you can: microwave, boil, steam, broil, bake, stir-fry, grill, and roast them. Beyond the method of cooking, hot dogs also have an extraordinary tolerance for how much they are actually cooked. As long as the middle is warm, and the outside isn’t on fire, your hot dog will turn out just fine. How many other foods can claim such versatility? Not many, I assure you.

So when designing a piece of software, robot, building, or anything else that demands reliability, remember: be as the hot dog. Be versatile. Be durable. Be strong. Most of all, be delicious.

I was thinking yesterday of things I could write about in my blog, and a lot of them seemed really interesting and amusing, the sorts of things that people tend to want to read about. Of course, they were almost all anecdotes from my personal life, or just random oddities that I had stumbled over. So how could I possibly write about them in a blog that’s supposed to be strictly informational?

It’s simple really: change the premise of the blog and pretend that nothing happened.

So welcome back to exactly the same thing. It’s always been this way. Really. I promise.

At work today, my boss asked me to write a tag library for Spring, and in the process, I found these two really neat Javascript libraries that reduce a lot of the tedium of writing an AJAX (Asychronous Javascript And XML) web application.

• Prototype – A fairly large (~50kb) Javascript library that defines several classes to make your life easier. There are many functions provided that simply reduce the amount of typing you have to do, and even Ruby-style closures for lists, through the Enumeration class. Of course, it also provides some great classes for AJAX tasks as well. However, be warned, there is very little official documentation for Prototype.
• script.aculo.us – A Javascript library that layers itself on top of Prototype and adds a plethora of eye candy. Some of the effects it includes are: drag & drop support, fading, sliding panels, and highlighting.

Working with either library is extremely pleasant, especially when compared to the task of manually coding all of the functionality that they provide for free. Also, I’ve seen the end results on many websites and they look great. Highly recommended.

I recently purchased the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s latest album, Stadium Arcadium, and have spent the past few days listening to its two discs, named Jupiter and Mars, for reasons that I’ll speculate about in a bit. My initial impressions have been overwhelmingly positive; the tracks of Stadium Arcadium are now regularly circulating in my Giant Playlist of Music ™.

The first disc, Jupiter, by far the more restrained of the two, begins with the now instantly recognizable “Dani California,” which is merely “very good” until John Frusciante launches into an incendiary solo near the end of the track. Frusciante’s guitar work on this album is simply remarkable, and is one of the main reasons I like Stadium Arcadium so much. Most of the remainder of the Jupiter disc is composed of slow ballads, reminiscent of “Under the Bridge.” Frankly, I prefer Mars over Jupiter, but the ballads are all well done. When I first listened to Jupiter though, it left me wondering, “Where’s the funk?”

Luckily, Mars proved to be the answer. Here, we hear Flea returning to the hyperactive slap-pop style that characterized much of the Chili Peppers’ earlier work. It works wonderfully. The tracks here are catchy, memorable, and above all, funky. Every member of the band shines here, from Chad Smith’s solid drumming, to Anthony Kiedis’ supercharged vocals. Mars is a disc that makes you want to move, and while it might not inspire some to get up and dance, it will certainly leave a huge, silly grin on your face.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers haven’t released an album in four years, and suddenly they drop this massive two disc set on the world. While it may not explore many new musical territories, it shows the Chili Peppers maturing as a band, at times preferring the sublime over the psychedelic, but no matter what, still doing what they do best: having fun.

Hey everyone, this is the first post in my experimental foray into WordPress blogging. Exciting.

I have plans for this blog, big plans.  Let me explain.  I’ve been trying to quit Slashdot/digg recently, seeing as the level of commentary on those sites has been reduced to screaming 14 year old boys trying to out-1337 each other.  Of course, I still need somewhere to find neat news about everything a geek might be interested in, including but not limited too: hardware, software, programming, web development, gaming, science/technology developments, music, and monkeys.

So, being the enterprising and naive soul that I am, I have this dream of turning this blog into a source of all of the above.  Wish me luck.