Edison Wang

With the release of version 1.1…we can see in our dashboard that we have more than 1500 downloads.

And it only has been ONE WEEK..

there’s a screenshot from AppBrain:

(http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.lslk.sleepbot) <—original link

We have released our first version of our application this morning around 06:30 am EST!

At the time of publishing this blog post, we have already got over 100 downloads!

We are really glad that people have already start using this application and most of them have kept it on their device!

It was a sleepless night for us, but we will not take a break from this. Our next goal would be working on our website and also preparing for our next release of the application. We have already planned a list of new features to roll out soon. We will keep everyone informed on this blog.

Please let us know if you have any questions, bug report, or good suggestions. Even though it is time to celebrate, we will keep an eye in our inbox.

Help Support Us!!!

gaaaahhhhh!

update coming soon!! — in the meantime

help support us!

Graphing on Android was one of the hardest problem we had to conquer because the Android platform, similar to other platforms, does not have native libraries that support plots like it does for text and images, or tables. And it does not support Java’s native graphing libraries that are available online. Furthermore, unlike iPhone and desktop applications, our graph has to occupy a variable amount of space to fit the different screen sizes supported by different devices.

Upon research, I found that there are several options:

1. Buy a professionally designed library native for Android such as the aiChart. The problem with this is that all the libraries are very expensive, and we don’t think it is necessary to spend that much money on those if it is possible for us to do it ourself.
2. Render the graph using a web view which will redirect the user to a browser, either rendering the graph using javascript or rendering it online using cloud services such as the Google Charts. We decided against we because of that will use a lot more resources (as compare to our last resort) and it does not offer as much flexibility as we may want it to have in the future.
3. So there is only one option left: writing our own native graphing library for Android (we are not porting a Java graphing library because those do not offer as much flexibility as well).

Building a graphing library only for the line graph came out not that bad. By making all the lines, dots, and text relative to each other and setting the size of the objects from multiplying the current screen spec to a standard one, we finally made our graph.

Here is a prototype of our graph that shows the last ten days of one of our developers’ sleep hours:

A graph that shows my sleep hours for the past ten days

This is an import from my team blog: http://blog.mysleepbot.com/2010/06/the-office/

The office for Sleep Bot Team…..

Hard at work on the weekend!

Our workspace: two laptops, two monitors, and Pandora!

People ask me how I manage to type.

Honestly, I don’t know what to tell them.

There was a server outage for some hostmonster’s servers today caused by a power outage in one of the server rooms for hostmonster. Thousands of websites were effected, including all my sites. The outage went on about 3 hours, and then everything went back to normal. Now I am thinking about switching to a better host or getting my private server, or even running a machine on Amazon’s EC2 cloud.

After two weeks of averaging 3 hours of sleep, Cooper is finally out of the way. Comparing to last semester, I did about the same–which is bad. It was a mere result of lack of attendance to the easiest classes and doing bad in them because I overestimated myself. Anyways, hopefully I will get around 3.0 (all I need is A in signals processing, eh, doesn’t sound so possible).

Other than the grades, the past semester went great. I managed to meet a lot new friends, learn a lot, and at the same time accomplish a lot. There is just one thing, however, I need to point out here before making a plan for this summer, is that I got through my grad level programming class: distributed computing, with 3 other seniors who pushed through like I did. It was the reason that I did bad in many of my other classes, but I did really enjoy learning such software engineering topics. It gets me excited. My final project was on Distributed Similar Image Search, it worked (see the picture at the end). Basically what it does is that it performs a search with the search term the user provided (e.g. square) and get the results from various search engines including Google, Bing, and Flickr, then the user can choose an image (or even provide an image in future releases, if I ever decide to come back to it) to match the image with the rest of the set. The system uses Hadoop Map-Reduce framework to distribute the image matching job and the search engine querying job to different mappers and reducers so that the job is performed quickly and efficiently (for those who don’t know, Google also uses a similar Map-Reduce system to allow us to search the entire internet and return the results in less than half of a second). The program framework that I wrote can be easily extended and be made into a real reverse image search engine provided that there exists a good image hashing algorithm and a large image database for me. I spent about three weeks on it, starting from writing a original Java algorithm, playing with search engine APIs, and then learning how to deploy it with Apache Tomcat and Hadoop within/out of an Eclipse environment. I really learned a lot.

Ok, before I talk another few hours about that project, let me go straight into the real topic of this post: my plan for this summer.

It is much simpler than past:  (TWO INTERNSHIPS + START MY OWN BUSINESS + FOR REAL)

1. Internship with Tidal Labs. -I will be working there three days a week this summer.
I would say that this is an engineering startup that aims to help the marketing departments of big companies and the marketing firms to data mining people off social network. I choose to work for them because see potential from the growing social marketing companies. It is also php and python based, so I can learn more about those two and at the same time learn about how to handle different situations for a startup company.

2.Internship with Indorse Technology. -I will be working there two days a week this summer.

This is the company of my professor who taught me distributed computing this semester. I’m looking forward to learn a lot more with him on both managing business and coding. We will see how it goes this summer.

3.Start my own thing with friends.

Information about this will be released in a future post while we are still discussing our business plan. It will be a huge thing (<–no jokes please lol).

After all, this summer will be very fruitful for me and should make me stay away from getting use to leisure so I would get killed in Fall.

4. If time allows, I will be able to push Bmark.Me to the next stage.

A distributed get image job result:

A distributed compare image job with efforts to find the ones that are similar to the first one

During the past few days, the biggest news that hit the online world was the news on Google’s withdrawing from China mainland.

To me, this is simply a retarded tragedy thanks to the useless politicians. Yes, I think politicians are the MOST useless people

Well, ok, media were also part of this. (e.g. a very biased NY Times article I’ve seen)

Let’s get it straight: Google is a U.S. based commercial company.

By that I think there are certain rules you have to follow no matter where you are:
1. Follow local rules.
Does Google obey Patriot Act? I don’t really think it’s possible for Google to not follow that rule. If Google FBI information all the time (this is just an assumption, but it is highly possible), why shouldn’t Google follow the Laws in China?

2.Your goal is to make money, losing a huge market like China is highly unreasonable for the reasons it gave. It is an action made by politicians, not businessmen.
Google has suggested that the Chinese hackers were sponsored by the Chinese government. A company that operates in one country would NEVER have the courage to accuse its local government for such crime. It has to be backed up by something, something stronger that supports it.
We all know how big the Chinese market is. Even though it only constitutes a small fraction of its revenue, we all know that Google is going into the cellphone market now. Its stupidity could possibly result in the government blocking all the Andorid based phones (btw, Apple and Microsoft must be very happy).

3. All the media attentions.

What is possibly a goal for the U.S. government to make such acts?

1. It doesn’t have to pay. Google is paying the price.

2. China and U.S relation has reached a low point in history after Bush’s administration.

3. Look at all the media attentions. All the news sites are citing about the censorship fact (ok, let’s get straight on this point again, a country needs stability, the government is oppressing different groups of people that wants to make riots by censoring sites such as Twitter, which can possibly make a huge impact on politics. and By the way, who knows if Twitter is not censored by the U.S. government? There’s just no media reports about it? Oh wait, maybe it’s the same concept as in China?). On the other hand, all the financial sites are talking about how stupid Google is.

But is google a company or is it a humanity organization? I feel your pain, Eric.

Hi friends,

After over one year of development, I’m happy to announce that Bookmark Me! has finally graduated from my home sever and it’s ready for testing.
Here I am inviting all of you, whoever is looking at this post right now, to become a tester for my project.
The site still lack AJAX implementations, it’s still ‘plain text’, so please excuse its appearance for now.

To become a tester, simply let me know by any means (fb comment/email/text), and registration forms will be sent to your Inbox within 24 hours.

My email is :

FAQ

So what is Bmark.Me?

Project “Bookmark Me !” (Http://www.bmark.me) was an idea I formed at my 19th birthday, when I got inspired by few of my friends.
It finally reached it’s alpha stage and will be used by NYU’s Chinese Mei Society as one of its marketing device (http://yuan10.wordpress.com)
It is a link sharing site will have the following features as its top 10:

1. Storing a link and retrieve it with with a customized alias. (Done)
2. Sharing the link with facebook, twitter, etc. (In progress)
3. The owner can track the link’s hits and referrers. (In progress)
4. For facebook users, the owner can see specifically who visited this link, and the visitors can choose not to reveal their identity as well. (In progress)
5. Links will be both scanned by anti-virus providers and the community. (In progress)
6. User can add tags, descriptions, and photos to associate the link. Using this feature, we can even suggest you links that you will be interested in!!
7. Users can view top linked sites and top tags by popularity. (Done)
8. Photo search on links. Since photos are tagged on links, one should be able to search using a photo and tag terms to identify which links are associated with the link. (Planned)
9. Private links, the owner can hide and/or password protect individual links.(In Progress)
10. A new business model for ad-clicking sites and marketing firms via new technologies. (Planned)

Why am I doing this while all the other sites are doing a great job?

1. I will offer some functionalities that they don’t, for example: facebook tracking and photo searching.
2. When I first had this idea, the only popular site back then was TinyUrl, so this site, if implemented back then, would be a huge success.
3. This is part of my PHP Code portfolio for myself in the future.
4. I learned a lot, and will learn much more through the course of development. The goal is to make this site efficient, able to scale up, and extensible.

Why didn’t you use HTTP 301 redirect to make it search engine friendly?

It is search engine friendly, in less efficient but more flexible way. The way I did it is that eventually the user can choose which method they want, either by using 301 or javascript redirect. The reason because of the behavior of the link previews from sites like facebook catches the link only catches whats there without letting the re-director modifying it. By using a javascript redirect in the middle of the page, the re-director can manipulate the information that will catch by facebook. For example, when you do a redirect of some blog you wrote with site like bit.ly and share it via facebook and you didn’t write a summary for the blog, facebook will not catch what your blog says. However, by using bmark.me you can add pictures for link preview, etc. just to attract viewers. This could potentially evolve into an advertising method for many different purposes.

Why are you taking down the link scanning feature off after a few month?

To be honest, I didn’t want to take it off since it is a very unique thing to do. It might be up again.

Right now, I am looking for two people for help,

1. CSS styler and web-page designers.
2. AJAX and Java-script writers.

I will share the honors.

Thanks for reading to the end,
Edison