NOW WE ARE ON GOOGLE’S OFFICIAL ANDROID MARKET AS ONE OF THE TOP FREE HEALTH APP!

WITH OVER 15000 DOWNLOADS AND TOP RATINGS, WE ARE ON THE FIRST PAGE….AMONG TENS OF THOUSANDS OF APPS!!!

And it only has been ONE WEEK..

there’s a screenshot from AppBrain:

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

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.

gaaaahhhhh!

update coming soon!! — in the meantime

help support us!

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

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.

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

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.

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