Category: Computers

Categories
Programming Taiwan

Hack+Taiwan

The World Creativity and Innovation week (WCIW) goes on every year April 15-21 (set to coincide with Leonardo da Vinci’s birthday). This year we were making some events in Taiwan as well, first about creativity: Create @ Public, and another one a week later for innovation: Hack+Taiwan, a hackathon.

Of the two events, this one was the trickier to do. For Create@Public, all I had to do is pack a lot of stationery and start making stuff myself. For a hackathon, there’s much more preparation to do. Fortunately, I had some great mentors to get things going, James of Startup Digest Taipei and Volker from Yushan Ventures. They have a lot of experience pulling off great events, and I was glad to hear their advice. I was surprised that in less than 2 weeks something like this could be put together, even under not totally favorable circumstances.

First had to find a place to host it, and preferably with zero budget. Looking at who do I know, ended up at appWorks, a startup accelerator, whose founder, Jamie is indeed a hacker at heart, so wasn’t actually that bad to convince him to give us some space on a weekend day. Even got one of their teams working there, Fandora, to help us.

That’s a good first step, now have to get some people to participate. I set up the Hack+Taiwan blog (on Octopress, just trying something new, that was an “interesting” experience as well), the event, a sign up sheet and started to spread the word. It all went well, until one week before the event it turned out that the Open Source Developers’ Conference has a hackathon pretty much the same day & time as I planned. That freaked me out a little, and after asking around, I got many different advice: cancel so not to compete with them, cancel to take a rest, and give it my best try nonetheless. Of course the craziest option won, so started to spread the word even more, trying to invite mentors, getting catering, figuring out how the day should work and so on.

Let’s get to it

Since people don’t like to fill out sign up sheets, and Facebook event “join” is so easy, I had absolutely no idea how many people will come. It was just winging it, I knew I’ll be there and a couple of people who were helping me, but that’s all so far.

Hack+Taiwan logo posted on the day
Hack+Taiwan logo

I ordered breakfast for 30 (from Magic Bagels), and let’s see what happens. Around 9am, the advertised start time, people started to come, first a couple, then some more, and around 10 o’clock there were almost a dozen people. That’s not bad at all, even considering that a third of that was mentors and other organizers, but they took part just the same. Since most people didn’t bring any ideas (some even didn’t bring a laptop, now that I don’t understand), had to get them to come up with some stuff on the spot. It took a little pushing, some ideas were so specific and pretty much the same they are working on their normal time, but fortunately there were some interesting ones. In about half an hour we had 3 teams working on three completely different. In the afternoon there were even more people who dropped by for some time, and got another project working.

Arduino hacking
Making an Arduino piano

The projects we had:

  • Mobile reminder app + website
  • Android programming (the team had to leave before demo time)
  • Visualization of the Taiwanese power grid for monitoring and supervision
  • Arduino piano
These are all very different, and fortunately all was pushing the participants a little bit. The first team was mostly mentors, or from different startups working at appWorks, and they haven’t worked together before. It’s a good way to improve collaboration. The second team wanted to try Android out, maybe I should have talked to them more (having done one app at my time), otherwise they looked pretty lost for most of the time, hope they will carry on. The third team I gave some advice, but not sure if that actually took them on a sidetrack, it should be a very useful project if done, and has a lot of potential apparently for the local utilities companies. The last one, a one person team, was making some really cool stuff in a very short time and even with broken and sparse equipment. Not sure if she was really challenged by the task, it looked quite effortless.

At 5:30pm we had a demo time, everyone showing off what they made, people switched to speaking Chinese since I was the only foreigner around, so I got to train a little better next time to be able to follow tings. I could see their demos, though, and it’s so impressive how far people got in pretty much 6 and half hours….

Here’s the photo album of what went down. I’ve also taken a timelapse image series of the event, been planning to make a video of it….and then successfully overwritten all the photos with a bad command of ffmpeg. That’s my way.

Lessons learned

  • Coming up with ideas is hard
  • It is still possible to come up with ideas. Look for issues that kept bugging you for a while, and do something about those
  • Everyone gets out different thing from these events
  • Don’t force things, everything will work out anyway
  • Don’t have to overplan, before one establishes their name in the community as good organizer, it is usually more likely to overestimate how many people will come to an event
  • Everyone loves bagels and cake (okay, that’s not new lesson)
  • Unless there are enough people, don’t have to focus the topic of a hackathon, see whatever people come up with. More difficult brainstorming, but better chances of success
  • Don’t drink too much coffee – I couldn’t get much done from the shakes

I really liked the feedback I had from the participants, and also from other people: there were some who were just working in the background on their own stuff, and when we finished they came and asked what was it, because they’d like to take part next time. That’s the spirit! And we might just do that, for example at the end of the summer. In the meantime, I will try to focus on earning back my own hacker badge.

Categories
Life Programming

StartupBus rolling again

If there was a place I’d like to be now…. then it would probably be actually 11 different places. It’s that part of the year, that crazy and incredible people get on a some buses, travel across the US to the SXSW festival, while building companies. Altogether dozens of them. While riding freakin’ buses…. I know, I can still hardly get over my own experience last year, though I don’t want to get over it, I want to cultivate, nurture and expand that feeling. Pretty much the whole last year was about that expansion, and it just continues to motivate me.

Fortunately I still keep in touch with some of the people from there, and when they are on the way right now as I write this, I cannot help but show my affiliations.

Wearing my StartupBus shirt for work today
Silicon Valley Bus 2011 represent

I’m really glad that I could contribute something as well. One of the core features of their site is the ability to see where everyone is right now. Cheer all the way as they fight through several states towards their destination, how they converge onto Austin, Texas in the end. For this to work, there has to be some way to track those buses. And as it is the tradition – and inevitable if you have a pile of the best hackers together – everything is pretty much custom built. The site, the virtual stock market game, the map – and the tracking app as well. This last thing is made by me, after a few evenings back last year while hanging out in San Francisco before getting on bus. I can’t believe that I even had time for sight-seeing while doing this…. Anyway, it worked like a charm on 6 buses, and I was quite satisfied. Pretty surprised, but also satisfied. It was great, especially because if something, then I didn’t want to let down this guy – one the craziest and most kick-ass person I had a chance to know.

Then again in the winter there was StartupBus Europe, which worked out fine, beautiful trace on the map from the Netherlands, through Scandinavia, then back to the continent all the way to Paris.

For this year’s event, I wanted to change it a bit around, make it more independent from me – and a bit less hackish. I gave up on improving the looks, but the functionality should be better.

Too bad that this time I wasn’t there in SF, working together with the team, inspiring and motivating each other. This made everything much slower for me, and much more “normal”, in the bad sense of the word. In the end I had a new version that worked, and was kinda okay, but wasn’t as well tested as I hoped to.

BusDroid interface
I wish there was a Taipei bus – not sure how to cross the Pacific, though

Of course bits are rotting when they are not developed, and one year in Android world is more than I’ve expected. Too bad that many of the problems came to light when the buses were about to head off. Turns out that aiming for the oldest version of Android to cover all different versions is not necessarily the right thing to do. I don’t need anything fancy, but the APIs changed a bit, some things got depreciated, and looks like some phones can’t run my very simple app. After all this craziness dies down, will have to investigate and figure out what went wrong.

In the meantime, fortunately 10 out of 11 traces are on the map, there’s only Las Vegas missing last time I’ve checked, and not sure what happened to them. I don’t like unsolved mysteries, especially when it’s my job to get them solved.

Screenshot of live map with buses
Startup Bus buses 2012 on their way

Let’s see if I can get a seat next year again. And also see if that year in the meantime is long enough to figure out some better solution. Will likely need to do things very differently as I was, will likely have to rewrite the whole app onto new foundations, and make it work on iPhones or iPads (do those actually have GPS in them? I actually don’t have any iProducts…), and more reliably work in general. Feels a little sucky, that I’ve let some people down that things didn’t work better. That’s what startups’ life is a little bit as well.

Now let’s pivot, and back to doing awesome.

Categories
Programming

Facebook Hacker Cup 2012 Qualifier 1

This is that time of the year once again, when coders gather to take part in some good programming fun, the Facebook Hacker Cup. It’s only the first qualifier round, and while I hoped it will go better than last year, well, it didn’t. Not that I’m really surprised.

My Facebook Hacker Cup 2012 Qualifier score
I needed one right to qualify, but I wish I haven't messed up the easiest problem.

After that 72 hours results are in, as is the explanation and example source code for the solutions. It’s good that the example solutions are in Python, I might even learn a trick or too.

Alphabet Soup

The problem setting is easy enough. Funny thought that no matter how many times I counted the letters in the world “HACKERCUP”, I didn’t notice that there are two Cs. I mean, duh! As usual, the example input set was designed such that it wouldn’t trigger the bug of miscounted Cs. This carelessness is one thing that comes up quite often in my programming, probably should take better care of it.

Billboards

This problem actually worked, which means I’m in Round 2, but I guess it can be improved quite a bit, make it more efficient or come up with some heuristics. Or maybe it doesn’t matter much.

Auction

This problem was on a whole different level. While the first two had apparently more than 5000 and 3000 correct solutions respectively, this had only 28… I was thinking about it for quite a while, drawing diagrams, trying to use my intuition and imagination to see where the trick is since the naive O(N^2) algorithm is definitely unusable on the N~10^18 level. On the other hand, I might have tricked myself. Reading the solution the trick was completely different than I expected – I thought there’s some weakness in the random number generator that can be used to express everything analytically, while it is actually just about keeping good track of things. There’s no fancy algorithm to break this problem, just pure logical thinking. Now that’ll teach me as well…

Looking out

This of course means that I have a lot more to learn, and most likely I’m not cut out to be a Facebook caliber hacker. That’s no problem, but good to know. Whenever I think about it, the picture that comes to me is the hacking competition scene from The Social Network, where they hire their first employee. I’d love to be in the middle of such brainfest, such intense creation, such inspired learning from one another while having an an amazing time. Well, fortunately there are other places where I can have that experience, like the Startup Bus. And maybe, I can also set out to create that environment over here in Taiwan.

But first, let’s get ready for round 2, should make that one better.

 

Categories
Programming

WatchDoc – an experiment in Chrome Extensions

I keep remembering that good ideas start from doing something fun, instead of doing something easy. About a month and a half ago I was reading the Google Doc that I have with some friends, listing ideas about “Changing the World”. It’s all the things that should/could be better in the world and “I wish….” it would be some way.

In the list of  a hundred or so I’ve seen one entry that was wishing for a way to see changes to our shared documents in an easier way than going back to the Docs home page and seeing if something has happened. Been thinking that that would be something I myself would totally use. Couldn’t find anything like that yet, but I had sometime in my hand to experiment, so WatchDoc was born….

Dropdown menu of WatchDoc
The interface of WatchDoc with lots of testing documents, emails blurred out just in case.

Getting it done

I haven’t written a Chrome Extension before, but seemed like such a suitable fit, and been looking for a project that I can try myself with. They are practically open source (since you can look into any one of them regardless of where you installed them from) and only using standard web tech, just like making a website (HTML + CSS + JavaScript). Indeed, all Chrome extension are some web-pages displayed in a special way, some javascript running in the background and/or javascript modifying the page you are on. Very neat, I would say…

Since I didn’t know where to start, I tried to find an extension that I can take apart and learn from. Fortunately, there was one, straight from Google, called YouTube Feed. So the first part of the project was slowly gutting that one out and replacing parts until I get something working that I wanted. It is easier to say than do, because the feed reader has somewhat different requirement than the code I had in mind, but at least close enough that most of the internal structure I could keep.

Some notes about the journey:

  • Authentication: oAuth can be pretty troublesome, but in the end it was easier this time than I expected from past experience. Maybe because YouTube Feed was written reasonably well already
  • Icons: Wanted to take the icons for the different document types from Google Docs itself. Took some time, but using the developer tools (inspect element) in Chrome I could finally find the links and download them.
  • More icons: Wanted to use the icons as a CSS image sprite just like the original extension, but couldn’t find some good program to combine PNG files into a single image. In the end wrote a quick Python script to do just that.
  • Extension icon: For the extension icon I used Google Docs’ own little icon (I think it’s kinda fair to use, especially now that they have changed it, it’s v9 of their icon theme compared to v7 at the time of my programming) and also on a free icon site I had found a matching hi-def icon. I just wish I could find it again for proper attribution, that still nags me.
  • Buggy notification: Some parts of the extension writing was pretty annoying. For example I wanted to get desktop notification work just the way it does in Gmail. I don’t know how do they do the auto-hiding, but I’m pretty sure not from the standard simple desktop notification type, because that I simply make to hide itself after a certain time. Instead I had to make it the more difficult way of using a HTML page to define content and then internal JavaScript to close it. Took a while to realize that I have to pass my parameters (the data that I wanted to display) as query parameters, but now it works pretty well.
  • Buggy libraries: this is always fun to have because have to find to work around it or  fix it. This time it was a jQuery URL Parsing library that crapped out on corner cases that the developer didn’t thought of but I fortunately run into. Took a while, but fixed it up, let’s see if upstream will incorporate it.
  • Optimization: it’s good to have things working first and then have them work well. For example originally I re-read the user’s whole feed, now it can read the part of the update feed that can contain relevant information, so I can have fewer requests to the server, and the updates come in several seconds quicker.

Release

After some work I thought it’s better to release first and ask questions later. So I registered on the Chrome Web Store (registration is $5 on time fee to get rid of spammers). Not much hustle, in about 20 minutes everything is done and now you can find WatchDoc in the Chrome Web Store. You can also find the source on GitHub.

The Chrome Web Store seems to have some strange policies, though, eg. didn’t let me update if I didn’t have the right shapes of preview pictures, and sometimes they only told me halfway into the submission of the new release, and I had to scramble to make some test documents and nice screenshots of the right aspect ratio so I can finish the submission. Nevertheless it is pretty easy to handle and useful too.

One beef I have is that I don’t have any way to reply to reviews. Much more people post negative stuff than positive and once I fixed something there’s no way to get in touch with the reviewers to ask for re-evaluation. This makes a very one-sided experience.

It is good – though addictive – to watch the number of +1s grow, as well as installs and users. The site must have some way to check people’s installations because the total number of users did decrease after the initial increase (the high water mark somewhat above 1500, now a bit below 1400). I guess I would need to improve the quality a bit more, and maybe there are not that many people sharing Google Docs with others than I have thought. :) Anyway, I think this is much more than how many people used any other software/site I made, so no ground to complain.

Post-release

The release was picked up surprisingly quickly by other websites, I think there are some automatic ones monitoring the latest submissions to the Web Store, and others take the news from them.

WatchDoc Google Analytics as of date
WatchDoc Google Analytics as of date, some review of it in the text, click to enlarge (in new window)

Here’s my Google Analytics since the release. The big spikes in the beginning go up to about 500 visit / day (tiny, but much more I have ever had), and are mostly due to Lifehacker. After that I have basically just a trickle of visitors (about 20 / day), with a little spike recently that is direct traffic, I wonder where from….

Some sites that reviewed WatchDoc (the ones with the highest referral counts)

I got up a support site on GetSatisfaction as well to be able to have a conversation with those who are persistent enough and submit some feedback regarding bugs. Used it a couple of times, and it’s quite practical. I finally learn how to do product support, which doesn’t mean it became easier. Still surprisingly maddening to debug a problem until it hits me as well by chance so I can check it locally. Got to figure out some superior remote debug system. At this point it seems to work well enough for about 1400 people, but the fact that I have lost about 200 shows that I still have a lot of problems to fix.

Into the future

It was a fun project to work on and it does most of the things I wanted to, but it’s dead ugly. I either find a designer and fix it, or just leave it like this because it doesn’t matter much…

I might work on it a bit more, especially bugfixes, though it would be better to have some ideas what is missing. Everything I can think of would complicate the user experience and that’s not my plan: document preview, ignore updates of certain documents, multiple-logins,…. What else?

Guess it is more likely that soon I will start to work on something else, let me know if you have something fun you wish to see :)

Categories
Programming

Language of the Month: Javascript

Continuing the Language of the Month serious after a little bit of break when I was busy with other stuff:

Javascript icon
Just a Javascript icon...

It is very long overdue, since I was looking at Javascript like…. 14 years now? But never really spent time to understand it because I never needed it really. I’m old enough to remember that when I started to browse the web, every time there was a page using Javascript, people’s sentiment was “oh, no, that’s going to be very slow, I don’t even want to check this site anymore”. Pretty much like it was/is with Flash later on.

Compare this to now, how 100% static sites are practically disappeared, and no web developer worth their salt should skip on learning it. I’m glad that browsers spent a lot of time improving performance and that so many interesting projects came out of it.

My impression of the current state of the art is that using HTML + CSS + Javascript now it is easier than ever to make good front-ends for programs. I’m mostly a command-line guy (and that’s pretty easy with many scripting languages as well as Python that I use), but I cannot deny that I’m the minority. Still, when i need convenience, I can even imagine people creating local (meaning not internet-enabled) software with those things.

Since more and more people had similar idea and started to work on it, there are plenty of projects that make this even easier, like jQuery and all its plugins. I don’t think people need a lot of introduction and already can do a lot of things easier using that. One drawback is that many things could be just as easily done in pure Javascript but people quite often don’t know that. I certainly have to learn a lot more.

In this month I was reading a few books and sites that people recommended on Hacker News, as well as I used it to do a few actual projects. Now that’s a change compared to the previous Language of the Month columns.

Projects

WatchDoc: a Chrome extension that notifies you when your shared documents on Google Docs change. Chrome extensions are merely HTML+CSS+JS code, so it was a perfect way to try a few things. (Will write it up here later) (wrote up here).

NowJS real time games hackathon: NowJS is a real-time communication plugin for NodeJS, the JS server. I wanted to make a game for this hackathon, but run out of time. Spent some time working with it, and it’s actually pretty awesome when I started to understand it, I’m do want to finish the game at a later time (it’s a multiplayer trivia game) . (Will write it up here later)

Venus & Mars: a little afternoon project using Facebook to help my friend’s research assignment at her university. Listing people’s status updates separated by gender. It looks awfully ugly, because I just wanted to make it work, but for the fun of it it’s NodeJS so good to practice my JS-foo.  (Will write it up here later)

Impressions

I definitely going to learn more of it, because now that I start to understand I quite like it, and I cannot imagine it going away anytime soon. Now that it is just a matter of seconds to set up a project on the web (really, on Heroku, Appengine, dotCloud are all one click away) there’s no good excuse not to do that.

Good

  • JSON, ’nuff said. That’s just such a good data format that is both human and machine readable. Seem to be pretty much the
  • No problem (it seems) with Unicode and international characters. Though I think it uses UTF-16 while many other code is using UTF-8, not sure if that makes any difference.
  • Feels quite light and flexible (from the language point of view, not necessarily the resources needed)
  • Since the source of websites is necessarily open, it is possible to learn from others’ examples much easier than otherwise.

Bad

  • Feels like it has a lot of baggage from it’s long(ish) and torrid life, which makes it feel a bit inconsistent. E.g. the first day of the month is 1, but the first month (January) is 0.
  • People generally seem to write pretty bad Javascript code. Because it’s so easy everyone can make some useful project, but they are full of bugs. Fortunately it’s Open Source, so I can try to figure it out, and I did find a handful of upstream bugs. But the stress…. huh…

Ugly

  • Formatting of JS code can be pretty unreadable (especially comparing with Python where formatting is not optional). It is made more difficult when I’m editing JS within a HTML file, since Emacs cannot handle that well.
  • Up until quite recently there weren’t any really good tools to troubleshoot things. Fortunately there’s Chrome and it’s Javascript console, and Firebug for Firefox. There are still some mysterious errors and the debugging has to be planned well ahead.
  • There are many things that are straightforward but require a lot of typing. Fortunately projects like jQuery are trying to fix that, but still there’s a long way to go.
  • Just like in Lua, for keys in dictionaries the quotation marks are not required and they are still understood as strings. These kind of magic can be convenient but there are occasions when confusing.

Links

Books

Interesting Javascript projects and sites

  • jQuery: making it easier to use JS, especially with respect to HTML DOM manipulation
  • Node.js: server side JS, thus it is possible for the first time (?) to use the same language for the front and back end on the web
  • jsFiddle: easy online editor, prototyping and code sharing for the web (JavaScript, MooTools, jQuery, Prototype, YUI, Glow and Dojo, HTML, CSS)

(last edited 2011-10-03)