Author Archive
Google Maps Tutorial - Preliminary
I've been playing around with Google Maps for fun lately. In order to teach myself the basics I assigned myself a simple project. I'm going to develop a Google Maps taxi application. Here are the requirements:
Text box: where you can enter an address you want to center on
Left click: will place markers on the map [...]
Using Technology To Get Out Youth Vote
There's an interesting article from Bloomberg about how Barack Obama's campaign is using text messages to get out the vote, especially among the young and African Americans.
The young are notorious for not voting. The last presidential election only 45% of eligible voters below the age of 30 voted. Even though they make up 25% of [...]
Linux Kernel Development
There's a very interesting article from Jonathan Corbet of Linux Weekly News that offers tips for people who are just getting started with Linux Kernel development.
As a Kernel newbie myself, I found the article highly informative, and even though it is a bit on the long side it is definitely worth a full read.
For me [...]
Vote: Presidential Election
Below is a gadget that will help you find your local polling station (N.B. you must be registered to vote before already before going to the polling station).
Also check out Google's voter info site for more election related information.
Career Planning
I read a interesting couple of blogs by Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame on career planning. I definitely recommend reading Marc's blog posts in their entirety.
Here are a couple of my takeaways that I found:
Relentlessly expand your skills.
Try to work in growing companies, where you can quickly expand your skills.
Don't neglect skills that seem orthogonal [...]
Programming Algorithms for Web 2.0
I just got a copy of a very interesting book: "Programming Collective Intelligence".
Admittedly the gratuitous use of "Web 2.0" in the title is a bit misleading, the topic of the book is much more broad than that. It is really about programming techniques and algorithms that have to deal with analyzing data.
With so much data [...]
Validating Web Pages and Feeds
A good thing to do after publish a web page is to check it's validity using an online tool. A lot of browsers will workaround incorrect HTML, so just because it shows up correctly on the browser you are using, it does not mean that it will show up correctly on all browsers.
You can also [...]
GStreamer
Briefly, GStreamer is an open source multimedia application framework that works on a variety of OSs. An application framework allows you to build multimedia applications - audio and video - using the plethora of codes that are currently available (e.g. audio: mp3, ogg-vorbis, aac,... video: VC1, WMV, AVI, Flash, H.264, etc.)
GStreamer is an alternative to [...]
World Chess Champoinship 2008
We're at the half way point of the world chess championship between India's Vishwanathan Anand and Russia's Vladimir Kramnik. After 6 games the score now is 4 1/2 to 1 1/2 in favor of Anand.
Here are some useful links.
Video highlights and post match press conference of the last game.
Official website. From the sponsors of the [...]
802.11n Chip
Quantenna launched a chip that supports the latest wi-fi standard, 802.11n. According to the wikipedia article, the 802.11n standard is set to be finalized in Nov 2009, and can support up to 600Mbps. Currently popular wi-fi chips can support 54Mbps. Even that is somewhat patchy due to the presense of physical obstacles likek walls.
The technologies [...]
