so what is it about micro-blogging

1. Quick add URLs and thoughts through twitter bar for Firefox. Twitter is like an instant repository.
2. Find what’s new and hot. Like the crash down of Gmail several days ago. Internet search could never be faster, since micro-blogging in sentences are much faster than full passage/post of news. The power of word-of-mouth online.
3. Being followed by anyone who value your thoughts and feedback. eg. Once I said I’m trying out social media tool, the vendor follows me.

My recent favorite graph

Network visualization is the wild wild west
I wake up every morning and urge myself with
“Go West, young man, go West!”
And go to bed every night with some thoughts
On why I’m generating such
Mysteriously beautiful
Stunningly life-like creatures
Like this pretty little one…

Sign the java applet!

keytool -genkey -keyalg rsa -alias yourkey
//follow instructions to submit author name, org name, blabla.

//make the certificate:
keytool -export -alias yourkey -file yourcert.crt

//make a jar out of the applet to publish

jarsigner yourapplet.jar yourkey

Jun.5 internship blog entry

Forward: I really have to back up my blog entries since the e-Portfolio blogs are such a horror that you couldn’t even edit them once they’re submitted!  Anyways, duplicated contents are sometimes in need, just like in this case.

And here comes internship blog entry for Jun.5.

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The best perk ever – you’re justified to “stalk” others

This place doesn’t offer free coffee, free cookies, free snacks (anymore).  This place requires you to swipe your card coming in and out.  This place implies that new co-ops arrive early and leave late (than usual employees).  And this place hasn’t paid me yet due to some paperwork issue (I hate paperwork!!!) but I already paid three months of rents plus safe deposits for my apartment on Yale campus.

However, I’m not disheartened by my life.  Actually, I enjoy it, very much.  Because I’m granted with the best perk that I could ever have — my job is to study and develop social networks and I’m justified to “stalk” others!

I get to realize that data analysis could be so much fun when the stories and truths of human behaviors and interactions begin to emerge.  “Stalking” others with the social network service we’ve been studying may not be the appropriate word, since we’re looking at de-sensitized data and looking at the entire social network.  But I do feel good to get credits for looking at people’s tweets-like mini blogs.  This, to me, is the best perk ever!

Last but not least, I’m really very grateful for the sweet white cappuccino my SI friend gives me before I leave Ann Arbor.  And because of this, I don’t even need free coffee! ^_^

UNIX learning resources

Unix Tutorials for Beginners: http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/

Notes from an intro-level lecture on UNIX:

the pipeline of UNIX:
use “|”
eg. cut -f3 2.txt | sort | uniq

grep someword somefile

grep ^someword somefile (get the lines beginning with “someword”)

cat 1984.txt | tr ‘ ‘ ‘\n’ | tr ‘(A-Z)’ ‘(a-z)’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

(-nr: sort numerically in a reverse order)

Perl, Awk

cat 2.txt | sed ’s/a/z/’
(substitute for every ‘a’ per line)
cat 2.txt | sed ’s/a/z/g’
(substitute for all ‘a’s with ‘z’s)

cat 2.txt | gawk ‘$1 > 5′

echo $SHELL
(gives you the interpreter you are using)
csh, tcsh, bash (Bourne Again Shell)

setenv PI 3.1415926
(set environment variable)
echo PI

Getting JDBC working with Eclipse

It took me sooooo many hours before I found out how to do this!!!  Just for documentation purpose, I summarize the little tricks as follows:

1. download  Connector/J, the official JDBC driver for mySQL from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/3.1.html

2. Right click on project, Build Path -> Add External Archives, and select the mysql-connector-blablabla.jar.

3. Done! Hueh~

Very similar to the way that we add external libraries to a MFC project under Microsoft Visual Studio environment.  Wow and that’s a long-time-ago memory!!!

Start-off week at Pitney Bowes

My first week as a Social Networking Intern at Pitney Bowes has started the past Tuesday.  It could have been very odd to start off without a mentor (since my mentor is sick and work at home); but the people in and across groups are extremely nice and friendly.  “People love to meet and give suggestions to those who are younger versions of themselves”, once I heard from an SI student and I paraphrase.  So I’ve heard lots of stories of people working at Pitney Bowes for so many years, who also started their career here as a co-op (they prefer to call us co-ops!).

I aimed to figure out two crucial questions within the first week: the history and current status of my group, and the job function of my internship position.

Yes, I deem these two questions mysterious until I’ve spent sometime at my position.  What I understand now is prone to change with time — and what else that’s not?

So the group I’m working in is called Emerging Internet Technologies, subdivision to a Research and Design department of Pitney Bowes.  Here are people who all hold PhD degrees and interested in examining online communities and developing apps of this type.

What I would concentrate on are two folds: research and development.  In the research realm, both qualitative research (which implies lots of user research methods that we have learned at SI: Contextual Inquiry, Interviews, Survey, Usability Testing) and also quantitative research would be deployed a lot.  I’m now feeling obliged to refresh my stats knowledge and picking up a statistical analysis tool, which would be a lot of fun!  How tough is R anyways? I would like to find out by myself.

The developoment part of my job function basically assumes coding to prototype ideas; and both front-end and back-end programming skills are needed.  From next week on, my mentor would like me to start on some development tasks, by picking up an app that was develped by a past intern and himself.  Lots of java programming onward!  And as always, it would be also fun to read others’ codes, since you could tell a lot about the programmer!

Import spreadsheet to MySQL database

Just in case I can’t remember this too well after this time, these are the steps to go:

1. Save excel file as .csv format

2. Use phpMyAdmin or command shell to create new table and define each column.

3. type the following command in command shell to load .csv data into the empty table we just defined.

mysql> LOAD DATA INFILE ‘(your path)/(your file name).csv’ INTO TABLE (your table name) FIELDS TERMINATED BY ‘,’ OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY ‘”‘ lines terminated by ‘\r\n’ ignore 1 lines (skip the header line in .csv);

It was fun talking to my self!!!

… using Hab.la as a test, or self expression to be more accurate.

For a depressing afternoon and for a more reviving future!

HCII is using Drupal too~

Congrats! Yet another site based on Drupal and doesn’t look like Drupal at all~~

Put: http://www.hcii.cmu.edu/node, we have: