Hung Truong: The Blog!

Facebook Feature: People You May Know

Might as well be called something like, “People you befriended then removed because they were jerks” or “People you know but aren’t friends with” or “Jerks who are friends with many of your friends.”

The algorithm is probably pretty simple. Facebook probably just grabs people who are not your friends but share a large number of friends with you. I imagine they aren’t doing any kind of interesting (mathwise) stuff like weighing friends with low degree higher and friends with high degree lower. That would mean that friends who are friend whores count less toward your “People you might know” score than friends who have very few friends.

And that’s why Facebook needs employees well versed in network analysis and graph exploration!

*HINT HINT*

Also, I’d really like to see a “DO NOT WANT” button for the douchebags who keep on showing up in my list of people I may know. Just because I may know them doesn’t mean I want to be “friends” with them, FB.

Google App Engine + Django == FAIL

Edit: Using the tutorial from this dude, I was able to get the Django “hey, you got the barebones working!” page working. I may have time to mess around with this more in a week or so.

I just wasted an hour trying to get the Google App Engine and Django to work together on both my Mac and my PC. Both give failure errors when I try to run the server.

Should I assume I’m a bad computer scientist? Or should I assume that Google needs to do more testing/documentation before releasing stuff? Granted, I haven’t used Django before, but it should really work if I follow the directions correctly (and I did, twice)!

I would consider learning the webapp framework, but I’d rather learn something I could use on a server other than Google’s. I’ve been meaning to learn Django for a while now. I had some high hopes that I’d be able to get something cool running in a short amount of time, but I guess not.

People are saying this App Engine thing is a great competitor to Amazon’s ECC. Not quite yet. You can’t run any software you want on App Engine, you’re limited to using Python for now, and from my experience, App Engine seems a bit half-baked at this point. What about cron-jobs? What about running scripts? What about root access? I can’t see why Google didn’t just decide to copy Amazon and allow developers to upload a linux image or something.

My initial impressions are disappointing. Maybe once the semester is over, they’ll have a more stable version of this available…

Blogging Considered Harmful

Via Venture Beat (who knew?), the New York Times thinks that blogging could be hazardous to your health:

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

I heard about Om Malik, but I didn’t know two other blogger dudes died of heart attacks. I guess I can imagine how this happens though. When I was starting my Anime Blog I wanted it to be successful, so I did spend quite a bit of time thinking about how to get to that point. After a while though, I just figured that blogging should be for fun, not dollars (even though my blogs actually do make some $$$).

The article mentioned bloggers either gaining or losing weight due to blogging. I wonder if there’s a blogging diet! If anything, I think blogging has had an opposite effect on me…

Of course, obsession to anything can be dangerous. Guys in Korea die of playing WoW all the time! Workaholics die from “Karoshi,” yes, Japan actually has a word from death by overwork!

Me? I try not to stress out too much. In fact, I am writing this blog just so I can procrastinate doing homework for one of three things that are due in the next three days!

Also, Om Malik sounds like the name of some Sith Lord, doesn’t it?

Zattoo Non-Job/Internship Interview!

About a week ago, I had an interview with Zattoo, a local startup here in Ann Arbor. I had met their VP of Engineering, Dug Song at a career fair and ended up giving him my business card. I got an email from Zattoo about them being interested in an interview. I’m not looking for an internship anymore, but I figured I’d have a chat to get to know the company better in case I want to work there after I graduate.

I talked to two engineers. I can’t really remember their names now! Oops. But basically we talked about the technologies behind the service (it’s a real-time streaming tv service). It’s kind of interesting that they use P2P in order to distribute the live tv content. I thought this might end up with a pretty big delay in actually getting the content, but one of the guys said there was only a difference of ~20 seconds or so.

One of the things that their website job page lists is that they want people with an interest in social networks. While I thought this was interesting and figured they might have something specific in mind, apparently they’re just trying to get people with knowledge in the area to maybe generate some ideas and build new stuff. Seems pretty cool.

Something nice about this interview was that while it went like a typical job/internship interview (they asked me a question about some engineering problem I’ve faced and how I solved it), there was like, no pressure for me to really do well. I mean, besides the desire not to sound like an idiot to other people. I kind of liked having no pressure on me during the interview. I should probably pretend it’s like that for every interview I take, since I think I answered their questions pretty “well” regardless.

So yeah, Zattoo is a startup in Ann Arbor. One of the few interesting tech ones that I know of. Though there will be more. More on that later…

Now That’s What I Call REAL ULTIMATE HR!

I met a recruiter from this company called imo.im last week at the Mpowered career fair on North Campus. Basically, the event was a career fair for startup companies. For some reason, some really big companies were there as well. I think I saw NEC…

Anyway, imo.im is some sort of web-based IM client, kind of like Meebo. I even asked the recruiter something like, “I’m sure you get asked this a lot, but this company is like Meebo, right?” Anyway, it seems the claim to fame for imo.im is that they’re financed almost exclusively by one of the first 10 employees of Google. This post isn’t really about their company though. It’s about their HR!

There were a bunch of t-shirts on the table. I, being a t-shirt connoisseur, especially of the company shwag type, asked if I could have one. “But they’re reserved for interviewees,” the HR person Marissa Huang told me. She also said she could mail me one when she gets back to their headquarters, since they have a lot. I gave her my contact info and figured I’d never get the shirt. Here’s a story!

When I went to interview at Google, they said I’d get some kind of awesome bag with Google related goodies in it. Like shirts and lava lamps and whatnot. Maybe not lava lamps. Anyway, it was supposed to be in my hotel room but I never got it. After the HR person at Google asked for my address for them to mail it, I felt that I’d get the stuff for sure, but I never did. It was like adding insult to the injury of not hiring me. By the way, I’ve fully recovered and hold no ill will towards the big G. Just throwing out this story to prove a point: why would imo.im go to the trouble of sending me a shirt when I didn’t even interview with them?

But they did. And it came today. Which is why I award imo.im the official “Hung Truong Company Shwag Award Seal of Approval!” I don’t know if something can be both an award AND a seal of approval at the same time, but whatever. There was also a nice hand-written note in the package, which is unheard of as far as corporate HR goes. But imo.im is a startup, so I guess that makes them different.

Anyway, thanks, imo.im, for the t-shirt. As a bonus, I’m even not adding a rel=”nofollow” to my links to you! Rock on!