There are certain reasons why I admire Google more than any other tech company out there, and one example is their Summer of Code program.

Under this program, a $4500 stipend is given out to college students who pick one of many available existing open source projects to work on for the upcoming summer. The projects, which have usually no established sources of income nor any personel on payroll, are as important as Subversion, Firefox and KDE, though the list is very extensive and even includes projects you’d like to do yourself, under Google’s own mentoring.Not only does the program support much needed open source projects by providing talent, but for every student mentored, Google will also pay the mentoring project $500.

Needless to say, if you are a Computer Science college student and use or write open source software for fun, this is an amazing opportunity. The pay is quite good for a job you can complete at your own pace, and of course since most open source projects have no offices to begin with, you never have to show up at work! And should you do a good job, you just might spark some interest in yourself from the folks at Mountain View; the very least, you get a T-shirt, a certificate, and the satisfaction of having worked on some of the best software and with some of the smartest people in the world.

Jaminid (Java Mini Daemon) is a very small HTTP/1.1 server written entirely in Java, and meant to be embedded into java programs as a builtin server, usually to substitute a graphical GUI with a thin-client HTML interface.

Due to an increase in interest from people lately, I’ve released a new version containing the impovements I’ve made to it since it’s first public release. The improvements include several bug fixes, and even includes a nicer example.

There’s probably no document more notoriously difficult to write than an entry-level resume. Hours of fudging about with the margins, text-seperation variables, let alone getting the wording exactly right for the specific job you’re applying for. If you are unix savvy, or you are slightly suspicious with all the WYSIWYG fanfare, you may have considered LaTeX as your resume typesetter of choice. A noble cause, so allow me to help you out.

This is a LaTeX2e document with special macros to typeset an Entry Level, one-page resume. The content on the page pertains to me; feel free to use this as a template for your resume. This format arose from a Technical Communications class I took as a freshman in college; it has since worked very well for me so I’ve kept it.

Using LaTeX for your resume has several advantages; it gives you complete control over the output, it is very stable, and it produces a PDF with no effort. My resume is a good example of a LaTeX resume.

The added advantage is, if you’re applying for a technical position in computer science, a LaTeX resume, although not often recognised as one, can give you a boost with your interviewers if they also happen to be LaTeX users. Therefore, make sure you add \LaTeX in your list of skills.

Furthermore, you generally should not submit resumes in wordprocessor formats for several reasons:

1. Missing fonts tend to be substituted with other fonts that may or may not fit the original font size, distorting words, lines and paragraphs from computer to computer.
2. Wordprocessor files contain a lot of information that you might want to be careful with - for example, different versions and anything you have copy-pasted in the file.

I can’t stress the importance of that last point. One of the less important duties in a job experience I’ve had involved being a proponent of a certain operating system which shall remain unamed; When the time came to apply to the competitor, I had to remove that particular line. Had I submitted the resume in, say, Microsoft Word format, a savvy recruiter could have easily undeleted the missing line.

If you are completely new to latex, I recommend reading the aptly named Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e

Remember to abide by all the good conventions of resume making:

1. Use whitespace to establish sections.
2. Use verbs when describing experiences and nouns in skills. Vary the wording from item to item.
3. Don’t list everything you’re proud of, just the most important and relative stuff.

Nothing brings me this much joy. I wish I had more nonsensical akwardly worded forms to fill in! Though most people file their taxes online, for us immigrants that’s not a choice. Thank goodness for these official IRS fill-in pdfs though; turns out I don’t have to use one of those pesky ink-in-a-stick writing utensils (so 20th century.)

Admittedly one of the few ways the Bloomberg Terminal distinguishes itself from the rest of the pack of financial data reporting, is the excellent News tracker. When you are viewing any chart, for example historical prices of a share, you can click on any point of the chart to view the news stories that occurred at that particular date and time.

I liked this little feature so much (it can make a lot of trends immediately obvious) that I’ve implemented my own little version for my news-equity correlation project, which could capture emailed Bloomberg stories and save them in a database. This was soon extended to capture stories from prespecified Google Alerts, and the task at hand was to learn to predict trends in the share price based on patterns in the news stories.It looks like Google has been busy. The all new, Google Finance site has this amazing little feature, and though it might not have as much content as Bloomberg, it is slick, functional, and appealing. I will be using this often.

Though the live iTunes counter was short lived, I’ve used the official data I automatically collected from the site plus the press release milestones Apple releases from time to time to predict the future.

It appears Apple will be hitting the 2 billion downloads mark sometime in early 2007 - I look forward to that.

The standard network on JHU wireless, available at least on the homewood campus, requires an authentication upon succesful connection to the wireless, even if you have the right WEP key.

If you are running linux or any other machine where you’d like an automated transition between networks, it is difficult to do this seemlessly.

This perl script will fill in that form and authenticate for you. Make sure it runs immediately after a connection to standard has been established.

Note: Depending on your distribution and level of expertise, there are different ways to establish a wireless connection on your typical linux. On Fedora for example, a typical way is to export the ESSID and KEY (as well as any other variables you might need) as environment variables and then call ifup. This could be done by another automated script that is configured to detect available wireless networks and roam among them. Many solutions like this one are available on the internet.

See Also:
Official information on JHU Wireless

Jean Tourrilhes guide to Wireless Linux

Apple has given its investors a brand new insight into how well iTunes is doing:
Apple iTunes 1 Billion Dollar Countdown

Watch those iTunes songs download in real time! I’m wondering whether someone has been extracting statistics out of this so we can linearly predict the iTunes momentum for the next few quarters?

Update: I have started regularly collecting these statistics directly from Apple. You can find a report of sales in Apple iTunes Sales Statistics.

Final Update: Unfortunately Apple no longer maintains their countdown since the 1billionth song was downloaded - at least I didn’t put any more effort on the reports.

There’s a minor rebound underway today - AAPL is up around $0.80 on news of the new iPod shuffle price as well as the 1GB nano. On one hand, this is a good move that will allow the iPod to remain competitive. On the other hand, this could be news that Apple is losing it’s pricing power, and this might be bad news for earnings.

Either way, I’ve always underestimated the Shuffle component of the Apple Earnings - but at $69, its price compares to the most expensive flash memory cards out there for the equivalent amount of memory. Perhaps this will boost earnings, and attract more customers to digital media players and the Apple way.