Woohoo! $500. Picked it up at local Safeway Customer Service counter without any problems. I filled out a Western Union “receive” form with the various information provided by Google, and the next day I handed it in and showed my driver license, and I got $500 cash back. Hopefully next time they’ll just give me a check instead.

Hrmm.. what to do with this money in the Bay Area? Buy more food for the interns?

Status Update:

[Code] Last couple weeks I started playing with Mozilla C XPCOM and did a quick
implementation of Link Fingerprints for the Download Manager, which will help
me implement Link Fingerprints at the network level (i.e., Channels). I’ll
finish up the initial Channel implementation by conditionally deciding to do
Link Fingerprints and compare hashes to conditionally fail the transfer.

[RFCs] Looked into existing RFCs and internet drafts to see possibles scopes
for our RFCs (a general extension to #fragment-ids (e.g., #!type!data) and Link
Fingerprints). URI general syntax says the semantics of #fragment-ids are per
MIME-type (e.g., application/gzip or text/plain (which has an internet draft
requesting new #fragment-id functionality)), so right now, things seem tricky
to request an all-encompassing RFC.

Last 2 weeks (2007/05/13 - 2007/05/26):

- Graduate 5-yr MS/BS in CS from UIUC and fly home to California bay area
- Settle in at Mozilla Mountain View, discuss implementation with Dan Veditz
- Investigate RFCs and discuss on m.d.a.firefox
- Research Mozilla C codebase to learn XPCOM, pointers, interfaces, fun
- Practice what I learned by partially implementing Link Fingerprints in
Download Manager
- Begin implementing Link Fingerprints (as a stream converter) in the network
to handle all requests and not just downloads (currently it prints the md5 hash
of all HTTP requests)

This week (2007/05/27 - 2007/06/02):

- Start (officially) Summer of Code (2005/05/28)
- Communicate with DownThemAll developer (Nils Maier) to see what we can share
- Add checks to nsHttpChannel to only do Link Fingerprint stuff if the URI
contains a Link Fingerprint-like reference and if it’s not a partial Range
request
- Actually compare hashes and not just print out the computed hash
- Find Erik Wilde (#fragment-id for text/plain author) to ask about RFC stuff

Wow. Such a long entry that it needs 2 parts? Well, I just wanted to separate the after-race excitement from the during-race fun. And because there’s too much text in the first part, I’ll just put pictures of places that Team UIUC visited.

Pacific Ocean + tons of wind = sandy beach

Our ride back to downtown decided to block traffic instead

Looking down Pierce from Castro

Corner of Duboce and Church = Castro Coffee

Powell Street Muni Station has an Apple Store

A very sunny day at Union Square

Today was the annual Bay to Breakers race that runs across San Francisco - starting on the east side on Embarcadero (next to the San Francisco Bay), cutting across the city and the Golden Gate Park, and coming out to meet the Pacific Ocean. The Mozilla people planned to meet at Cupid’s Span to prepare for the race and pass out Firefox swag, and I found some of them at the Mountain View Caltrain station at 6am.

Sunny day in SF from Cupid’s Span

The train was packed with a ton of people - some of which were race participants, but the majority were going for the “parade.” The latter group had all sorts of costumes dressing up like superheros or McDonald products (fries, milkshakes, Hamburglar). Quite a few people brought refreshments (some loaded up with shopping carts), but these drinks aren’t the ones that help them go faster in the race.. not that they were worried about getting to the finish line in the first place.

By the time we got to San Francisco, there was a huge crowd, so I walked towards the starting point with some UIUC friends hoping to eventually find the Mozilla people later. We made a quick stop to grab some drinks and breakfast, but by the time we finished, the race had started promptly at 8am, so the Mozilla people were nowhere to be found at the meeting spot.

So I decided to take some detours through the city following one street off of the main parade to later catch up with Team UIUC. The nice part about not getting lost in the crowd is that I could take stops and examine the various decorations around the city. Also interesting to note was that as I ran down the street parallel to the main race, there were extremely long lines of cars going in the other direction - seems like the only way to downtown San Francisco from south of the race was going to the Bay and up Embarcadero.

Art at the Child Development Center

1 hour 41 minutes in and not even halfway

Highest intersection of the race (3mi mark)

I soon caught up to my friends, and we witnessed all sorts of interesting sights to see (and some you don’t want to see). The entrance to the Golden Gate Park is near the 4 mile mark, and this is where many people left the race to party party party with plenty of drinks and music and crazy outfits to go around.

Arrr matey.. one of the many floats

Team UIUC finished the race with a time just over 3 hours - not that we began at 8am or the starting line..

Windy end of the race (but still sunny)

It’s been a few days since starting at Mozilla, and I’ve looked through various RFCs to find the related work and analyze the structure for writing my own for the project. I’ve been making good progress and posting my findings on the Mozilla newsgroups such as mozilla.dev.apps.firefox [groups.google.com].

I’m still matching up aliases to names and names to faces (and trying to figure out if I should call people by their IRC aliases or their names), but people have been good in introducing themselves - helping me to make the connections between them and the features they’ve worked on for Mozilla/Firefox/Gecko.

So as a little present to them for the summer, I’ve set up my Nintendo Wii with controllers and games on the first floor of building K. (As a reminder for myself, so that I don’t forget by the end of the summer: 4 controllers + 1 nunchuk, Wii Sports, Trauma Center, Zelda: Twilight Princess, Super Paper Mario, Wii Play, Super Monkey Ball.) And I just happen to conveniently move out of building K to building S this same day, so I won’t get distracted to play some games during the day.

First large-scale Wii ad - Times Square, NY

After a day of traveling from Urbana-Champaign, I’m back home in the Bay Area. One day I have my cap ‘n gown, and the next day I’m at Mozilla Headquarters to begin working on my project for Google’s Summer of Code (SoC) [code.google.com].

I applied for the Link Fingerprints [gerv.net] project with Mozilla back in early April amidst the craziness of thesis writing and full-time/internship interviews. And in the end, I finished the thesis and will continue with my advisor for the Ph.D. program while turning down the other industry position offers to have fun at Mozilla for the summer.

I’m not sure how they picked me out of the 6000+ SoC applicants (was it the big Firefox poster my roommate and I put up a few years back?), but I’m glad that I can meet some Mozilla people that I’ve worked with through the internet. I’ve also had some previous experience with the Mozilla code, but that’s only in bits and pieces with minor changes to Firefox and writing some browser extensions.

Spreading Firefox in Siebel - October 2004

There was some slight confusion early on because Mozilla never had a SoC participant on-site before, and I’m not officially an intern, so I get to be the guinea pig. But soon I got my first Firefox related t-shirt (to add to my stash of Firefox goodies) and was able to settle down and dive into the huge Mozilla codebase with the help of other interns and full-time employees.

Gift from Mozilla for starting SoC

Time to begin coding and writing RFCs; and hopefully I’ll finish the project before the summer is over.

It’s been just under 4 years since high school graduation, and it’s already time to officially end the undergraduate program by getting my B.S. degree in Computer Science. Things have gone by especially fast this last semester with all the work in gathering data and writing the M.S. thesis - one of the opportunities provided by the combined M.S./B.S. program in C.S. There’s always stuff happening like moving into the house off-campus 2 years back and starting Teaching Assistantships 3 semesters ago, so being very busy seems to make time go by much faster.

Shaking hands with the Engineering Dean

But graduating doesn’t seem to change too much - I’ll be back at UIUC for the Ph.D. program in Computer Science for Fall 2007. Well, one difference is that I’ll need to take several classes each semester again and not just one like last semester, but learning is fun and I’m sure I’ll be making plenty more trips to Siebel Center for classes and research.

Entrance to Siebel Center for Computer Science

On a side note to potential Master’s students, your gown gets extra wings on both sides and a “hood” that comes with an extra tail at the bottom. These are the rewards for your extra effort (and $12 more for the rental fee). Note: I don’t think the wings and tail will help you fly.

Additional fancy stuff for Master’s graduates

Today is June 2nd 2007, and as with many new products, this blog has been delayed. But with some magical programming powers, I have gone back in time to post from almost a month ago.

The next several posts will also be bending the space-time continuum until time catches up (i.e., I finish posting what’s been happening since graduation). So without furthur ado, a “Hello World!” from Ed (from 3 weeks ago).

Visit to Bryce Canyon National Park - August 2006