Today was quite exciting with Google’s event in San Jose. I got to learn about the new Google APIs and developer tools that’ll be pushing forward web applications as well as to meet all sorts of people and see what they’re working on. I attended most of the main sessions except to participate in the Fireside Chat for Google Gears, but the nice thing is that many of the sessions were recorded and are now available on youtube [code.google.com].

Overall, the event was very Google. Colorful decorations with beanbag seats and exercise balls. Free drinks. Free food. Free swag. And plenty of Google products. (Tons of Dev Day photos [picasaweb.google.com].)

Free Developer Day T-shirts + badge

I found the performance improvements provided by Google Gears especially interesting because one doesn’t have to even be offline to see some benefits (of removing network latency). At the fireside chat, I asked a question about Javascript performance (relating to my research area) because Gears will facilitate building more complex web apps that do a lot more (distributed) processing on the client. The responses were valid in that bottlenecks do come from updating the DOM and disk I/O, but maybe I was just hoping to hear what Google has planned in pushing Javascript from interpreted to JIT and then adaptive optimizations.

And after the conference part ended, there was a big party at the Googleplex with even more free food and beverages. The center of the campus had food stands with hamburgers, corn dogs, shaved ice, cotton candy, churros, nachos, and a bunch more. The dining area of the main cafeteria changed into a party area with a DJ, pool tables, arcade games, and flashing lights with the projector showing photos of Dev Day around the world.

When it started getting dark, they brought out some neat cups to add to the party atmosphere – glowsticks in a cup form. Basically, cups that glow, so you end up drinking glowing green goo in the dark.. kinda. Just make sure when you hit the cup against a hard surface to break the glow capsules, don’t hit so hard that you crack the cup causing the liquids to spill out.

“Cracked” glow-cup (only the middle red one is glowing)

Flash shows the cups’ true color

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

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)