whats the plot

i like the site for twitter, ‘friendorfollow,’ which tells me who i am following and isn’t following me back, who are following me and i am not following back, and so on. given that i got access to google buzz today, i decided to write a little script to help me determine the breakdown of my friends (specifically, who i am following and isn’t following me back, since the rest of the information is easy to read off of the website anyway).

this script will tell you who your friends are (lol, i wish), who your fans are, and who you are following but isn’t following you back. unfortunately, there’s a manual step involved (getting the server response with your friends and followers). there’s really no point in trying to automate this right now, because soon enough, i expect that one of the google apis will expose this functionality.

(removed download since this probably doesn’t work anymore).

i hate to say it, but i love google documents. i never thought i’d use it, but man, it has made my life a lot easier for so many things. the sharing feature is especially nifty (and probably accounts for 90+% of the reasons that i have to use it).

someone from the yahoo maps team did this last hack day (a month+ ago), but for whatever reason, it hasn’t been released by yahoo yet. very useful feature imho (basically, you can drag and drop on the map to change the route, so if you want to avoid a particular road, you can).

i’ve gotten used to using google reader for my rss feed reading. one of the nice features is the ability to share interesting items. i decided that i might as well start using this. here is my shared items page, and here is the atom feed. i’ve also added a link to the side of the page.

i saw this yesterday when i clicked on the gmail tab to read some new mail. click the image for a readable version of it.

and no, i haven’t custom added any rss feeds to gmail… it means, “know Allah’s marvelous/magnificent plan for your life…” thanks google!

i found this picture the other day… pretty funny, the poor guy has to swim to get to his destination.

this is really neat: google sets.

try putting in these words in the first and second box to see google’s piousity:

“fajr” in box 1, “zuhr” in box 2.
“shahada” in box 1, “salat” in box 2.
“ramadan” in box 1, “shawwal” in box 2.

i am sure there are more but… feel free to post them in the comments. dang, that’s awesome

peace. not much going on here. i posted some of the pictures i took in atlanta up, but i ended up deleting some of them on accident. so there are only a few on there, but you can see them on the photo galleries.

google launched sms.google.com – seems like something pretty useful and neat.

gmail rocks – i still got some invitations if anyone wants one.

i upgraded to the newest wordpress version that was released yesterday…

that’s all for now…

i am *so* frustrated right now, i feel like yelling and screaming, etc, except that i can’t because mansoor’s asleep and the neighbors are too…

sooooo… *something* makes me decide to sign up for this google code jam 2004 competition… bad idea.

so it was 2 problems for the 1st round (i guess there was a challenge round or something too but i dunno, 2 problems basically, and you had an hour to do both of them).

really cool problems too mind you…. especially the second one. the first problem gave you a “map” consisting of you and enemy targets, and you had to return an array of the distances of the enemies to you.

the second problem was awesome — given a rock that drops in a pond of water, you always have this “ripple effect” — so given an array of such rocks, and assuming that ripple in any one spot is additive (and that the effect of a rock begins at time 0 as its weight and decreases as the time increases), what is the largest ripple value in a particular pond?

the first one took me a while even though it was easy, especially since i misread part of the problem and proceeded to waste about 15 minutes first trying to figure out how to get an ArrayList to sort in java, and then writing my own quick bubble sort algorithm when i didn’t have to.

the second problem (the big one, 1000 points) is what REALLY frustrated me. due to the great amount of time spent on the first problem, i had about 25 minutes to do this problem (minus however long it took me to read it and figure out what to do). if i had about 30 more seconds, i would have done it right… i found out my mistake 30 seconds after i submitted it — rather than do:

for (i=0; i<arr.length; i++)
   for(j=0; j<arr[i].length;j++)
      // code goes here

i instead did…

for (i=0; i<arr.length; i++)
   for (j=0; j<arr.length; j++)
       // code goes here

thus throwing all my answers off, thus kicking me out of the competition, thus making me *uber* frustrated because i knew how to do it and did it right even with the limited time remaining… it was just one silly error. the sad thing is, i found this same exact error three lines lower and i didn’t see this one three lines above until it was too late…

i guess i do admit it was pretty fun… but nonetheless, i am upset, and as thus, i am going to sleep now…