Hung Truong: The Blog!

Wii Fit: One Month Later

I’ve been “playing” Wii Fit for about a month now, so I thought I’d put up some updates on how it’s been coming along.

There have been some weird things happening occasionally when I play. For example, when I start up, the trainer will randomly be the dude (who has a slight Southern accent) and he’ll be like, “I’m filling in for your regular trainer today.” What gives? I need some eye candy while I exercise, not some dude!

Also, one day I got all the way through my workout and went to do the plank thing. After doing the plank thing my time reset to :01 minutes. It basically erased all of the previous things I had done. Not that it really matters. It didn’t erase the calories I burned (OR DID IT!).

As far as my health goes, I have lost a few pounds since starting, but not enough to reach my goal in time. So the game let me readjust my goal. I think previously I was trying to lose 5 lbs a week or something, which is kind of difficult.

I’ve also noticed a marked improvement in my strength. All those push-ups and stuff paid off. Which is to say I can actually do some push-ups now when before I just collapsed under the weight of my torso. My posture is probably improving as well.

So anyway, I think the fact that I have stuck with the Wii Fit stuff for a whole month is probably some kind of achievement. Maybe I’ll celebrate by eating a whole tub of ice cream. Oh wait, that WOULD erase all the work I’d done. Maybe I’ll just have some lowfat sorbet then…

Wii Fit Update

I’ve been “playing” this Wii Fit thing for about two weeks now. So far I’ve lost a few pounds and I think I’m probably quite a bit more “fit” than I was before. I guess the most remarkable fact is that I’m still at it after a few weeks. I’ve already pretty much unlocked everything in the game, so I just go through the normal exercises in my routine. It’d be cool if new exercises were to show up as downloadable content or something.

I’ve been feeling pretty good lately as well. Besides the major pain factor of the “plank” exercise, most of the stuff isn’t too bad. I think I’ve already been building muscle, and now the actual weight loss might begin to show. I’m also trying to eat less. “Normal” portions in the US are way too big, so I’ve been trying to get small stuff for lunch and share things when possible. It seems to be having a positive effect.

I also seem to be more flexible during the yoga stuff. Who knows if I’m doing it right, but the Tree thing is a lot easier for me to do (and my foot actually can go up that high now).

I’d like to get a Wii and Wii Fit for my parents since they’d probably enjoy doing the exercises and could probably use the exercise themselves. Too bad it costs a bunch and the equipment is still in high demand and short supply. Overall I’d say the product is pretty sweet, and if you have enough self-motivation paired with the game’s motivation (it says stuff like, “I see you were too busy to exercise last night…” when you miss a day) you can easily live a healthier lifestyle.

Setting The Crontab Environment For Your Ruby on Rails Jobs

So today is my birthday. In honor of my birthday, I’ve been migrating some websites from my old server to a new one. Okay, it’s not really in honor of my birthday; I’m just doing it because I have some free time today.

Anyway, one of the things that Anime Nano needs to do is run a crontab of a function from a Rails model using a crontab. If that made no sense to you, don’t worry. Just enjoy the pretty picture of the rails logo above. If that made sense to you, wow, you’re pretty hardcore.

This is something that I remember spending time getting to work the last time I set up my server. But unfortunately I didn’t write about how I did it, so I had to spend an hour or so figuring it out again. Apparently, crontab runs in a different environment than the root user. If you try to run a script for Ruby using “ruby script/runner” you’ll just get nothing. No error message, just nothing. I did something on the previous server that set the crontab environment, but I have no idea what I did. I searched. I didn’t find the answer.

So what I ended up doing (this is for future Hung when he has to eventually move his sites to an even newer server) is sticking some lines for my environment into the crontab itself. I just ran ‘env’ and got a bunch of stuff. Comparing the ‘env’ command run from the crontab itself (I just piped the output to a random text file) and running in my shell, I saw a few differences. Most notably these ones:

GEM_HOME=/usr/local/rubygems/gems

GEM_PATH=/usr/local/rubygems/gems

RUBYLIB=/usr/local/rubygems/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8

And voila, my crontabbed rails script/runner model script thing ran. Hopefully writing this post will save me some time in the future.

Oh, and happy birthday to me.

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age – Book Report

The weekend is here, and I’m trying to use my “free” time as effectively as possible.

I just finished a book that I borrowed form the library, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan Watts. The book is basically an overview of the evolution of Network Science, the thing I’m studying in grad school. I’m technically specializing in “Social Computing,” which includes the study of stuff like complex systems, graph theory, sociology, etc. Since it’s a relatively new (or recently popular) field, there’s a lot of overlap with other fields. And as described in the book, it is very interdisciplinary.

Facebook Removing Network Pages: WTF?

I was browsing around Facebook today when I thought of checking the network pages for my universities. Network pages are interesting because you can see stuff that’s popular in your particular network. While the Network pages seem to be rarely used, I still think they’re interesting to have around. For example, here’s the statistics page for Michigan as of right now:

I found it really difficult to find the network page today. In fact, I had to go to google and query for “facebook networks” to actually find the networks page. This is because Facebook is apparently discontinuing the network pages.

Now is a good time for me to ask, “WTF!?” Social networks are interesting because they have multiple variables. People know each other through networks, especially by regional and work networks. By removing network pages, Facebook is losing a pretty important source of info. I understand they’re not removing actual networks; just their pages. But still, why bother getting rid of something? They aren’t really being used, but I still like to check them now and then to get a quick overview of what’s happening.

Recently, Facebook seems to be closer and closer to jumping that proverbial shark. Not just because of this change, but because of changes to the developer platform as well. It’s gotten to the point where one cannot casually write applications for Facebook because the functions they use will surely become deprecated within months. Can you imagine that happening on a real OS? Combine the “alpha” hijinks of the platform with the fact that no meaningful income is being made on the apps, and you have a formula for slow, rotting death of applications!

Will the next Facebook please stand up?