Hung Truong: The Blog!

Jazz Standard Currently Stuck In My Head: My Foolish Heart

Well, it didn’t take long for Rick Astley to get out of my head. While on shuffle, my iTunes played the Bob Mintzer version of “My Foolish Heart” sung by Kurt Elling. It’s really a nice ballad. And the arrangement by Mintzer is nice and slightly weird as is his style.

The night is like a lovely tune, beware my foolish heart!

How white the ever constant moon, take care, my foolish heart!

There’s a line between love and fascination,

That’s hard to see on an evening such as this,

For they give the very same sensation.

When you are lost in the passion of a kiss.

Your lips are much too close to mine, beware my foolish heart!

But should our eager lips combine, then let the fire start.

For this time it isn’t fascination, or a dream that will fade and fall apart,

It’s love, this time it’s love, my foolish heart!

And, as usual when I get a standard stuck in my head, it’s really friggin’ stuck in my head!

This is Probably Slightly Unhealthy…

It all started as a joke. A RickRoll. Following a link like "Starcraft 2 leaked trailer!" and instead being presented with a video of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up." More …

2003: The Missing Blog Year

So for some reason I was looking at the archives of my blog today. I noticed that there was a gap between the years of 2004 and 2003. I obviously didn’t stop blogging completely in 2003, so I figured something was up.

I’ve been blogging for a number of years now. The earliest protoblog I had was probably on ujournal.org. After that I switched around a lot, to places like Xanga, livejournal, Myspace (ugh, yeah, I know) and finally to my own domain where my blog resides today. I’ve made it a point to export all my old blog entries though, so I was kind of pissed to see that 2003 was nowhere to be found. Sure enough, I checked out my old livejournal (which still exists!) and exported all the posts from 2003 into my blog this afternoon.

A few notes on my blogging style of 2003:

• I used exclamation points in my titles a lot.
• I mostly blogged about news events. Unfortunately, Yahoo News links die fairly fast.
• All links referencing my UNM webspace are seriously borked
• For some reason I wrote about Ebay a lot!
• In 2003, my blog really sucked.

There are a few noteworthy posts from that year, including the self imaging post (which links to a broken site now…), the Ebay commercial post (which links to a working video!!!) and my rant about Humpty Dumpty.

You can see all the missing posts here. If you really wanted to. Which you probably don’t.

A Tale of Two Facebook Apps: Viral Vs. Non-Viral Growth

For my SI 508 Networks class last semester I did an analysis of one of my Facebook applications, Notecentric. Notecentric was a social network that I had written during the Summer of ‘06 and I had recently ported it to the Facebook Developer Platform in Summer ‘07 shortly after the platform had been launched.

The growth of Notecentric isn’t what I had hoped it would be. Not too many people use it, probably due to network effects of Facebook promoting a competing app (note to Facebook: if you want to promote a level playing field, don’t play favorites!) and other general performance issues (the application is pretty barebones and the RFacebook library I used to write it is pretty damn slow. It times out a lot!).

Fire Eagle Invite Get!

Thanks to LordElph, I got an invite to Yahoo’s newest thing, Fire Eagle. I feel as though there’s enough fire stuff in the world with Firefox and its eternal enemy, Firedog. But oh well.

Fire Eagle is a centralized location information service, basically. You can use its built-in APIs to set user location information and grab user information from it (assuming you have the correct permissions).

This is cool because in the past, applications have had to do this location stuff on their own. For example, if I wanted to set up a Twitter clone that knew a user’s location, I’d have to be able to take the information and process it, and retrieve it later. Fire Eagle handles a lot of stuff like figuring out exactly where a user when things might be ambiguous (I typed in “University of Michigan” and it gave me a choice between the main campus and the Dearborn one).

I’m planning on coding up some location aware applications at some point soon, so I think it’ll be fun to try and see what I can do with the help of this Fire Eagle thing. Yahoo has definitely done something unique and I give them some props for working on this service!