Hung Truong: The Blog!

Craigslist and Google Maps Mashup Thingy: Day 2

Today I pretty much worked on my Craigslist Google Maps app all day. I spent a lot more time getting the data that I scraped from the individual Craigslist ads into the database, and then setting up the cron script thing to periodically pick up the new feeds. To parse the RSS feeds, I just used Magpie since it was really easy.

Magpie wouldn’t parse the KML files that Google Maps uses to do its geocoding thing (where it gives you the latitude and longitude based on an address) so I had to use a regular expression. It was a pretty ugly hack, but at least it got the job done. I suppose it’s more efficient to use regular expressions rather than a full blown parser though. Maybe.

I also got the database info for the apartment ads into Google Maps using their API. It’s actually pretty simple once you understand what all the lines mean. I’m sort of weak in Javascript, so I guess this is a good chance for me to learn some more. I know Java, but I’m not used to using things like event listeners for mouse clicks and stuff like that. GUI? Who needs ‘em, right?

So I’ve got a sort of working prototype. Now all I need to do is clean it up and add more prettiness and features. Right now when you click on the map marker, you just get the description. Hopefully I can add stuff like the price, a link to the Craigslist listing, and pictures. It shouldn’t take too long, now that I’ve got the skeleton in place.

Craigslist and Google Maps Mashup Thingy: Day 1

So I’m sort of looking for housing in Michigan since I’m gonna be living there for two years. The apartments apparently go fast, so I should be looking for them a few months ago. Which is to say now.

A while back, some guy made a mashup of Craigslist and Google Maps. HousingMaps shows a giant google map with pushpins corresponding to communities on Craigslist. I think this was one or two years ago. Since then, other communities have been added to Craigslist, but the person who wrote this site hasn’t updated anything. Guess what? Ann Arbor isn’t one of the communities supported by HousingMaps.

So I figured it’d be a good exercise in coding (in PHP and some javascript for the Google Maps component) for me to do something similar. Sure, I’m not doing anything very original, but at least I’ll learn something, and I think it’ll be difficult enough without being impossible.

So far, I’ve gotten the important chunks of info parsed out of the individual Craigslist listings. Note to Craigslist: Your HTML is horrendous. It is formed: horribly. Okay, so maybe it’s not that bad, but it’s certainly not semantic. Honestly, figuring out how to parse this very crappily formed HTML took some crazy logic, but I think it came out okay in the end.

Next, I’m going to have to figure out putting these listings into the database (shouldn’t be that hard), so that they can populate the map. After that, adding stuff to the map and getting the map to do what I want. Now, sleep.

Facebook Programming Puzzles – A Boatload of Fun?

So I was browsing Facebook, my second favorite social network (my most favorite being Notecentric, of course). Unbeknownst to most, Facebook has a bunch of random pages linked to from their footer. There’s a pretty cool developer blog, and other random junk. I was looking at the jobs section (I need something to do this Summer) and I came across a section called “Puzzles.”

There’s just a bunch of programming puzzles. Some are harder than others. As in programming wise and computationally too. The Prime Bits problem seemed pretty easy (as in, doable in about an hour) so I did it. I guess I’ll just send it to Facebook and tell them that I’m looking for a Summer internship or something.

The only thing is, it seems like the puzzle is too easy. What if they use this puzzle as some kind of red herring to capture lazy programmers in order to blacklist them? Or maybe there’s a way to be clever that I didn’t think of? I’ll probably send it anyway. It only took me like an hour. It’s probably mostly just to see what peoples’ programming styles are like (OOP, functional, etc.).

What’s the point of my post? I dunno, but Facebook seems like a pretty fun place to work for if they just randomly post programming puzzles for people to solve.

University of Michigan: More News (Good News!)

I wrote this over on my grad school blog, since it has to do with grad school.

I got an offer to be a University Library Associate. This is a pretty big deal, so read about it here!

Basically, tuition and money to go to school are no longer a concern, and I’ll be sending my acceptance to Michigan very soon.

After being rejected by Google, this is really just what I needed to get out of my semi-depressed slump of saditude. Now I’m super happy!

Google College Days Interview and Visit: Impressions + Verdict

[Edit 11-13-2010 Hi Techcrunch! This is an old post I made more than 3 years ago about Google. tl;dr I interviewed and didn’t get a job. I’ve done some stuff since then. Check me out on LinkedIn and look at my portfolio. I’m currently looking for interesting stuff to do. And now back to this lengthy post about Google…]

So last Thursday I flew out to Google to visit in the context of their College Days program to do some interviews / take a tour of the Googleplex and eat their food. Google had me sign a pretty hefty NDA (Non-disclosure agreement) so I’ll try to be careful with what I say. Basically, I believe that if what I say is pretty much common net knowledge, I’ll be ok. I don’t really think they told me any Google secrets.

The main point of the NDA, I think, is not to reveal any of the interview questions, since they’re important to keep under wraps so that interviewees will see them as fresh questions instead of being coached on them.