My silicon valley experience

Apparently Scoble was able to get news about the earthquake in China onto his blog before any major news side was able to. How? He got the news from fellow twitterers in China while it was still shaking there.
And what is the outcome? Twitter gets a lot of major media attention and is down all day. Twitter is known to have performance issues and something like this just gave them the rest. I wonder if twitter will manage to get this organized before someone else takes the market away from them.

I am running Ubuntu since a few days and am pretty unexperienced with Linux in general. I just needed to install the build-essentials but it wanted me to insert the installation disc. Since I am in the university right now this was not at hand. There seemed to be a thread at http://ubuntuforums.org but the side seems to be gone.
So I found out that using the Synaptic Packet Manager you go to Settings->Repositories and at the bottom of the first tab there is a box called “Installable from CD/DVD”. Remove all check marks in here and it works without the CD!
Simple problem, simple solution but apparently it’s causing problems for some people.

EDIT: I am getting a lot of visitors for this post. Can some one please tell me if this post is helpful or not? Thank you very much!

Yesterday I had to implement an approximation algorithm for the subset sum problem for a class at university. Since this algorithm contains a lot of list operations I decided to use Python for this since it’s a great language for this kind of stuff and I wanted to be done fast. This turned out to be a great choice since I had really a lot of fun using Python for a project again. I sometimes use Pythons IDLE as a better calculator but that’s it for the last year. It was just beautiful how well Python works out for list operations! Adding a number to every element in a list and being able to filter these elements in the same step is nothing but elegant. I wanted to have a look at the Google App Engine soon which uses Python and now I am even more looking forward to that.

Here is the little program I wrote. It’s based on the approximation algorithm give in
Introduction to Algorithms

def approxSubsetSum(S, t, epsilon):
    L=[[0]]
    print "L_%s: %s"%(0,L[0])
    for i in range(1,len(S)+1):
        #MERGE
        L.append(L[i-1]+[x +S[i-1]for x in L[i-1]])
        L[i] = dict.fromkeys(L[i]).keys()
        L[i].sort()
        #TRIM
        L[i] = trim(L[i],epsilon/(2*len(S)))
        #Cut off too large elements
        L[i] = [x for x in L[i] if x<= t]
        print "L_%s: %s" %(i,L[i])
    return L[-1][-1]

def trim(L, sigma):
    m = len(L)
    L2 = [L[0]]
    last = L[0]
    for l in L[1:]:
        if l > last*(1+sigma):
            L2.append(l)
            last=l
    return L2

In the last days I listened to two German podcasts (SWR2, Werbeblogger) talking about privacy in the times of the web2.0. Alot people are sharing information on the web that usually would supposed to be private. We publish photos on social networking platforms or flickr. We update people about the status of our relationship, who our friends are or where we are going to shop in a few minutes. Especially younger people care very little about this. But what happens if a potential future employer sees this picture of you being drunk or feels offended by your religious or politic views you publish on your facebook profile? Professional data collectors crawl the web for information about you to sell it to companies. Which kind of information are they really interested in and collecting and what are they really using this information for? If they go over your data to target advertisements better to your needs this might make some of us feel uneasy but on the other hand we might appreciate it because finally we get advertisements in our mail for the TV we are looking for instead of advertisements for window coverings or 24hr home care which we are not really looking for. More on Privacy 2.0

According to the O’Reilly radar the iPhone is getting really popular among managers. The iPhone is able to convince by it’s user friendliness and elegance. Apparently this convinces managers to switch to Apple products also for their computers. Some of them did that not only with their private machines but also do this switch at work.

Usually managers tend to be very conservative when it comes to technology choices. Usually they make their tech people use what ever everybody else uses. If a technology has certain advantages over the established technology it’s hard for them to value it high enough to chose it over the established one. They don’t work with it and don’t want to carry the risk that they might end up with some unforeseen problems or without people being able to use the new technology. The iPhone is a way how managers who otherwise aren’t open to technological adventures can get in contact and can get convinced by a technology other than the established one. Maybe the iPhone will turn out to be the best thing ever happened to Apples computer business. Now that Microsoft is in a weak position with Vista is for sure a great time to take over some serious market share. I am curious which impact this will have.

I had to do a little survey about three different mashup tools for university. Those tools where Microsoft Popfly, Google Mashup Editor and Yahoo! Pipes. I first tried Yahoo! Pipes and was really amazed how easy it is to build simple Mashups. Because it was fast and easy I decided to build a simple application with each of the three competitors. I just wanted to take two RSS-feeds and merge them to one sorted by date of publishing. More on Mashup tools

Yesterday we went for a walk in the neighborhood and to University Avenue. I used this occasion to make a bunch of photos you can see below. We also passed by the Peninsula Fountain & Grill where we continued our cream test. The price here was slightly higher ($5.5) than at the Peninsula Creamery but it was a straight win for the Peninsula Fountain & Grill! The shakes were absolutely awesome. It was even more creamy and the strawberry shakes flavor was extremely authentic. They offered also the option to add dates, cream or make it extra thick and more. We didn’t make use of any of these options because it would have made the comparison harder. Can’t wait to try these!

the birthplace of the Silicon Valley is in my neighboring block:

Yesterday we wanted to do a cream crawl. It can be compared to a pub crawl only that you go from one creamery to the next and have milk shakes instead of going from pub to pub and have booze. Our trip started at the Peninsula Creamery on Channing and High street. Here I had a chocolate shake and Ana had a strawberry shake. I was surprised how creamy the shake actually was. Much creamier than a shake I had at the cinema tonight. Also the chocolate taste was nice and strong. The place looks really traditional and you can see that it is from 1923. It has that certain charm to it.

The cream crawl was supposed to cover all three creameries that we found in Palo Alto using google earth. But we were so filled up from this one shake that we went to the Apple store and borders instead. We hoped to be able to drink another one after that but I actually felt nauseous because the first one was too much and I drank it too fast. But at least we saw the Mac Air this way. Which was really amazingly thin and had a nice design

So today I had my WST (writing skill test) after which was very good. I was a little short in time because I am a very slow reader (in every language) but it was very good anyway. When I came home from the test we jumped into the car immediately sine we wanted to have lunch at the famous Buck’s restaurant. The main reason why we wanted to go there is because it’s famous for being a place were a lot of important deals of the silicon valleys history had been made. And I have to say it is a really remarkable restaurant. The room is stuffed with all kind of interesting, odd, old decoration. An astronauts suit is hanging from the ceiling together with winged horses, an old anaconda snake skin is on the wall and a big submarine model is separating different sections of the room. The walls are completely covered in odd things like that. So much about the look but how is the food? - Food was just awesome. We had a BBQ burger with coleslaw and crab with Cheddar on sour dough with french fries and fruits. The fries were the best fries I’ve ever had. Seriously! The crab with the bread was just amazing. You didn’t taste the crab a lot but it was jut fabulous. The burger was nice and moist and had really crispy fried onions on it. Lots of those! Very nice. So even if you are not a VC or wanting to meet with one you should absolutely go to Buck’s restaurant. If you are looking for good American food Buck’s is a great decision even if it’s only to experience the interesting location!

(Pictures from the restaurant will be added later)

The second day at university was so much better. First class was given by Prof. Smith about the Design and Analysis of Algorithms. This class covers exactly what I expected when I registered. So we will learn about NP-completeness, which is cool since I already know about it. Further we will learn how to approach these kind of problems using randomized and distributed algorithms and of course with approximation algorithms.

Next class was the real great thing. It was given by Qi (Tom) Zhang who works at google. He said that this is a job oriented class which will provide us with knowledge we can actually use in our later jobs. It covers all kind of topics related to XML and web services. I already learned about these things in Paderborn but here the emphasis is much more praxis related. Therefore we also have to write a little Mashup in a team of two. I am really excited about this class and can’t wait for the next session. I’ve never felt that way about a class before!

Dr. Zhang also showed us two cool web pages that you should check out:

- indeed.com: Here you cans search for jobs and see trends for the demand of certain qualifications. You also see the Salary that jobs requiring a certain qualification usually come with. Very interesting and useful!

- ning.com: Create your own facebook-like community with several mouse clicks. Haven’t tried it yet. But we will use it in class

Today I attended my first lecture in the US. The experience couldn’t have been any more different than from university in Germany. The lecture wasn’t a lecture but more the forming of a project group. The aim is to create a database system using C. The system is supposed to have a good new feature for searching the web. I don’t wanna go into technical details but the whole project is done in cooperation with IBM. This all sounds great and probably really is great. But I am right now going more and more away from close to hardware programming and am sure that I absolutely won’t want to have a job which includes C-programming. So I am not willing to invest the needed time into this project. But I am highly interested in the topic itself and therefore talked already with the Professor to see if he can give me a more research oriented task. He didn’t know yet but will be able to tell me on Monday. This whole story unmotivated me a little esp. since I felt like I gave up. But sitting in the train back home I continued reading a great management book by Fremdund Malik in which he states that you should work on your strengths and not on your weaknesses. So this convinced me that I made the right decision. I also was able to find a substitutionary lecture in case I won’t get a non-C-programming task. The only problem with the other class is that I can’t find a way to get in contact with the teacher…