khoa's internet hideout

Last weekend, I got the opportunity to volunteer as a Group Leader for the biannual Cal Transfer Shadow Day. Two years ago when I first transferred, I received a great deal of transfer tips and advice from many awesome Cal students, most of whom have graduated. Now I'm almost at the end of my undergraduate years, and I want to give back to the transfer community that has helped me so much over the…

I recently wrote up the instructions for setting up a Virtual Machine for doing the labs in CS70: Discrete Math and Probability Theory, and I thought other people not in the class may find this useful as well. Here's a pdf copy of all the instructions below for those who want a handy reference. Installation Instructions (for saasbook VM users) (borrowed heavily from the installation instructions i…

During the first month of my internship, I learned and worked exclusively with Scala, Simple Build Tool (SBT), and Play 2 pretty much everyday. Last weekend, I decided to crack open Python for Data Analysis to learn a few new tricks with Python and data analysis using its awesome libraries. One small thing I noticed about the difference between the Scala's REPL and Python's is that the former reme…

Have you ever missed those classic PS1 titles like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night? Or felt nostalgic for your childhood, when you trained your Pokemon to be the very best, like no one ever was? I know I have. But I run Ubuntu, and most of the emulators found online are .exe files. You can run Wine, but I wouldn't recommend it, unless the emulator is really lightweight. It turns out that th…

On Friday, March 29, I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in an externship program and shadow the engineers at Constant Contact (CtCt). I spent a couple of hours the night before doing "research" (reading about their products, googling my mentor, etc.), and I was very impressed with what they do. "But how did they do it? What technology did they use?" were some of my questions at the tim…