Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow.com

I had lunch today with Bjoern and Jeff Atwood. It was really interesting to listen to what Jeff had to say about his websites and get some feedback about what we are working on.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/
This is Jeff's blog. No time to write now! will write more later

GRE

Tonight is GRE day! It's our first GRE class and we'll be taking a preliminary GRE exam to get a base score and find out our weaknesses.

Wednesday

I read papers today and started writing up an analysis of the papers, picking out the important questions the authors focused on, the data they used, and how they graphically represented their results.

Molecular Foundry

I took a tour of the molecular foundry this morning at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. They have an entire building devoted just to nanoscience research, which I don't know much about so it was interesting learning a few things. They are government funded as well, and one of the only remaining public laboratories where researchers and students can apply to work there for a year and use their equipment.
I also continued trying to debug my buggy python code, and it seems like every time I discover one error, and fix it..another one appears. I read a paper titled "Questioning Yahoo! Answers" and have two more papers to read this week. It will help me get more familiar with the other research that has been done in this area, analyzing public online communities.

Monday

More struggling with python today. I'd like to say it's getting a little easier, but no. Not yet at least. Python is pretty hard to get used to since I've been using mostly java in my classes. SQL gets very complicated too. It's those little brackets you forget, or the lack of a quotation mark or a parenthesis that usually gets me. And even if that is all okay, my syntax will be off, or I'll tell it to do something it can't do, and then I sit there waiting and waiting, and waiting for a result that never comes. Right now I have a 'list' object has no attribute 'replace' error with my python script. I feel like I have seen this error before, but I'll have to scan through some other python examples to figure out how to resolve the issue. I have all sorts of other fun errors too, like string index out of bounds...
I also have a bunch of papers to read this week, which is a nice break from coding, or debugging, depending on how you look at it.

Garden

I went to the botanical garden today with a few people from my group. Photos can be found on facebook. It was quite beautiful there.

Friday!

California is awesome. Lemon trees. Palm trees. Fragrant flowers. Nice people in my program. What is there not to like?

Today I worked on getting that histogram from yesterday to work. I got farther along, it is working to an extent. I also took notes on lists, tuples and sequences, sets, dictionaries and looping techniques in Python. I pretty much have my histogram working for a small set of data, it just takes an extremely long time to load if I'm looking at the entire set of data in this one query I ran on frequency of tags.

I'm glad it's Friday! The group is going out tonight for some San Francisco fun.

Python

Python can be very frustrating. I spent quite a while watching the program crash, and waiting for results today while the window mysteriously reduced in size as results were printed. Bjoern came by though and fixed everything up, giving me some helpful hints. I also downloaded a new editor. I ran my code on the IDLE editor and it kept crashing so frequently and taking forever, really- not like..'oh no it takes 5 minutes to run, soo slow!'...more like 'oh no, it's never going to finish, at least not today, and it will probably keep going in and out of crash mode for the next hour'. But when I switched to TextMate editor..and I was expecting it to take an hour, imagine my surprise when I got all of my output in 6.79 seconds.

So what did I do today? Well, I worked more on creating interesting queries (which gets hard by the way) for analyzing the data. I thought I'd get a few graphs done today....not the case.
I had to save the results of my first working query in a csv type file, and use python to get those results, change them around replacing carats and whatnot and splitting words, and then that is stored in a dictionary or associative array, and then I want to sort it so it is no longer a dictionary but a bunch of tuples, and then finally I save those values as y values and x labels, and the last step is creating a histogram of that data.
So, in result, I didn't even finish creating 1 histogram today, but I spent a lot of time trying to debug and I guess that made me a little more familiar with python.

Also, the guy at a desk in front of me is listening to ABBA and lady GaGa. I can hear it through his headphones. :)

In other news, one of the coordinators of our program, Carol, had 2 free tickets to this Steinbeck performance at the California Shakespeare Theater. Exciting! Since I was the only one that responded, I got both tickets and I'll be going to the theater with Nikki tonight.

Day 3

I met a student today who came into the lab and introduced himself. He is an intern for Nokia and enjoys it. He says they have a lot of resources and are able to get a lot of work done quickly. He is working on some sort of new implementation there that is top-secret and classified, so he couldn't tell me what it was. But the mystery makes it sound even cooler.

I also worked with python today and went through a python tutorial. Tomorrow I'll be looking at saving the results of my sql queries into a file, then taking that file and reading it for information that my python code can use to create graphs of the data. It's an interesting process.

Day 2: Lost on campus

Day 2:
Today I spent most of the day looking at two pretty good SQL tutorials and doing all of the exercises at the bottom of the pages. It helped me get acquainted with SQL queries. Bjoern helped me download SQL Lite and a Stack Overflow dataset, and I ran queries on the data through the terminal. It was pretty cool, however... I had a moment of frustration before realizing I missed a semicolon.

Also, I went to lunch today and got extremely lost on campus. The enormous hills don't help. I must have climbed up and down a million staircases. I also swirled around the building I needed because I wasn't used to seeing it from the front. So I saw my building, thought to myself 'where am I ?!' because I didn't recognize it, and then went up a massive flight of steps to the top of some hill...looked down and thought..I should have really been back by now. Luckily, I figured it out after going in several circles. The people on campus also have no idea where buildings are. It seems most of them are tourists, visiting students, or just not familiar with building names.

My first long practice query from an exercise on the tutorial: select customers.customerid, customers.firstname, customers.lastname, items_ordered.order_date, items_ordered.item, items_ordered.price FROM items_ordered, customers WHERE customers.customerid = items_ordered.customerid;

Day 1: Orientation

UC Berkeley summer REU program:

Today was orientation day! Logistics, expectations, id cards, and safety were the topics of the day. We met our mentors and learned more about our projects today. It seems like there are a lot of interesting events going on at Berkeley. They seem to have a ton of campus happenings, as well as museums and recreation available to us for free. We also get discounted student tickets to theater events. They mentioned a possible visit to Intel and a visit to this National Laboratory that is so classified, you need a passport or drivers license / official ID to get in (can't just use your student ID). Very exciting! The people here are all very nice, and the weather is fantastic.