I used to have a page on the old version of this site to keep track of the movies I have seen, but I stopped updating it after the script I wrote quit on me. I decided to bring the page back to life last night after being pretty frustrated that the little side project I am working on keep giving me errors that I can't fix arrgghh!! Anyway, I took a break from that project and spend a bit of time updating my movie database, with the help of Google's AJAX Search API to query the release year of the movies from IMDB, saving me hours of work to go through over 400 movies that I have seen in the past few years.

You can find the list on this page. I am going to share some statistics I've generated.

• 463 movies as of today
• Most (429 movies) of them were released in or after 2000
• 86 movies' title start with "The"
• In 2007, I have seen 91 movies, which is pretty close to one movie every four days.

Well, now I am going to get off line and watch a movie. :D

The past week I have been toying with a few APIs, namely those offered by Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook. The resulting product is a rather sluggish map overlaid with geotagged contents from BrightKite, Flickr, Panoramio, Picasa, Upcoming, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, and YouTube. It also features "Local News" and "Local Tweets" which shows news from Google News and recent tweets from Twitter based on the map you are viewing (I won't bother you with the boring details). The "Local Friends" is an optional feature that requires the user to connect the site with Facebook Connect, it basically shows you how many Facebook friends you have in each U.S. states and who they are when the map is over that state.

The main purpose of this little application is to explore geotagged contents from various sites, whether on street level or country level.

It's somewhat unstable due to the nature of the application relying on data from third party APIs but it should be fine most of the time. I might work on it a bit more to sort things out, however in the mean time I will be moving onto my next little project, something related to this but hopefully more useful.

It was pretty fun* while working on this little project and I can also add it to my portfolio page - which I have yet to create - to demonstrate my skills with JavaScript/jQuery and working with third party APIs.

So, until the next post, ciao!

* Switching from "WHY IS THIS NOT WORKING ARRRGGGGH!" to "Ahh, I am so awesome for figuring this out." in a microsecond bring me so much joy.

[comic by Abstruse Goose]

It's September already and while most friends from high school already started school, I am just starting to buy things for college! Last Friday I went to Micro Center to purchase the Gateway NV5807u that has been chosen as the lucky laptop that gets to spend the next few years with me, after the hours-long online research I've done in the previous night. I was going to get my laptop online at Dell but I changed my mind, as Dell's customer service is not the most promising - although I have never dealt with them before, but my sister had, and her experience with Dell's laptop department wasn't that good.

So far the laptop is worth every dollar of it and since I am planning to get a desktop soon so I wasn't really looking for a desktop-replacement laptop, just need something lightweight and can get things done while on the go. Netbooks fit in that category but I am not a big fan of them.

On Saturday I went to Prime Outlets - wasn't my intention at all to go there but I went anyway - and bought a few articles of clothing, on Sunday I went to Target with Christina and bought some accessories for my dorm room, and on Monday I went to Kohl's to get a bed set that was on sale for only $27.

I still haven't bought my books yet but (hopefully) I will get to that soon.

Weeks in the making, version 2 of iHaochi is now live! The new version of the site includes the jQuery framework, which is currently only used to handle AJAX comment-posting but I will employ more of it's JavaScript magic on the site over time.

Besides the new design, another change to the site is the updated tagline. It changed to "You are under my control" from previous version's "Haochi's master plan to take over the world, one step at a time" to reflect my successful plan to dominate the world.

Just kidding.

It sounds cool though.

Well, I guess the next major project for me would be to continue my work on the Firefox-plugin-which-I-have-yet-named since Carey expressed his interest in it and I would really like to release that before school starts in late September.

As announced in the previous post, a new design for iHaochi is coming soon! The design is pretty much done but I am planning to add more a bit features and little tools to it before launching the new version of the site.

The most exciting thing for me is that the blog application behind iHaochi has also been completely rewritten from scratch, including the addition of the sparkling tagging system (tags still needed to be added to most of the posts).

I have also written a Firefox addon to check the "unread" items in Gmail, Google Voice, and a few other Google services. It's pretty basic but it works (for me). I might release it some day if I have time to work on it a bit more but for now I will be a bit selfish and keep it for my own use. :D

Anyway, stay tuned for the cool things. :)