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. :)

Haochi walking across speeding through the stage

Fours years in the making, seniors from the Class of 2009 finally graduated on June 6th at the Veterans Memorial. The valedictory address was the highlight of the overall very boring graduation ceremony.

Despite knowing that I may not see most of the people from the class again, I did not feel at all emotional. The feeling still haven't "hit" me yet, well over a month after the graduation. However, one day it might.

Scott, Haochi, and Shane aka HS²

A display of firework goes off as I was walking to the parking lot, marking the end of my four years of high school, or perhaps, marking the beginning of something even better.

Going down memory lane and reminiscing the four years in high school, I feel like I missed out a lot of the "high school experience." I did not play any sports for all four years, was not involved in any school clubs until my junior year, and further more, did not do anything wild. Actually, on a second though, I am glad that I've made the choices I made.

Some highlights of my (pretty ordinary) high school career:

• Nothing special happened during the first two years besides that I accidentally broke one of the teacher's lava lamp and had to buy her a new one :(
• No.1 at a regional competition
• Being accepted into The Ohio State University
• No.2 at national competition
• Voted by my peers as the "Class Brain"
  
  

Time flies ...

Preschool (Taishan Children's Palace) class photo

(c. 1997) I am not in this photo but these are my classmates from my elementary school in Taishan, China. Photo courtesy of Haifeng Chen - a friend since pre-school

(c. 2002) Yuenfeng - my best friend in elementary school and I

And then I flew across the Pacific Ocean - Superman-style - from China to the U.S.

photo by Chris Devers, used under a cc-license

(2005) Haochi in Ms. Ellingwood's room

... and then the birth of this blog which journals the important (and miscellaneous) events of my life.

Summer's (been) here!

How Haochi starts his summer days

I haven't done anything special so far this summer vacation, there's no definite plan to travel somewhere but I hope that I get to go somewhere before school starts in late September.

My internship at Emerge Inc.'s been pretty cool so far. I learned a lot of cool stuff.

Besides the project at work, I also have plan for a little personal project. I don't have a name for it yet but basically it's a Firefox addon that unifies all those "Google XX Notifier." I would also like to work on small projects to build up my portfolio. If you have some cool ideas in mind for a web app, let me know and I will probably build it for you, free of charge!

Another thing is that I will probably redesign this blog and give this blog a major overhaul, I haven't updated the application for about half of a year besides giving it a bit of maintenance.

I really went off on the tangent on this post than I have originally planned, but it covers the two main points nonetheless: I graduated and my summer vacation is so good so far.

I will conclude this blog post here and I hope that you enjoy the beautiful summer days.

Update: Forgot to add that I received a very satisfying score on my AP Calculus exam. Didn't do as good on my AP English exam though. :(