Earlier today I exported all the posts/comments/etc. to a hosted wordpress install here:

http://distilled.adiunnithan.com

WordPress is the best blog package ever. Here’s why:

• I had a blast hacking on it and watching it grow at ibiblio for lyceum
• Matt Mullenweg is a coder who doesn’t allow users to succumb to cognitive friction
• WordPress.com was awesome
• The wordpress 2.0 package from wordpress.org is easy to install, customizable as hell, and fun.

Under construction…

With Phil’s hosting advice, I’ve gone with serveraxis’s Xen-based virtual hosting.

Over break I’m building a home theater PC.. I figured having my computer and my TV be two separate things was kind of pointless. I might upgrade the other PC I built into a web server. Here are the stats so far for the parts I’ve bought and installed.. I’m just missing memory. All prices are displayed and rounded as: (actual/retail):

• Case: Ultra MicroFly MicroATX ($30/$60)
• Mobo: ASUS A8R-MX/SI Socket 939
• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3400+ 2.2Ghz Socket 939 ($95 with Mobo)
• Memory: Patriot 1GB PC3200 ($90/$105)
• Video card: EVGA GeForce 7600GT 256MB ($90/$200)
• Hard drive: Samsung 160GB (had it before)
• Optical: Sony DRU-120C CD/DVD Double Layer Rewritable ($10/$40)
• PSU: Ultra 500W (Free!/$40)
• Keyboard: Logitech S510 Media Keyboard ($10/$30)
• TV Tuner: Hauppauge PVR-150 MCE ($50/$100)
• Heatsink/Cooling: ($20/$40)

The total so far: $393.95
Amount I’ve saved: $296.03
Thanks to Black Friday and mail-in rebates.

Here’s the case!

Here are the papers that were in Bioinformatics, Volume 22, Number 21. You can check out the site on a production server at http://ifold.dokhlab.org.

Base Paper [Adobe PDF]
Supporting Information [Adobe PDF]

So, with the exception of my honors presentation/semi-completed thesis/deliverable, two finals, and another presentation… I’m 88% complete with being an undergraduate. The other day I remembered some random event and was telling a friend.. “Do you remember last year when…”. After I finished the story, she looked at me and said, “Yeah… but Adi, that was in freshman year.” I was confused; I was so sure that it happened last year.

Even though I’ve gone through almost four years of college, it still seems like C-Tops was just last week. And that scares me. I don’t want the last few experiences of college to past by like a fleeting daydream. My worst fear is sitting in an office somewhere a few years from now, looking back on these past four years and missing it all — all of it. The parties, the dance battles, the allnighters with Pokey Stix, the classes, Kamikazi, the teachers, the friends, the acquaintances, that damn pit preacher, that meditative experience of walking through the quad in a sea of people, jumping across puddles of rain in the pit, being a freshman and eating at Lenoir with random people. But I know it’ll happen. I know i’ll miss it all.

Regardless, I’m trying my best not to think of it this last semester. I was originally going to graduate in December and I know now that would have been a horrible idea. I need a semester to take it all in, to relive everything that I’ve missed and live everything that I haven’t done. I need a freaking conclusion to this four-year novel. As far as work is concerned, most of it is stuff that I’ve always wanted to do independently but never had the time or the resources.

1. Work on my honors project, thesis, and presentation… and probably take a grad. info theory class to help it.
2. Consolidate all of the web design work, web development work, and graphic design work I’ve done in the past years into one place.
3. Work on designing and developing one of my ideas and push it out to the public for free (but get money through advertising!) I want to see what people like and what they don’t like. I have these conceptions of what users like right now, but I think that’s kind of pretentious without actually knowing what target audiences are interested in.
4. Build/hack the HTPC…
5. Start work on the carputer (…car + computer). I can’t actually do anything to my car until June when the warranty expires, but there’s always LOTS of time to spend $1,000 :] I should probably also figure out how I would cut out the dashboard and stuff before I actually do it…
6. Start developing applications in .NET. Ha, this is kind of obvious…

So lots of fun, but mostly lots of relaxing before summer, travel, moving to Seattle, and starting work with Microsoft on August 13th!

Kind of random, but uh, wow.

Also.. here’s a link to Timbaland/Nelly Furtado/JT’s latest:
Give it To Me. Hot beat, good chorus, lots of dissing… :]

Just played with the just-launched Like.com, a site whose design reeks of Web 2.0 but whose functionality is seriously unparalleled. This new webapp is from the creators of Riya.com and has stuff that would have Vannevar Bush rolling in his grave. For example: you can search for watches (or browse by watches) select which ones you like, and the backend feeds the user-friendly interface with tons of watches that look like it. What’s more, you can select which of the following attributes you like: the color, the shape, or the pattern on the watch, and the frontend immediately updates to show you watches based on your preference. THEN you can select a part of the watch you like, and find watches with that part! It’s eerily accurate. You can also change what color you’d prefer. Finally, you can look at pictures of celebrities and search based on the products that they’re wearing — you can drag a box around their shoes, or their watch, or whatever, and find products exactly like it!

Whew.

Keep a close eye on this one. Froogle-like functionality + Like.com + cool domain name = a killer app.

I went to Boston this past weekend to pitch an idea with Phil to YCombinator, a venture firm started by Paul Graham — the guy who sold his online store to Yahoo in ‘98 for 48,000,000 dollars. The entire weekend was an incredible escape from school and work (unfortunately as I write this now I’m right back in the heart of it). We applied with a completely different idea than what we pitched. In fact, we had a few ideas so we didn’t really know what we were going to pitch until the day before. Regardless, we put our faith behind an idea that did have a lot of technical problems. While we could have touted the amazing user experience and the sheer amount of pain points that the product could have addressed, in the end we were pushing our beautiful pie-in-the-sky design that would have solved all of these technical problems. I think Robert Morris noticed that the most. Phil and I both agreed that we probably would have done a lot better if we had a demo or if we had come better prepared to tackle the technical issues… or if we had went with the idea that Paul had suggested we do!

The night before the interview we had dinner with about 10 of the teams that were interviewing. Seriously, I met some of the most diversely smart people in the bottom of that Italian restaurant. The guys who probably impressed me the most were the three-member Weebly team. They have an amazing beta of their product with an impressive userbase and a great team organization. A few days ago they were mentioned in TechCrunch and received another 2000 users.

While I was pretty disappointed in not getting YCombinator, it was still awesome getting the opportunity to meet Paul, Robert, Trevor, and Jessica. And hey, everything happens for a reason. I was always upset at the possibility of leaving my friends and abandoning my senior year to work in Mountain View on the startup — although I definitely would have done it if we were given funding from YCombinator. A few hours after Phil called me and told me the outcome I ordered Chinese for the people I was staying with. After good food and a good conversation, I opened my fortune cookie and broke a smile as it read:

“Your true wealth lies with your friends”.

A while back I was messing around with a graphic design project and happened to indefinitely screw up my color settings in Photoshop. I have no idea what I did but I thought, hey, I can live with this. Until I spent two hours trying to fix the color on an organization flyer. I’ve searched everywhere on the internet, tried dozens of color settings but nothing works. The problem is that all of my colors are desaturated in PS. I’ll design something with the desaturated color pallete but when I export a flattened image, the entire image has brightened. All of the highlights go crazy. My browns turn to pinks. The maroons turn into neon reds. The jungle green turns into a bright shade of puke. I’ve never seen anything like it. Here’s an example in CMYK (US Sheetfed Coated v2):

Here’s what the color SHOULD look like (and what it looks like while I’m designing it, even though it’s a desaturated color pallete):

Here’s what the color ACTUALLY looks like, after it’s been exported to a flattened JPEG:

That last image is kind of what I was going for — you can see I actually had to desaturate the colors pretty badly in Photoshop to get it to turn out right in the end. So i’m pretty much working as if I had some weird kind of color blindness.