This year I once again participated in the RailsRumble competition with the goal to build a Rails app in 48 hours. My amazing teammates Arya Asemanfar, Gary Tsang, and Alex Le and I worked together tirelessly to build an application for tracking grocery purchases. The result is Grocery Tracker.

Grocery Tracker

The objective of Grocery Tracker is to make it really easy to visualize how much you are spending on groceries and how your buying habits are changing. For me, it is interesting to see what percent of my grocery purchases are going towards “Snacks & Candy” as well as my historical spending in that category. Grocery Tracker allows me to quickly answer questions like “Am I spending less on snacks now than I was 3 months ago?”.

Start Tracking!

To signup, click “Get Started” on the homepage. Fill out the (poorly styled) registration form to create an account and you will be automatically logged in.

When you login for the first time we create two sample grocery lists for you. The first one has all the ingredients to make a wicked sandwich and the second one is blank. Click on the blank list and play around with entering new items to the list.

After you have entered some data click the “Reports” tab at the top to view graphs of your purchases. The first graph on the reports dashboard is a graph of total spending over time and the smaller graphs beneath display a breakdown of spending by category. The default view is to view a breakdown by day. You may find it more useful to break down your purchases by week, month, and eventually year. To do so, click the respective links in the top right of the page.

iPhone Integration

Grocery Tracker has a minimal iPhone interface for viewing your grocery lists from your phone. This is ideal for reviewing your grocery lists when shopping at the grocery store. We hope to build out the iPhone functionality more in the future.

Alpha, Beta, Gamma?

Keep in mind when using Grocery Tracker that it was developed entirely in 48 hours. Once the deadline passed we were no longer allowed to make changes. There are a few known bugs in the software that we want desperately to fix but are barred from doing so by the rules of the competition. In particular, logging in and out of the application is really rough and you should anticipate strange behavior to crop up.

This jumped out at me while browsing the Apple Store today. The two 13″ Macbooks are practically identical on the inside. The new aluminum version’s hard drive is 40GB larger and it contains the newer DDR3 memory. However they have the same video card and the same CPU. These changes may seem of consequence, but with the falling price of memory components Apple is likely paying the same price or less for the DDR3 memory and 160GB hard drive than they were for the corresponding parts in the white Macbook a year ago. Making the internal enhancements essentially a free upgrade for Apple.

All that remains is the case. Which means buyers are paying $300 for the upgrade from plastic to aluminum. That unibody case is nice but that is outrageous! It is easy to see where Apple’s high profit margins are. And I thought it was bad when they put a $150 premium on the black macbook casing two years ago.

My resolutions for 2009:

1. Take on fewer projects. I have a tendency of getting involved in just about everything. Too often I eagerly say “Yes” to a for-fun project, contract, or job without really thinking about whether I have the necessary amount of time to devote to the project to make it a success. For a few months I need to instantiate a “project-freeze” until I can bring some closure to the myriad of things currently clogging up my to-do list.

2. Look at where I am spending my time and decide what is truly important. Stop spending my time on the things I think are important but really aren’t. I just finished reading the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. The eighth chapter is titled “Keeping Doors Open: Why Options Distract Us from Our Main Objective”. In the chapter Ariely explains how people have this irrational behavior to keep as many options available to them as we can. Even though this behavior diverts our energy and commitment away from the doors that should be left open and that we are better off when we close as many doors as we can and focus on the ones that are the most valuable. For most people, including myself, deciding which doors are the most beneficial is a not easy because, as Ariely states, some doors are tied to my dreams or contain the promise of leading to a better career. Therefore I need to be rigid in closing doors if I really want to focus on what is important.

3. Get better at finishing what I start. Since I have been starting too many projects in the last year and getting involved with too many things, I have fallen into a really bad spell of not finishing many of the various projects that I start. By spreading myself too thin I have become ineffective as a programmer. But I believe that if I am able to stick to my first two resolutions, then finishing the things I start will follow.

4. Exercise with Wii Fit on a regular basis for the entire year. I am not overweight or out of shape so when I say that I need to exercise it is not to lose weight. Instead I want to see how my body will improve if I do exercise regularly. And I say exercise with Wii Fit because that is the only method of exercise that is convenient enough (I don’t have to leave my apartment) for me to do it for a prolonged period.

Since July I have been using an application called RescueTime to track my computer usage habits. It records how much time I spend using each application and visiting websites. This information is useful for me to monitor how much time I am blowing on Twitter and how much of my 8+ hour work day (when I was working) I was actually spending on programming.

One of the features of RescueTime is that it lets me set efficiency values between -2 and +2 for my Apps. So for example, I marked TextMate as being +2 efficiency, Adium and Skype as -1 efficiency, and Facebook as -2 efficiency. Then RescueTime aggregates all of my usage data, and generates an overall Efficiency Score based on the efficiency values I assigned. If my overall efficiency score is above 0 than I have been productive, if it is below 0 than I have been generally unproductive.

So far I have assigned all of my “most used” applications and websites and efficiency value…except for my email client, MailPlane. When it comes to rating the efficiency of my time spent writing and reading emails I am conflicted. While email is necessary to getting many things done, it is a lot of time not spent working towards my main objective which is programming.

Writing emails is what particularly kills me as it consumes far more time than reading emails does. Writing good emails that provide actual value is difficult and I can easily spend 20 minutes writing and rewording an important email. If the amount of email I dealt with was low this would obviously be less of an issue but I estimate that I send an average of 40 emails every week, half of them being during the weekend.

I know that this amount of email writing is nothing compared to what many people deal with but for a college student who writes code on the side, writing 40 emails every week is a significant time sink. According to RescueTime, I have spent 110 hours using my email client since RescueTime started monitoring on July 21st. Making it my most popular application (Adium is second, followed by TextMate).

So the problem I am left with is, how do I rate the efficiency of a necessary evil? I can not stop writing email because then I would not be fulfilling my other responsibilities, like my role as ACM President at UCI. If I give MailPlane an efficiency rating of +1 than time spent writing emails is going to boost my overall efficiency score so that even if I’m not writing any code RescueTime is still going to tell me I have been efficiently using my time. If I rate it negatively and give MailPlane a rating of -1 than I am never going to be able to dig myself out from negative territory on the overall efficiency scale. I already have Adium, VLC, and Facebook bringing me down enough as it is.

In the end, I feel that 0 is the most appropriate efficiency rating for a necessary evil. Thus it does not hurt you to be doing it but it does not help you either. I think a good solution would be for RescueTime to add a goal type where I can specify that on any given day, my goal is to use TextMate for longer than I use MailPlane. RescueTime deals in tags and categories so really it would be to use things tagged “dev” for longer than things in the “Comm (Email)” category but it is the same principle. That way I can challenge myself to spend more time writing code than emailing without having all my other activities interfere.

So what about the actual movie? Wanted pulls its style from a variety of different action movies. First it borrows a little bit of The Matrix‘s disregard for Physics. Mix in Shoot ‘Em Up‘s abundance of manslaughter. Finally throw in a high speed car chase plus gunfight that is standard for any action movie and you’ve got Wanted.

Luckily the “curving bullets” thing doesn’t end up being as lame as it looks in the preview. Instead it serves as a nice touch that differentiates the movie from every other action movie. Although it’s really entertaining to watch the actors shoot a “curving bullet” because it looks more like they are throwing a baseball sidearmed than shooting a gun.

The movie is such that when it finishes and your sitting in your seat as the credits play your thinking to yourself “either that was really dumb or it was freaking awesome”. Ultimately you cannot decide which it is so you compromise and declare that it was both.

Unfortunately the movie has a piss poor name. After seeing the movie I still cannot determine why they called it Wanted. I am sure that people will remember the movie 5 years from now but absolutely no one will remember its generic title. They’ll say, “Oh yeah! the curving bullets movie with Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman! What was the name of that?”. Ultimately no one will be able to remember and they’ll have to look it up on IMDB.

Despite my criticisms, the occasional cheesy dialog, and not-so-stellar performance by James McAvory, Wanted is a good movie and I recommend seeing it. If nothing else it is very entertaining. But honestly don’t take my word for it because like I said, I know absolutely nothing about reviewing movies. Nor do I have any authority on the matter. Instead I referrer you to Rotten Tomatoes where Wanted is currently at a very respectable 93%.

That is all I can think of for now. And, unlike the aforementioned 5 people, you can follow me on Twitter to see what I’m thinking about.

Some of the questions were given to me by a classmate and I don’t know where she got them from. The rest I wrote myself. I dumbed down the questions as much as I could because I wanted to make sure people would get them right. Having a trivia game with questions that no one knew that answer to would not have been much fun.

If you need to sort a very large list of integers (billions), what efficient sorting algorithm would be your best bet?
Quicksort

What mega media company merged with AOL at the turn of the century?
Time Warner

What do they call people who register domain names with the hope of selling them for a profit?
Cyber Squatters or Domain Squatters

Name the authors of the book The C programming language. The authors are often referred to as K&R
Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Richie also developed what computer operating system at Bell labs with Ken Thompson and Douglas Mcllroy?
Unix

Name the primary creator of the Java programming language.
James Gosling

In 1914, Thomas J Watson renamed the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR) to what?
International Business Machines (IBM)

Name the famous computer scientist who worked to break Nazi codes at Bletchley Park during WWII.
Alan Turing

Who single handedly built the first Apple computer that launched the personal computing era?
Steve Wozniak

What is the day and time of the Unix epoch?
Midnight, January 1, 1970

What is the name of the recent female CEO who stepped down from HP?
Carly Fiorina

What does the company AMD stand for?
Advanced Micro Devices

Who headed the team that created FORTRAN in 1957?
John Backus

Who developed LISP in 1958?
John McCarthy

Who developed PASCAL in 1968-70?
Niklaus Wirth

Who wrote a BASIC version for the 8080 microprocessor, Altair, in 1975?
Bill Gates & Paul Allen

Who created the C++ programming language?
Bjarne Stroustrup

What is IEEE 1394 refer to?
Technical code for Firewire

Who is the Ada programming language named after?
Ada Lovelace

Which Google vice president co-designed TCP/IP is regarded by some as the father of the Internet?
Vint Cerf

Vint Cerf is regarded as the father of the Internet but who is the person that actually invented the World Wide Web?
Tim Berners-Lee

Which UCI alumni co-authored the HTTP protocol?
Roy Fielding

Into how many zones are DVD’s divided worldwide?
Eight

What was the first computer to have a GUI and a Mouse?
Apple Lisa

Name the founders of Yahoo
David Filo & Jerry Yang

What prolific entrepreneur founded Silicon Graphics (SGI) and Netscape?
Jim Clark

Who founded the Free Software Foundation?
Richard Stallman

Which company is the largest manufacturer of network equipment?
Cisco

Who is famous for developing the Mosaic web browser at the University of Illinois? Mosaic was later renamed to Netscape Navigator.
Marc Andreessen

What was the first OS for Personal Computers?
CP/M by Gary Kildall

What is CE in Windows CE stand for?
Consumer Electronics

What is BSD in BSD Unix?
Berkley Software Distribution

What is the name of the popular free software license written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project?
GNU Public License (GPL)

What was the first codename for the Intel Core 2 Duo line of processors?
Conroe

Who founded Amazon.com?
Jeff Bezos

What year was Google founded?
1998

Who created PERL in 1986?
Larry Wall

What free loving programmer created the GCC compiler and the original Emacs?
Richard Stallman

Who founded Dell Computer Corporation?
Micheal Dell

To which company acquired the ICQ instant messaging computer program?
AOL

What is Error 403 mean on the Internet?
Site Access Forbidden/Password Protected

What company is the world’s largest maker of computer mice?
Logitech

What was the first full-length computer generated feature film?
Toy Story by Pixar and Disney

What does ZDNet stand for?
Ziff Davis network

Which company invented the floppy disk?
IBM in 1971

What is the name of Linux’s Mascot?
Tux (a penguin)

What South African entrepreneur funded the creation of the Ubuntu Linux distribution?
Mark Shuttleworth

A nibble is how many bits?
4

What Apple portable debuted in a choice of two fruity color schemes, Blueberry or Tangerine?
The iBook.

What game system was the first to offer online gaming?
Dreamcast.

What Apple media file format became the basis for MPEG-4 files?
QuickTime.

What does the computer acronym PnP stand for?
Plug and play

What file-sharing software was named for creator Shawn Fanning’s frizzy hair?
Napster

What company, while still called AuctionWeb, registered its first sale when bidding for a busted laser pointer topped out at $14?
eBay.com

What does the “W” stand for on a WAP phone?
Wireless.

What computer accessory did Apple try splitting in two in 1993, in an attempt to reduce injuries?
The Keyboard

How many zeros are in a Googol?
A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Donald Knuth wrote what, still unfinished, multi volume work on programming algorithms and their analysis?
The Art of Computer Programming

What chess-playing computer developed by IBM that defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997?
Deep Blue

Ted Stevens, Republican Senator from Alaska referred to the Internet as what?
A “series of tubes”"

What was the dominant spreadsheet application before Microsoft Excel and Lotus 1-2-3?
VisiCalc

Amazon has recently released a variety of services for web developers. Some of these services are Elastic Compute Cloud (ECC), Simple Storage Service (S3), SimpleDB, and several others. Collectively these services are known as what?
Amazon Web Services

Up until the 1990s, IBM has a very strict public uniform for IBM employees. Describe the uniform.
A dark (or gray) suit, white shirt, and a “sincere” tie

Who was the creator of Lotus Notes that is now the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft?
Ray Ozzie

What is the name of the Movie that documents the rise of the home computer through the rivalry between Apple Computer and Microsoft. In the movie Anthony Michael Hall plays Bill Gates and Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs.
Pirates of Silicon Valley

What geeky TV Network was acquired by G4 in 2004?
TechTV

Before founding the social bookmarking site Digg.com, Kevin Rose was a co-host of what TV show?
The Screen Savers. (Attack of the Show! is also an acceptable answer)

The slides I used for the presentation are available for download below. The zip contains a pdf of the presentation and the keynote files. The original version of the slides was provided by Ryan Felton. I expanded and modified them for my presentation.