Hung Truong: The Blog!

Google’s 10^100 “Contest”

Google’s 10^100 “contest” sounds like a pretty cool concept. Basically it’s crowdsourcing ideas for the best ways to help the most people, then $10 million dollars from Google goes to fulfilling those ideas.

I put “contest” in quotation marks because the media seems to be portraying the thing as “submit a great idea and win $10 million!” But that’s not really the case at all. The “winners” of the process will win nothing (except “good karma” as Google explains) and the job of making the ideas into reality will go to some organization chosen through an RFP process. So really, the people who will benefit from the ideas (and whichever organizations get the $$$) are the real “winners.”

I guess this process makes the most sense, but I have questions about how an organization would be chosen (it’d need to be done very fairly, non-biased to US-centric ideas, non-imperialistic in origin or intent). Also, where is the incentive, besides karma, for people to submit ideas? There’s something to be said about social entrepreneurism. If it’s really a great idea, others should be able to take that and do something really positive while also making money. If that’s the case, maybe Google can choose to fund startup companies that can execute the idea. I think that’d be a really cool angle to hold an actual “contest” of sorts.

I’ve been thinking about what kind of submission I would send to Google. I think it’d be for:

A non-evil search engine whose mission would be to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. One that doesn’t censor any of its results and doesn’t do business with governments that engage in censorship.

University of Michigan Job Fair ’08 + Facebook!

Today and Yesterday were fun days since the engineering career fair was going on at north campus. Having started my own company (I’m the President!), I might not need to be looking at jobs this very moment. But I’m also looking at PhD programs and other stuff to do after I graduate, so I figured I should scope out the job scene as well.

You’re already familiar with my past job hunting experiences, I wager. Or if you aren’t check out some posts here in the archives. I stuck to the engineering fair this time (there’s also a normal career fair going on at central campus). The experience seems to be more of the same for me this year.

Spore Score Pwned By Amazon.com Users

I really love how users on Amazon have rebelled and made the average score of Spore = 1. I’m not sure if the game is really that bad or not, but it seems the big beef so far is with the DRM scheme. If that’s so, I kind of feel bad for the developers. They probably have no say in whether or not their game gets DRM slapped on it, so it’s punishing them for something out of their control.

DRM sucks, but I dunno if it’s “okay” to act like a baby and give the game 1 star if it’s really better than that. But hey, I haven’t played it so maybe it really sucks. Probably has to do with the years(!) of hype the game got that couldn’t possibly be followed through in the end.

In other video game news, I got Disgaea 3 and have been playing that for a bit. It’s pretty much the same as Disgaea 1-2 but it’s still fun. I’m a bit dissapointed that the vector graphics are still pretty low res. If it’s the PS3 I’d like to see at least a few more pixels on those characters. 3D would probably ruin the game, but higher res would be very much appreciated.

I also got Resident Evil 4 for the Wii but haven’t played it yet. Too scared of dogs jumping through the window like in the first one… Fuck that was scary!

Sweetcron: Roll Your Own Feed

I just found out that the roll your own feed thing called “Sweetcron” has been released. Basically, you install it on your server and it aggregates your activity onto one page. I installed it and stuck my blog, twitter and delicious accounts into it. Oh, and Digg too, I think, but I don’t really Digg stuff much anymore. You can see it here (it should have this post on it by the time you can read this, too).

The initial release is really barebones and somewhat crappy. There’s no commenting system (it just tells you to add one). I like the way that the system formats images within imported blog posts, but everything else seems like an afterthought. The Twitter imports had a picture of some random Asian dude before I changed it to my own picture. Why not use the Twitter user image? Also, when you click through to a blog post, all of the text just pops out, unformatted. It turns everything into one long paragraph.

I’m all about paragraph breaks.

Besides a few supported feeds, Sweetcron kinda just imports RSS generically. Like my delicious bookmarks don’t have anything special. Just the text and a link to the bookmark. At the very least, Sweetcron should have support for all of the things that FriendFeed does. And by support, I mean it should intelligently handle any categorization and formatting of the content.

I guess Sweetcron is strictly for the hardcore such as myself, but I was hoping it’d have a little more going for it upon its first release.

Vote for SXSW Panels By Friday, August 29th!

This Friday is the last day to vote for SXSW panels, so if you haven’t yet, go check out the panel picker (and check out my presentation submission, too)! SXSW provided people with badges, so I figured I’d use one (see above). Yep, I think that’s about it.