Bryce Boe

So I left work a little early today because they weren’t serving dinner tonight and because I had some stuff to take care of. Most importantly I was contacted by this guy Tom, an EE major at University of Illinois, who would like to donate a server and help improve priceTrackr. So I of course was like hell yes, thus tonight I have been running a few scripts to start collecting some fresh newegg data.

After crawling the user comments pages I have gathered over 35,000 unique newegg product IDs with which we could seed our crawl with, thus essentially eliminating the need for the user submitted add item page. However I don’t think we’ll quite have the resources to update all these items multiple times in a day, but one never knows. Maybe we’ll start small and make a decent amount of ad revenue to warrant switching to a cloud computing server structure. That would be pretty sweet, but of course we must start with baby steps.

Anyway I’ll make updates with priceTrackr’s progress along with everything else. Jeeze 3 posts this week; one might start to think I have nothing better to do

I came across this today and am very curious as to why this is:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107666

If you used Open Firmware Password utility to create a password that contains the capital letter “U”, your password will not be recognized during the startup process (when you try to access Startup Manager, for example).

After reading this I decided I must post this immediately and since it’s Wednesday I’m starting a hopefully new recurring section of my blog called “Wednesday WTF”. So please comment as to why you think this might be. One other thing is the page which describes settings up the Open Firmware protection does not anywhere mention to avoid using an uppercase ‘U’ — WTF?

I’m going to try to give a brief week by week update on my Google adventure so here goes, with a few extras. As I mentioned previously, working at Google is much more amazing than everyone makes it out to be. Yes they do make it out to seem awesome, but imagine awesome-er, and your still short. Okay… maybe I’m elaborating a little bit, but they do an excellent job of ensuring I’m not bored from the times of ~8AM to ~8PM. On a separate note, I don’t have much to leave work for (yet), so chilling at Google a few extra hours is the easy decision, plus I eat breakfast, lunch and dinner there every day.

Anyway during week I watched a few videos, did a few tutorials, and tried to eat at a new cafe for each meal. I also discovered that my building has the following __cool__ things: unicycles, a pool table, a foosball table, a DDR arcade machine, and a few other arcade machines, such as the original Mario, and Pacman. I have yet to play on any of these, but it’s only a matter of time.

Thursday evening I played some volleyball with a handful of other Googlers and made some contacts for more intense playing. I discovered that there is an unwritten rule at Google that one must jump serve on game point. I’m not much of a jump server, nonetheless to the astonishment of everyone playing, including myself, I aced my first jump serve. Someone commented saying that I looked like the person on the ball.

On Friday we had TGIF so there was free beer, and we, the nooglers, got cool hats with little propellers on them. Larry and Sergey lead TGIF, as they always have, in which they basically joke around quite a bit while covering the weekly happenings at Google. It is something I now look forward to in the weeks to come.

That wraps up my first week at Google. Look forward to updates on the following for next week:

• Google lunch with UCSB friends, hopefully complete with a ball-pit picture, yes we have a ball-pit at Google.
• Comments on my hour long massage
• And well I can’t think of anything else currently, however I’m sure there will be more interesting things to mention.

Finally the week wouldn’t be complete without a weekend update. Friday evening, I saw Wanted, complete with a view of Angelina Jolie’s ass with some UCSB friends. It wasn’t the best movie, however I will say there was a lot of entertaining action. Saturday I fixed my bike up, got a helmet, and a camelbak and did a test bike to Google and back; it was quite enjoyable, though my butt is a little tender today. Saturday night I went to a Berkeley bar with some other UCSB friends, followed by a breakfast with them in Berkeley this morning. This afternoon I gained an interest in hobby RC cars after driving (and slightly damaging — sorry Victor) one in San Mateo. And this evening, I will finally get to check out a Palo Alto (Stanford area) bar. It was a good week.

Let me first start out by saying Google is AWESOME! I’ve always thought working for Google would be pretty sweet, but let me just say, that all the positive things people say about working for Google do not do it justice.

Anyway at Google they call their employees googlers and new googlers are called nooglers, so thus I am a noogler. For the intern nooglers their day starts at 10AM in which they setup their computer account, get their badge picture and then receive a brief tour of the campus’s main buildings. Following the tour we did the standard intern orientation, which included filling out necessary paper work, a fun exercise, and lunch.

Breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, coffee, naked juices, and almost anything imaginable are all available free to googlers as well as their guests. There is no badge swiping process so people are free to eat all day long, should they choose. This allows for what is known as the Google 15, which is similar to college’s freshmen 15; I better start making use of their exercise facilities. By the way, their cafes can be thought of as gourmet college dining commons.

Following orientation the engineers broke off from the business interns and were given a presentation on being an engineer at Google. It was really quite amazing though I can’t go into details. It’s quite surprising how open and trusting Google is with it’s nooglers. Another cool thing was one of the places near this lecture room was called the Hub which served free Starbucks style coffee, complete with baristas.

At the end of the lecture we were able to pick three free computer programing books, and then were directed to our working areas by our mentor/advisor/boss. I was surprised when I saw a 30 inch monitor sitting at my desk waiting for me along with my 4 core computer named Sybok. To end the day I took a few pictures and grabbed a light dinner; my grocery bill will be pretty cheap this summer

Tomorrow the noogler interns are going to Great America, which I haven’t been to since Space Camp. On Friday there is a TGIF (Thank God its Friday) meeting in which Sergey and Larry (Google’s founders) will speak and the nooglers will have to wear cool Google hats with spinners on top. Oh and there is free wine and beer. I love Google.

A few other things that are awesome. In the middle of the main buildings is the most awesome sand volleyball court I’ve ever seen; the only thing missing is an ocean view. Additionally there are two endless lap swimming pools, complete with a lifeguard. All nooglers receive a coupon for a free one hour massage which I will be scheduling in the near future. Subsequent massages are reasonably priced for the hour. The list of awesome things can go on and on, but perhaps I’ll save some of them for another day. -Noogler out

‘Twas the night before Google, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

Tomorrow’s outfit was picked from the closet with care,
In hopes that the first impressions are fair;

…

It would be interesting to complete “The Night Before Google” however it could take hours and I want to be up around 7:30 so that I am ready for my 10AM start at Google headquarters tomorrow. So to keep this simple I wanted to write about my experience becoming a Google intern.

I applied for Google internships online back in January. It was actually an interesting experience because their jobs site is like a shopping cart. It allowed one to add five jobs to the cart and submit their information along with a resume and cover letter. To maximize my chances I selected five internships which seemed suiting and then quickly wrote a cover letter. My letter was very informal, in fact I mentioned the informality within it, however it apparently was sufficient because a few days later I was contacted to setup two phone interviews with Google’s Platform division.

It’s been quite some time since my interviews however both interviewers asked me general questions about the TCP protocol and networking tools of the trade. The good stuff was the technical questions which I will provide. Feel free to comment with your solutions, however I will omit mine.

1. Given two sorted lists of positive integers and a number N, describe an algorithm which determines if any two numbers in the list sum to N.
2. Describe an algorithm which determines if there is a cycle in a singly linked list.
3. Describe character for character the C code to reverse a 32 bit integer. If the following string represents a 5 bit integer “10011” the reverse would be “11001”.

A few comments and hints for those having some difficulty. The first can be done with constant memory and O(n). The second can be done in O(n) but not constant memory, or an alternate solution can be done with constant memory but not O(n) running time. The third is quite trivial, however try programming via voice over the phone; it’s not the simplest task.

Well that’s all for this one. I should have a post about my first experience at Google soon.

My undergraduate education at UCSB can simply be described as AMAZING. Achieving my Bachelors of Science in Computer Science over the past four years was the best time of my life. My memories of the time will last on forever and with social networking sites it will hopefully be much easier to remain in contact with all the wonderful friends I made over the years.

For future nostalgic purposes I will list some of the most memorable events in the past four years:

Freshmen Year:

• Moving into FT and visiting UCSB for the first time
• Meeting Adam and Scott at our first class
• Thursday night Sushi at Somethings Fishy with my FT floor mates
• Drinking for the first time with Buz in Flagstaff
• Finding a place to live for the following three years (6660 Trigo A!)
• Showing up half an hour late to my one hour CS30 midterm yet still receiving 100%
• Learning to skimboard
• Starting to work for WorldViz
• Taking first place in the UCSB Programming Battle
• Creating gauchoShare with Adam for CS50
• Goleta Beach BBQ with Anacapa friends
• The dining commons – late night at DLG, tuna melts at FT, pizza at Carillo, shake night at Ortega, tots, and so much more
• Learning to program Java

Sophomore Year:

• My first summer in Isla Vista with A.J. and Johnny
• My first regional programming competition with Adam
• Discovering that food was offered at company informational sessions
• Discovering Natty Lite
• Eating way too much Domino’s Pizza
• Sharing wonderful times with my then girlfriend Monica
• Late night hangout sessions with friends from freshmen year in Scott’s room
• Learning python and c/c++
• Switching to Linux

Junior Year:

• Taking Soc 152B
• Developing priceTrackr while procrastinating writing a Soc 152B paper
• Snakes on a Plane!
• Jon Stewart at UCSB
• Taking 5th place in a Southern California regional programming competition with Adam and Scott
• UCSB Soccer National Champions
• Early mornings in the digilab for ECE152A
• Discovering better beer than Natty Lite – Mmm Blue Moon
• Taking Compilers with Tim
• Taking the GRE three days after I discovered I needed to take it
• Spring Break at Avila Beach with A.J. Mike and Johnny
• Being accepted into the 5 year BS/MS program
• Taking Operating Systems with Ben
• Having ridiculously long hair and keeping it out of my face with a beanie
• Growing my first real beard

Senior Year

• Watching my little brother ride his bike for the first time
• Power Hours and 40 Hands over the summer
• SIGGRAPH 2007 with WorldViz
• Drinking with Professors at the CS BBQ and discovering they call us the Three Musketeers
• Starting networking research in the current lab
• OTT Wednesdays
• Downtown Thursdays
• CS176A – Networking
• The return of American Gladiators
• Super Mario Galaxy
• Getting our home IP banned from UCSB’s network during CS176B
• Hacking for CS177
• Super Smash Brothers Brawl
• Developing an awesome web scraping toolkit
• Being partially responsible for getting lab computers blocked by overstock.com
• Being accepted in the the UCSB CS PhD program
• Interviewing and accepting my summer internship offer with Google
• Working on my first research papers and having one accepted
• Late nights in CSIL for CS176C
• 50 Club at Study Hall IV and the following open bar 50 Club party
• The IV Loop
• Mimosas and Graduation
• Sharing the last moments with many friends

I’ve probably missed a few things, but this is a solid start. Lastly I just want to thank all of my college friends for all the memories, which I will cherish for ever. I sincerely hope that we all stay in good contact with one another. Best of luck to all of you on your future endeavors.

Winter quarter is to the school year as Wednesday is to the week; it is right in the middle. Fall quarter has the excitement of the new school year, which is unlike Mondays, and Spring quarter means it is almost summer time, which is exactly like Fridays, or Thursday’s if you are in college. There just isn’t any natural excitement about Winter quarter. In Santa Barbara Winter quarter is when it occasionally rains, and for the most part sandals and shorts aren’t worn, at least by me. Nonetheless I had an excellent Winter quarter.

I was enrolled in three courses last quarter: a networking course taught by my advisor Ben Zhao, a computer security course taught by another awesome Computer Science Professor Giovanni Vigna, and an ethics class required for all engineering students at UCSB. The ethics class increased my awareness to issues in our country however other than that I don’t feel I gained much else as it was mostly common sense, although perhaps I was just raised well (thanks parents). The other two courses were quite excellent, although they heavily overlapped because many computer security problems occur on the internet, hence crossing over into networking.

In networking we had two fairly good sized projects. The first was a swarming ftp client in which the client would download chunks of the file from multiple ftp servers with the goal being to decrease the time to download the complete file. The second project was an anonymous routing service based on onion routing. In this project we had to implement the router application which relays the messages to the next hop and the client application which constructs the hop sequence and the proper encrypted message to send along.

The security course was particularly excellent. We learned about vulnerabilities in programs, and thus what to do to avoid writing programs with vulnerabilities. Additionally we learned about web site vulnerabilities, the current low hanging fruit in security. Giovanni tested our raw hacking abilities by providing us access to vulnerable servers, and applications with vulnerabilities. The goal of these challenges was essentially to gain access to protected information. Because of our success in the class, both Adam and I were invited to be part of the UCSB hacking team. This might mean possibly participating in a future defcon competition, but for now we will attend hacking sessions once a week.

Other than courses this quarter, I started a biweekly event for our UCSB Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) club which I call Interactive Informational Sessions (IIS). The goal of the event is to teach students tools that aren’t typically taught in classes which are of a great benefit. The two sessions I held last quarter were an introduction to the python programming language, and an introduction to Linux. I will be continuing these sessions in the Spring and there is a possibility that they might even turn into a seminar.

On the research front our group conducted a social networking study on Facebook. This is what the majority of my time during winter quarter was spent on. As our paper is awaiting a potential acceptance I will not go into detail, however the research was very exciting and kept me quite busy. Should the paper be published it will be my first published paper. Additionally I was the first author on the paper, so if one is to cite us in another paper the citation might read “Boe et al.” which the thought of is very exciting.

Finally this quarter I secured my summer internship with Google, yes Google! I applied for five intern positions in January and within a week was contacted to interview with Google’s platform team. After filling out some papers I was scheduled for two phone interviews in February. I felt the interviews went quite well, which they must have also because a few weeks later I was called to have a chat with a project leader. A few days following the chat I received my offer letter, which I of course accepted. Thus I’ll be up in the bay area for the summer.

Well I think that about sums up last quarter. I can only hope spring quarter is as excellent, which based on past experience, it will be. Spring quarter at UCSB means the girls start wearing skirts again, and being back on day light savings time means long afternoons. Weekends will entail drinking on the beach and enjoying the sun. I love Santa Barbara.

Okay, so I will probably never hear that line in a serious situation. Nonetheless I’m excited because this morning I received a letter which starts:

Dear Mr. Boe,

We are pleased to inform you that you have been admitted to the Ph.D. program in Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) — with five years of full financial support. We reserve this prestigious offer for our top candidates only. We are very impressed with your qualifications and are confident that you will do very well in our program. Furthermore, we believe that our faculty’s research interests are a perfect match with your own. We hope that you will find our program exciting and your study at UCSB intellectually rewarding. Congratulations on this accomplishment; consider it the next step in a lifetime of achievements!

Oh, I’m glad I love Santa Barbara because I’m going to be here five more years.

Another quarter has passed at UCSB as I just finished my last final about two hours ago. Overall this was quite an interesting quarter in which I started off taking three classes: Intro to Networking, Computer Graphics and a special class to prepare for the ACM Programming Competition. In addition to this classes I signed up for Master’s research under Ben Zhao, a fantastic professor, and a few weeks into the quarter I added a graduate class on writing and presentations. The writing and presentation class was one of the most amazing nontechnical courses I’ve taken at UCSB. I gained experience presenting as well as some tips to improve my presentation. While I continue to feel I struggle with writing, I’ve discovered my main problem is not wanting to put the effort into it, and when I put in the effort it shows.

To prepare for my networking research I was given a networking book which I read a large portion of prior to the start of the quarter. As it turned out, this was the same book used in the intro to networking class and thus I was two months ahead of the class. Despite the repeat in material it was an amazing class with an awesome Professor; I can only hope the other networking classes I take will be as exciting. With my reading and through the course I can confidently say that I know nearly 100% of all actions that occur between two communicating nodes on the internet. Of course we didn’t cover every internet protocol, but nonetheless I’m a networking baller.

Since I work for a Computer Graphics Comanpy, WorldViz, I signed up for the computer graphics class. I wanted to get a better idea of how OpenGL and scene graphs work as they, along with our program (Vizard), make everything so simple. Unfortunately the class was taught by a Professor which I seemingly cannot learn from, and given my chats with other students, I’m not the only one. Thus, I was forced to learn everything on my own. My primary problem with the Professor is his lecture style in which a single lecture may cover up to 80 slides of which he jumps back and forth between making it very difficult to follow. I’m not an expert on teaching, however I know he is doing something wrong as in a class of about twenty students only five would attend the lectures. In a CS class one should expect just over half the class to attend, but not a quarter. My gripes aside, with the studying I did for the final, I finally learned some of the concepts I wish to leave the quarter with which were matrix transformations and projections. I just wish I didn’t have to learn it on my own.

The ACM preparation course was awesome as there were only six of us in the class with one of the coolest Professors on campus, along with the other two previously mentioned. We covered some advanced algorithms needed for solving programming competition problems. As I mentioned in a previous post, Adam, Scott and myself placed 5th last year at the competition without any formal preparation, thus we were expecting to be much more prepared this year. Unfortunately despite all the preparation, luck is also a factor in the competition, and unfortunately I think luck was why we did so well the year before. This year we placed 12th only managing to solve three problems. In comparison last year we manged to solve five problems. My explanation for the decline is in the previous year two of the problems I solved were dynamic programming problems, my forte, of which none of the problems this year were. Nonetheless it was fun and we’ll get to have another go at it next year.

On the research front I’ve been working on vulnerabilities in transport layer protocols. I wont go into detail, however I will say research has been fun, but NS-2, the network simulator tool, is horrible. It interfaces with the TCL scripting language which I think was a terrible choice as TCL has the worst error reporting mechanism I’ve seen. I’ve silently been planning to re-implement NS-2 using python, however it doesn’t seem worth it as I’m hoping to not have to use NS-2 much after this project.

On the project front I had time for one project of my own and completed some pretty cool projects for my classes. My own project I call Simple File Transfer which I designed a protocol similar to TFTP and FTP. Like TFTP there is a very limited number of commands, GET, PUT and QUIT, however unlike TFTP it uses TCP to send data. Finally unlike FTP it sends data in band which means the data and control signals are sent through the same connection in the same way HTTP data is sent in band. For my graphics class we had to program a cube animation sequence which included textures and shadows as well as a separate program on generating Bezier curves. The networking projects were all simpler than my Simple File Transfer and thus deserve no mention except for the extra credit assignment in which we were to code up a proxy server. I chose to do this assignment in python and the resulting code, with some extras, was only 107 lines; Python is awesome as demonstrated by this XKCD comic, though I’ve known it for far longer than the comic author.

Well I think I’ll wrap it up now as this has been a pretty long post. In the words of Ron Burgandy, “You stay classy [the one or two readers I have].” By the way if you do actually read this how about some comments which spark discussion, or just comments? If you want to be anonymous just use a fake name and a fake email address and assuming it’s a non-spam comment I’ll accept it.

I was just checking out my Google Analytics and wanted to share some random statistics.

1. This site is the fourth result for ucsb computer science drop out — When I had previously seen this I was the first result
2. My image is the second result for vista screenshot
3. I still hold the second result for javascript timer class — I intentionally wrote that entry to have a high google result.
4. To my surprise someone found my site by searching for “pantyhose story” which I am the 21st result, and I will probably rank slightly higher in a few weeks because of this.