Lets start with the old. I was really excited to have chemsink written up on haverford.edu. For those who don’t know chemsink was my senior thesis project which supplements existing chemical reactions databases in a free/open format.

The new side project is recipe puppy, a ingredient based recipe search engine. This idea has been done before, but I wanted something better so I went out and made it. I got a lot of great feedback on reddit and there is definitely a lot of work left to do. If only I had more free time.

If you find it and return it I will be eternally grateful. Lost during the trip from penn station to the ues.

Update: Laptop has been returned by a very honest cab driver. This post had nothing to do with helping me find it. Faith in humanity +100.

Some of you may know that I have started to work at fandome.com. Since I have been there I have seen a lot of sports videos. Here are my top 10:

#1 Canada vs USSR Hockey Fight - This has set a new bar for hockey fights. Both teams clear the bench and there is an all out brawl. The refs leave the ice, and they turn off the lights because things get so out of control.

#2 Dumbest Sport Ever - I don’t know who thought of this sport or why anyone would want to participate, but the ridiculous intensity of people arm wresting and boxing at the same time is enthralling.

#3 Malcolm Kelly Freestyle - I don’t think it is Malcolm Kelly’s talent that makes me love this video of him freestyling. Its definitely the team support.

#6 Phillies Fan meets a bottle of Grey Goose - Being from Philly I know fans can be obnoxious, but throwing a grey goose bottle at a fellow fan after a world series victory takes the cake. I wonder if this fan is still in the hospital.

#7 Peanut Butter Poopy Time - The peanut butter jelly time dance is good, but what makes this video great is the emergency trip to the bathroom halfway through.

#8 Ref tackles SC Player - Ok ref, I know you take a lot of shit, but there is no reason to go around and start tackling players.

#9 Everyone underestimates the kick to the groin - By the far the best way to learn how to make bar fight sound effects. Stop watching about half way through, it gets a little weird.

#10 WVU Drunk - Last but not least, the drunkest person at the WVU game. I remembers this so send it to your friends until it gets back to him. He needs help.

Today I am beta launching a project I have been working on for just over a year. The site www.chemsink.com is a place for chemists to discuss chemical reactions, while slowly building a verified free open chemical reactions database. I am launching the site with 1,200,000 compounds(a small racemic organic subset of pubChem) which are connected by 2,500,000 reactions.

I still have a whole list of things to work on, but I want to get people using the site and giving feedback.

To navigate on ChemSink, just search for the reactant or product you are interested in. If there associated reactions, they will appear on the page. To see an example compound that has reactions where it is a product and reactions where it is a reactant, go here. Please send me feedback!

So today Michelle Obama came to visit Haverford, and I went to see her speak. After she recapped the course of the campaign she gave a nice speech where she addressed things like supposed elitism.

According to an email from the college no one was allowed to bring any signs, but they did hand out some signs that looked like they were brought from home. Mine said UNITY. I tried to make a makeshift sign from the heart with the ballpoint pen I had in my pocket, but to no avail. I would be interested in knowing the reasoning for not allowing people from bringing their own signs. It seems a little silly.

Netflix now has unlimited online viewing with one catch: you must use Internet Explorer. This leaves the mac and linux users searching for virtualization software. I am an Ubuntu user, and I already had vmware server installed with both a windows xp and vista. Both of these options ‘worked’, but the playback was so choppy the movies were unwatchable. Fortunately I found some other virtualization software and Virtualbox(the first one that I tried), worked smoothly. It also provided better windowed integration into Ubuntu as well a full screen mode that worked better on my dual monitor set up. This should hold me over until there is some proper linux support.

I frequently visit reddit.com and am a big fan of the site. While you can append .rss to nearly any page on reddit and get an rss feed, many of the feeds have the same order of the page itself and are not ordered by date. They do offer this feed which shows some of the top links ordered by date, but the feed does not get a large number of stories posted to it. So I put together a simple script that loads reddit every few minutes and if certain requirements are met, it adds it to the feed.

Check out these two feeds:
Reddit stories organized the by date and time they reach 500 points(not including any stories about reddit.com)
Reddit stories organized by the time they reach 100 points

I just got a extra screen that makes my desktop this size, and there are not very many backgrounds available. Here are a few I created using the Hugin panorama generator and photos I took in australia. I would have a lot more high quality panoramas if I read this.

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Here are some large panoramas as well.

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So every once in awhile I have a pang to write a simple flash game. I ended up starting to build the exact same game I made back when Macromedia was its own company. That game was riddled with bugs and I wanted to make something stable. I assumed this would involve loading up vmware and installing the latest version of flash that my school provides, but this time I learned that there was a free alpha linux version of the adobe flex builder! These instructions worked well for installing the flex builder(you need eclipse 3.3).

Once I got everything installed I got to dig into some actionscript 3.0. What an improvement over the previous version of actionscript I used! Everything is object oriented and flex builder allows easy for all of the objects that you might want to use. Type checking is there if you choose to assign types to your variables. Some of the cooler things that I came across were the iterators and the event handling. The only hiccup was trying to import Kongregate’s library(Kongregate is a great way to get feedback and to implement High Scores easily). I had to add this to the “additional compiler arguments” under in the project properties:

-include-libraries “/path/to/KongregateAPI.swc”

Anyway check out the magnetized avoider game I made.

Some things that were helpful in making this really simple game were the moving circle AS3 class, obfuscating high scores to prevent cheaters, and realizing that Event.MOUSE_LEAVE is not infallible and you should check the x and y coordinates of the mouse.

So you’ve lost your cell phone again, and you didn’t have the foresight to back up all of your phone numbers. What do you do? Well if you are on facebook you may know that people have created thousands of groups requesting numbers after such an event. Now there is an application to end the nonsense. Need numbers allows you to recover your numbers more easily, by allowing you to download your friends numbers in a phone importable CSV. I just finished up the privacy settings today, so your facebook friends that are not really your friends can’t get your number.

Check it out