Syncing Picasa

Anyone here have a Google Picasa account? How about 2? (I'm thinking families here) More?

Sure someone can share an album with you, but if you want to view it, you have to find the link, until google allows shared albums to be visible in your account (and indirectly visible via your Android phone). You'll have to just deal with it.

I got tired of dealing with it, I started working on a project, right now it does a one way "copy" from one account to another, I have plans to finalize the checks that compare the folders (albums) and determine what differences exist, and move photos back and forth to sync them.

My current implementation runs from a python script, and you have to have the Google API's loaded. This is great for those cases where you only need to sync once. However I want to sync say, once a day. Using this locally would require my computer to be running, what if my other family members wanted to sync albums with eachother? Now we have multiple instances.

Eventually I would like to set this up to run on Google's App Engine on a daily or more frequent rate, however oddly enough, their API's are not as clearly available via App engine.

On a positive note, I hadn't really done much programming in Python prior to this project, now I've begun, I don't mind it as bad as I originally had (don't get me started on the whole whitespace thing).

If you're interested in what I'm working on and would like to poke around, follow along, (or maybe help) you're welcome to check out the repository located on GitHub.

I'll keep you updated as I move along with this project.

https://github.com/onaclov2000/PicasaSync

Job At Google

Well I finally did it, I applied at Google, I don't know if I'll ever feel ready with the epicness this company has brought to every household. If not, I won't discourage, I'll keep working, if anything I'll create a business that Google will want to buy, so I'm not too worried, if it doesn't happen now, it will someday, but then again someday I might be ready for my own business and will be able to R & D on my own merits.

Here is my submission window, I was kinda excited:

Google Contacts

How can google make their contact manager more useful for their users (especially Google Voice users)? I have some ideas. Here they go:

1. Shareable groups (I.E. business and spam numbers for example)
2. Lookup of your number to see who has your number in their contact list.
3. Blockability of your number from any and all contacts in Google.
4. For Phone Type it should be labeled Landline and Mobile.
5. If you want to list the Attributes/keywords of a number allow that, (kinda already the "groups thing"
6. Reverse Phone number lookup across the board, you know google has all that data (most likely) already, why not make it easier. I don't mind a couple ads while I'm trying to find out who just called me.
   

Let me know what you think. Do you have any better ideas for Google to use for their contacts manager?

Alien Language

Alien Language Problem from CodeJam 2009, I solved this one pretty quickly but ran out of time on the other two (time meaning, I wanted to sleep since I work 36ish hours a week and go to school 11 credits)

If you don't want to see the solution (in perl) don't look at my code, but here it is I'll explain it below.

Quick overview of the problem:

The first line of input contains 3 integers, L, D and N separated by a space. D lines follow, each containing one word of length L. These are the words that are known to exist in the alien language. N test cases then follow, each on its own line and each consisting of a pattern as described above. You may assume that all known words provided are unique.

My solution:

while (chomp($read_line = <>))
{
@settings = split(/\s/, $read_line);
for ($i = 0; $i < $settings[1]; $i++)
{
chomp($item = <>);
push(@items, $item);
}
for ($i = 0; $i < $settings[2]; $i++)
{
chomp($testCase = <>);
$counter = 0;
foreach $word (@items)
{
$testCase =~ s/\(/\[/g;
$testCase =~ s/\)/\]/g;
if ($word =~ m/$testCase/i)
{
$counter++;
}
}
$caseNumber = $i + 1;
print "Case #$caseNumber: $counter\n";
}
}

Basically we grab the first line, and look for the 3 numbers, grab the second one to determine the number of lines we drop down for our test cases, then the 3rd number to grab the actual tests, then we just make it a regular expression, worked pretty quick, I know at least on the large dataset I had over 3:41 remaining, (maybe more) from when I downloaded it, to when I completed the upload. Worked pretty quick

Google Books

So I was attempting to find alternate resources rather then spend $170 on a book this semester I tried using the internet. After doing a little searching I found this book:
Which led me to finding a particular example of a site using javascript to generate a little table of books, after looking at it, I can simply use that java scripting to generate the link to books, I decided to try the book we're using in class and what do you know, there is a limited preview here:
That's kinda neat, so basically a guy could write a script that grabs all the isbns from a particular csv file and format a page that looks something like this.
Test Page

Take a look at the source and see what you can do with it.

Source Pulled from this site: Google Example Dynamic Links

Live Android CD

I'm working on learning the java language so I can develop apps for the G1, so far I have only managed to run the hello world, from a tutorial (not much time for learning the java language yet), so far its an interesting project. I hope to build some posts around what I learn.

I came across the below link talking about some users of the Google Code Community porting a version of the Android OS to a Live CD that you can run to on your desktop.

It looks quite interesting and I'm going to give it a try, now it looks like there are 3 options for downloading,
1. Torrent
2. 2 Part ISO (Not sure how that works)
3. 3 Part Rar file.

(download page link: download)

I'm probably going to give the torrent one a whirl and I'll give it a review in the near future.

Check out the main site link here:
Live Android