I was asked to write a hangman AI as a challenge last week. I was asked not to leak the detail, so I will not post my solution here. However, the hangman problem itself is a well-known problem, I would like to share some thoughts that I used to build my hangman solver.

Applying for a PhD degree can be troublesome. There are agencies out there helping people deal with the process. Is it really necessary to pay lots of money for it? My answer is simply negative. All you need is a right set of tool to track the progress. I will share my experience of applying both the PhD and F-1 VISA (this part only applies to students in Taiwan, as your experience may vary). I started working on my application very late and it resulted in a rush application process. Hope by sharing my experience, you can apply for PhD programs more easily. :)

Today, I spent a whole day on reconfigure my Vim. Vim is a powerful monster that needs care. Once you feed it with (your precious) time, Vim will pay you back with a nice and pretty editing experience.

It is very convenient to build a static website using middleman along with some tools like compass, twitter’s bootstrap framework. You can easily build a professional looking website while maintaining high code readability and maintainability.

When you’re designing a website for a conference or event, one thing that you might want to put in the footer is the “last modified date”. The first way come in to my mind to do this is very simple. Just put a line to output current date in ruby code.

There is a interesting javacsript library being released on the github these days, the impress.js. Impress.js is a framework for making presentations on a open canvas, or so called the Prezi-style. I tried out the Prezi few years ago. It’s cool, but as the README from the impress.js said: ``impress.js may not help you if you have nothing interesting to say ;)’’. I don’t really have a chance to make a will-use-on-the-stage presentation on a Prezi.

This dashboard is made for collaboration with teams. I was a hackthon-ing with bizkit and ftt. We set up the dashboard to pulls new data from the repository automatically and display in this pretty format. It was only intended for fun but it turns out very useful when merging works from everyone. The tool we used to make it display on the desktop is called NerdTool.

MetaWatch just shipped out few days ago. Once I got the watch, I starts to play with it, and to see what it is capable to do.