Website Update Log
Version 8.0 (7-4-2002 to present)
7/8/08 - added two new photo galleries for the first time in years! I hope you all enjoy Summer 2007 Cows in CA and Summer 2008 Animals in San Diego.
6/22/08 - added a (very) short article, How good of friends are you with someone?
6/20/08 - added 3 short articles in outline form because I'm experimenting with a new outline format (since I figured that most people browsing the web have short attention spans): Hobby projects, Programming with assertions, and Programming with class invariants
6/16/08 - refactored the front page to make it more friendly for casual perusal
6/4/08 - Uploaded my first new article in many months: Some Tips for Life
3/28/08 - Uploaded first version of notes I jotted down while learning statistics for my research: Summary of Statistical Tests
1/30/08 - Took down my XML gallery search engine because nobody seems to use it, and it raised some privacy concerns over people's names being transmitted in the clear.
12/20/07 - My first book, On the Move: An Immigrant Child's Global Journey, has just been published.
12/01/07 - After 6 wonderfully happy years hosting my personal website in the web.mit.edu servers, my MIT student account is about to expire. I have moved it over to www.stanford.edu, where it will continue to reside for the remainder of my time at Stanford.
11/25/07 - Added summaries for some of my longer articles and created a new index.html that is hopefully less content-free. My goal is to have people be able to get a general overall impression of my website by reading the contents of the front page.
11/22/07 - Made all the CSS styles consistent across all of my HTML files and updated pgstyle.css to make the textual content of the pages more readable. Hopefully if this was successful, the reader won't consciously notice anything but simply just feel that the pages are slightly easier to read. Also converted all pages to use Markdown so that it's even easier for me to add new content to my website.
10/12/07 - Finally uploaded my friends' gallery for Stanford 1st-Year Ph.D. - Winter and Spring 2007 Quarters after many months of delay.
9/19/07 - Added a compilation of my favorite YouTube videos
9/15/07 - Added new article, Lightweight File Versioning and Synchronization with Git and Unison
9/13/07 - Uploaded two new articles that have been sitting in my queue for several months but I finally just found some time to edit: Types of Friends and Cars and Computers
7/30/07 - Finally got up-to-speed with this Web 2.0 craze and uploaded my video projects to YouTube
6/17/07 - A large batch update to publish several education-related articles that have been in my pipeline for several months now but I just didn't have the chance to edit them until this weekend: The Power of Scripting, Python: A Great Teaching Language, and Introductory Computer Programming Education. Also, updated my Site Map to include the top 10 most recently-written and recently-updated pages.
4/18/07 - Added a new (sort of) article/mini-experiment: Indian Buffet
3/27/07 - Added a new article (really just posting an old email I wrote): Saving for retirement while in graduate school
3/25/07 - Added a new article, Attention: Overbearing Asian Parents
3/22/07 - Added a new page to describe my latest hobby software project, Random Browser
2/4/07 - Added a new page, Site Map
2/3/07 - Added a new page, Emails About My Website
1/28/07 - Added a new article, What's My Favorite Operating System.
1/20/07 - Added some new info and majorly re-organized my Computer Quick Tips page.
1/7/07 - Added a new photo gallery: Stanford 1st-Year Ph.D. - Summer and Fall 2006 and a new small software package, Gallery Lite.
1/5/07 - Happy New Year!!! This year marks the 10th anniversary of my webpage. My inaugural article for the new year is: A Better Hand-Washing Protocol for the Men's Bathroom
12/22/06 - Added a new article, Computer Science in Modern Everyday Life.
12/21/06 - Added a new article, Essential Free and Open-Source Software for Non-Nerds.
12/19/06 - Added a new article, Tips for First-Time Teaching Assistants, and updated my academic home page and some other random stuff a few days earlier.
10/7/06 - I uploaded a new article, Advice for preparing to apply and actually applying to science Ph.D. programs, in time to hopefully help out students who are in the process of applying to grad schools right now.
10/4/06 - In my first update of my Ph.D. student career, I brushed-up and uploaded an article that I wrote during the summer: On Popularity.
9/24/06 - It's the day before I begin my Ph.D. program at Stanford (the last day of the summer), so I wanted to get a bunch of things in order on my website. I removed the About Me page, because it's been subsumed by my Academic home page. I also added a new article, MIT: A Life in Emails, and a new software project related to this article, Email analysis scripts for mbox mailbox files.
9/19/06 - Added a new article, Advice for applying for graduate science fellowships: NSF, NDSEG, Hertz
8/29/06 - Added a new article, Setting up Unison for your mom
8/19/06 - Added a new article, Types of Facebook Photos
8/16/06 - Added a new article, Radness and Lameness
8/9/06 - Added a new article, Programming in a Vacuum
7/31/06 - Woohoo, the end of another summer month! I just added a new Summer 2006: Boston Cow Parade gallery and modified my Boston gallery to only include Boston/Cambridge photos. I also added a new Python script to auto-generate galleries because I didn't quite have all the pre-reqs for my existing BASH script to work on my Mac.
7/1/06 - Halfway through the year! Wow! I just added a new article, pgbovine's slang dictionary.
6/27/06 - After taking a one-year hiatus from working on my XML Photo Gallery Client-Side Search Engine, I finally tried to fix some bugs and overcome obstacles that prevented it from working on Safari and reliably on other browsers. The combination of XMLHttpRequest (of AJAX fame) and disabling of browser caching for loaded XML files worked like a charm! Now it works pretty well on Internet Explorer for Windows, Mozilla-based browsers, and Safari for Mac.
6/26/06 - Added my 10th and final friends photo gallery from my 5 years at MIT: MIT M.Eng. Year - Spring 2006
6/24/06 - Added a new article, Email Writing Tips, updated Recommended Reading, and updated URLs to refer to my alum.mit.edu forwarding address.
6/18/06 - Added a new article, On Grades
6/10/06 - Added a new article, Programming Languages: My (Biased) Two Cents' Worth
6/9/06 - I created a template scripting system to automatically generate navigation sidebars for all of my pages on my website. Hopefully this will improve clarity and usability. My website had gotten large enough so that the one level of navigation provided by the horizontal menubar wasn't sufficient anymore.
5/31/06 - I just returned home after my 10th and final semester at MIT! I can't believe that I'm finally done!!! Two degrees and plenty of fond memories over the past 5 years, ahhh good times. I've updated my resume and academic home page.
4/17/06 - After hearing back from all graduate schools and fellowships (concluding a process that began in Sept. 2005) and deciding to attend Stanford, I was suddenly inspired to make my first academic home page, which will hopefully grow more substantial with time :)
1/20/06 - I haven't updated my home page title picture for quite a long time (over 3 years), so I suddenly got inspired by the idea of a random photo generator and implemented it on my home page. I wrote a Python script to mine thumbnail data from my various gallery XML files and a simple JavaScript random image selector.
1/12/06 - Added a new advice page: Advice for MIT Undergraduates.
1/10/06 - Added a brand-new software project, CVS Lite, to my website.
1/9/06 - Updated the XML Photo Gallery User Manual to include a new BASH script and the Links page.
1/3/06 - Happy New Year! Added 3 new photo galleries (Boston, Southern California, and San Diego) and removed a few obsolete galleries that are subsumed by those ones (Summer 2002 and MIT Sophomore Year galleries).
12/31/05 - Updated the high school friends after high school graduation gallery with new photos and added a new M.Eng. Summer and Fall 2005 gallery.
11/27/05 - Added a technical article entitled C programming tips.
8/28/05 - Added 2 new software projects to my software page (Image Harvester and Animated GIF Maker), and updated the formatting slightly.
8/26/05 - Added an article, Tips for Casual Digital Photography
8/14/05 - Re-formatted most of the pages on my site to get rid of tables and instead use only CSS components to do my formatting. I am not done with this quite yet, though. Some pages still remain un-transformed.
8/13/05 - Played around with my CSS to get the formatting of articles to look more aesthetically pleasing. I still need to learn to not rely on ghetto HTML tables and move to pure CSS, but I'll save that for another day. Also, I used xsltproc to create hard-coded HTML versions of all of my XML gallery pages in order to lessen the load on the client's browser. Also added three new summer galleries (one for Summer 2004 and two for Summer 2005).
8/6/05 - After spending an entire Saturday dedicated to my website, I have cleaned up a lot of the CSS/HTML code to make the source look a lot neater, ported my XML Photo Gallery to use an XSLT stylesheet instead of flaky JavaScript to load XML files (which is something I've wanted to do for quite a while) so that it now works reliably even on Safari, generated static HTML low-bandwidth versions of all of my galleries, and did lots of general housekeeping on my website.
8/3/05 - After 24 hours of sweat and toil, I have upgraded my old People Photo Gallery project to its new form as the XML Photo Gallery project. The two major enhancements that I made were to convert the gallery from HTML to XHTML (so that I can use it with XSLT and other XML-based tools in the future), and to make fixes so that it finally works on the Safari web browser for Mac OS X, which was no trivial task. I have also converted all of my galleries on this site over from using the People Gallery files to the XML Gallery files. To end-users, that means one thing: Safari compatibility. Now, Mac fanatics who refuse to download any other web browser can finally view my gallery! I have also added an article entitled Unison: Liberation through Data Replication.
6/26/05 - On the plane ride back home from Boston, I decided to improve the user interface of my client-side people photo search engine to provide more precise searches and to issue more meaningful error/informational messages to the user.
6/11/05 - To officially mark the conclusion of my undergraduate career, I have posted up the photo gallery for Senior Year Spring 2005 Semester on my Play page.
5/28/05 - I played around with XSLT and created a stylesheet for my People Photo Gallery files which generates simple low-bandwidth galleries without any JavaScript. Hopefully this will allow more browsers to view my photos.
5/27/05 - I added the Senior Year Fall 2004 Semester photo gallery to my Play page and updated the search engine databases appropriately. Now all I need to do is to find some time to add my Senior Year Spring 2005 Semester photo gallery to my Play page as well.
5/15/05 - Cleaned-up the page which describes my old websites and this page to make it list updates in REVERSE chronological order so that the first entry always reflects the most recent changes. Somebody suggested that this would be better from a user-interface perspective. Also added a "View project summaries" button for my software projects page, which collapses the detailed descriptions inline and allows you to only view the project summaries.
5/10/05 - Added Master of Engineering thesis proposal and a new page which includes various computer quick tips.
5/6/05 - Did lots of grungy housekeeping work and updated the text on various pages to be more up-to-date and consistent.
4/11/05 - Due to the fact that I've received quite a few emails in the past month from people wanting instructions on how to use my People Photo Gallery code, I have created a People Photo Gallery User's Guide in order to prevent myself from repeatedly writing the same email responses.
3/27/05 - Added a client-side search engine for my People Photo Gallery system.
3/21/05 - I have finally converted my MIT junior year photo gallery to the new dynamic People Photo Gallery format. In addition, I have added many more photos from my junior year as well as split up the gallery into two separate ones for the Fall and Spring semesters, respectively. Check them out at my Play page. Also slightly updated my recommended reading page.
3/12/05 - I made some minor updates to my classes taken and recommended reading pages, but most importantly, I added a new Video Projects section which showcases a few of the digital video projects I have created throughout the past few years.
2/10/05 - I ported my two MIT Sophomore Year (Fall 2002 and Spring 2003) photo galleries over from the old static HTML format to the new People Gallery dynamic format here
1/31/05 - I ported several personal photo galleries over from the old static HTML format to the new People Gallery dynamic format.
1/28/05 - I stayed up last night writing a Python script which translated my old photo gallery plaintext data format into my new XML format. I ported most of my old gallery pages over from the old gallery format to the new one.
1/23/05 - Added a new software page and went through each page by hand to clean up the HTML and CSS in order to prepare for a more major structural update which will occur soon (hopefully).
12/17/04 - Made some minor textual updates to my site in order to accurately reflect my current status.
7/11/04 - Added some more friends to my links page and cached local versions of most photo galleries on local Athena space. Now when people request to view photo galleries, the MacGregor server does not have to dynamically-generate the pages using php. It's all saved as individual HTML files.
6/30/04 - Added Seve and Jian-Ming to my links page and made minor modifications to my work page.
5/25/04 - Now that the Spring 2004 semester is finally over (phew!), I had some time to look over my tons of photos from the semester. I updated the MIT Junior Year Photo Gallery with Spring 2004 photos. I also resurrected my old CTY Photo Gallery and my Digital Reality page for old times' sake.
4/28/04 - After borrowing my friend Eddie's webserver to host my photo gallery php scripts for a month or so, I finally moved my scripts back to the new MacGregor House webserver that belongs to my undergraduate dorm. Being the former webmaster does have its perks :) like permission to use some of the server space to run my photo gallery.
4/2/04 - I revamp the My Old Websites page by posting screenshots of my old websites instead of the websites themselves. I did this because Google was finding my old websites and placing links to them in searches instead of pointing to my regular website. That got pretty annoying because I didn't want people getting outdated information about me.
4/1/04 - I moved my dynamic photo gallery PHP scripts over to my friend Eddie Kay's webserver because my dorm's webserver (MacGregor House) crashed. After a few tweaks, everything works pretty well.
1/1/04 - I decided to make drastic updates to my site, including adding sections devoted to my friends, work, and hobbies. I wanted my website to be more than just a showcase of my photographs.
8/5/03 - My new dynamic photo gallery site is ready for its first release!!!
7/31/03 - After a month of hard work (and lots and lots of time spent learning PHP, CSS, and JavaScript), I have finally completed my new dynamic photo gallery. I want to do a major website update every summer, and I am definitely satisfied with this one for summer 2003.
1/13/03 - I've begun my winter 2003 update to my website. More content!!! Lots of new pictures and some more writing. Two new galleries are up: MIT Fall 2002 and China Winter 2002-2003
8/15/02 - I added a new gallery which shows off my Summer 2002 pictures. I took these pictures with my new Canon S30 digital camera (and some with my old Sony DSC-S30). My new digital camera is good enough to replace my SLR's for my amateur level work - and it does video clips too! It's almost time for school to start yet again. Hope this new school year goes well :)
7/7/02 - I had a 5-day long July 4th weekend off from work. I spent a lot of that time redesigning my website to give it a fresher look. After over a week of intense planning and graphics work, I finally finished a new interface for my website. This time around, I lose the cutesy Badtz-Maru icons and the childish colors. I am going for a cleaner, sleeker, more professional look for my site this time around. Hopefully, this layout can remain for a while to come.
Version 7.0 (7-28-2001 to 6-9-2002)
1/16/02 - ANOTHER FACELIFT! I added an additional tab to my layout and slightly modified other graphics, including adding in a side border. I trimmed down some of the excess fat off of the side so that only the meaty content would remain. MOST IMPORTANTLY, though, I POSTED UP NEW PICTURES WHICH WERE SCANNED WITH A CANOSCAN FS2720U FILM SCANNER. THESE PICTURES LOOK SOOOOO MUCH BETTER THAN THE PRINT ONES.
12/26/01 - I've completed and uploaded two new galleries, Fall 2001 MIT Gallery and Thanksgiving 2001 New York City Gallery
12/25/01 - First semester of MIT is finally over! I just got back home Friday and I'm enjoying every minute of my break. I'm currently working on two new galleries for pictures I took during the Fall 2001 term at MIT.
11/12/01 - It's starting to get cold up here in Boston, but the tons of schoolwork is keeping me quite warm. I'm taking lots of black and white photos but I haven't gotten a chance to digitize them yet.
9/23/01 - I survived my first month at MIT! Yeehaw! Well, survived as in physically, but mentally, it's a doozie. Well, it's only the beginning.
7/30/01 - I added the Badtz-Maru tabs and the Pochacco footnote!
7/28/01 - I finished creating the new layout of my entire site. I decided to use tabs for navigation and include some new pictures and quips. I think that the new look is kinda refreshing. It was just time for a change.
7/18/01 - I put up a new gallery on my Digital Reality Gallery, chronicling my second voyage to In & Out. Also, I updated my CTY photo gallery to point to actual pages instead of just jpegs when you click on the thumbnails.
7/11/01 - I'm headed to MIT this fall! Yeehaw! High school is done! Farewell Agoura High! I have just moved my webpage to its new and cozy home at the MIT server. Now I am making preparations to add even more content and tweak the look of the site. Have a happy summer everyone!
Version 6.0 (12-26-1999 to 8-24-2000)
8/19/00 - Summer is almost over!!! Noooooo!!! However, I did add a new gallery of my picture from my summer vacation to China - Summer 2000 Gallery
6/11/00 - Junior year is almost over!!! YES!!! I have finals next week which I'm supposed to be studying for, but instead, I made a new digital camera webpage called DIGITAL REALITY!!! COME CHECK IT OUT!!!
3/11/00 - I spent 3 hours of my Saturday night designing a new title interface picture for this page. I hope you all like it. Man, I should be doing my ISP right now but too bad. Cya later.
12/26/99 - 'Tis the day after Christmas and I haven't updated my webpage in over a year, so what the heck, I'll do it. I added a new gallery, 1999 Summer Vacation Gallery, as well as remodeled and updated my other pages. Enjoy because I don't know when my next update will be. Whoa, I just noticed that it's been exactly 13 months since my last update, Nov. 26, '98 to Dec. 26, '99. Yeah baby.
Version 5.0 (8-30-1998 to 11-26-1998)
Wow, look what I wrote when I first made this page:
Hey, summer's almost over! Nooooooo!!! Once school starts, it's goodbye to free time, photography, and Photoshop, possibly for the whole year. It's been a great three months while it lasted. Well, there will always be next summer. This will probably be my only update for a long while since school starts in three days, AHHHHH! Anyways, enjoy the pictures and summer while it lasts.
Philip Guo (webpage created: 8-30-1998)
11/26/98- I added a new gallery: My Favorite Photographs Gallery and did some extra small stuff.
10/10/98 - I changed the Fall 1998 & Later Gallery to just the 1998 & Later Gallery and added a CRAP-LOAD of pictures!!!
10/9/98 - Phew!!! Finally, a slight break from physiology and other classes. I added a new section to my page dedicated to Canon EOS cameras and lenses.
10/4/98 - I'd like to thank Sharon for sending me some new pictures to post in my CTY photo gallery.
9/29/98 - Physiology is a big pain!!! But I managed to add a new gallery with 2 pics right now that I took over the weekend in Santa Barbara.
9/19/98 - I've completed the CTY Canon Song page and got the pages a little more organized.
9/12/98 - I added a whole new gallery, my 1997/98 B&W Photography Gallery.
9/7/98 - I added a page, Why CTY Rules.
8/31/98 - I wrote the "shout outs" on my webpage and publicized it on the internet.
8/30/98 - After maybe 6 or 7 painstaking hours, I finally completed this webpage and uploaded it.
Version 4.0 (12-13-1997 to 1-21-1998)
(No documented updates)
Version 3.0 (11-9-1997 to 12-13-1997)
(No documented updates)
Version 2.0 (4-13-1997 to 5-4-1997)
5/4/97 - I changed all the HTML files and pictures to lowercase so they would be uniformed since UNIX is case-sensitive.
4/29/97 - I added a web-page for my Quake Clan, the CCC and killed the frames thing since it was getting too annoying.
4/24/97 - I fixed the progress page bug which doubled up the frames. I also added my HTML Writer's Guild membership logo into my page.
4/23/97 - I improved the watermark wallpaper by making it a bit lighter in color so it will be easier to see.
4/21/97 - I made a watermark of my name as my wallpaper (not to be egocentric or anything) and also updated my main menu bar a little. When I have time, the main menu will be converted into an image map that will look like a neon sign.
4/20/97 - I decided to centralize the theme of my page more since it would be impossible to have so much stuff crammed into one page. I also changed the frames format and made a new title graphic. (It took me over an hour with Photoshop so you better like it!) I also changed the graphics to make it work best with 800 X 600 instead of 1024 X 768 since not many people have their monitor set at 1024 X 768. It will still work fine on 1024 X 768, though. Also, back by popular demand, the little waving guy from my old home page!!!
4/13/97 - I started making my frames page and made a few image maps.
Version 1.0 (First created: 3-16-1997)
3/16/97 - First of all, I started working on this page on March 16, 1997. I got my nickname when I played basketball. There was two Philips playing so we had to make up a system to distinguish us. I became Philly G. and the other guy was just Phillip. Later, the Philly part was weighing me down so I decided to dump it and leave myself with G.
