I’ve completed almost all my degree requirements at SJSU and have started my two semester thesis. I’m still trying to narrow my thesis scope, but early on I picked out a good thesis advisor. This professor is in high demand among the graduate students, and no wonder: He’s extremely bright, an excellent instructor, and a prolific developer himself. He’s also extremely busy, and could take only two more graduate students. Over the Christmas break he held a coding competition with the two top submissions getting the spots.

The challenge was the following: Given a URL, implement (in PHP) a hashing function that produces a fixed length, approximately unique key that can still identify some of the “tokens” that created it.

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If you are regular readers of this site (me, my mom, and my fiancee) then you have noticed that the site has been down for a month! It was caused by what I fear is a rather common occurence: Some WordPress plugin. The delay in repairing it was caused by school!

Now that I’m back on the job hunt, I wanted to get my “web presence” back up so I decided to spend some time fixing the site. This involved tinkering in an ignorant and dangerous way with WordPress and then calling my hosting service where “Justin” (I didn’t quite catch his name) told me that I needed to upgrade my account to be eligible for helpdesk support and then went ahead to find and fix my problem anyhow. So, thanks Justin! And if anyone needs a bangin’ web hosting (and wordpress troubleshooting) service, I am one satisfied Lunarpages customer.