My CS3216 Experience

What have I learnt in this semester..

2010-04-17T01:04:00.001+08:00

What is this semester about? About CS3216? Not really. I think it's more about life. And I think I had a wonderful semester to conclude my years of studying life.

What have I learnt? I actually dislike this kind of topic because I can't seem to be able to pen down what exactly I have learnt because a lot of stuff are intangibles I dunno how to explain them in words. I guess there's still a lot for me to improve.

So looking back at my past 30 blog entries (ya 30.. I didn't realise I wrote so much), I realised that I wasn't really just learning what was actually presented during the lecture. My thinking seemed to have changed, and I'm getting more and more used to writing.

I admit that I used to care a lot about my CAP. But I think I'm not grade-centered. Instead, I'm more result oriented. Who cares about how much effort you put in? In the end only the result matters. I'm also very focused on what I think I should do in order to achieve good results. I prefer things to be well organised so that I can slowly work towards my goal. There is no such thing as instant success, if you want to be successful, you need to work towards your goal.

I thought CS3216 would be the same, the module is divided into different portions with % allocated for each component, you just have to grab as much % as possible in each component, and you will be on track to get an A, but I was wrong. CS3216 is not about teaching you stuff, it's a module for you to learn independently and for you to get a chance to execute something you want. I think CS3216 is sort of like a motivational + entrepreneurship course, although I don't really know if I'm right because I've neither attended a motivational nor an entrepreneurship course before. It's also a jungle survival course, as we are thrown somewhere in the middle of the jungle, and we must learn and adapt in order to survive in this harsh environment. (Actually this mimics life.)

That is why I was very unreceptive of Prof's words that school is unimportant and grades doesn't matter when I first entered this course. Prof mentioned about people who dropped out of school and became successful. That is why grades are unimportant. I didn't really understand why it is so that time. It's totally opposite of my beliefs. My beliefs that grades are important started when I tried to apply for internship back then. I remembered that I was chosen for many of the interviews that I've applied and out of 5, 4 replied me and 2 accepted me. My friends' internship journey weren't that smooth, although they all still secured an internship in the end. That was when I realise that our grades are important, as it helps you get a chance to be interviewed and get recruited. I want to secure more of these chances, that is why I focus so much on my grades from then on. Actually now that I'm graduating, I realised that grades are pretty important to help you get interview chances too.

Then about half a semester later, Prof suddenly had an impromptu session which talked about grades, scholarships and meritocracy, and that's when I realise that his definition of not important is different from my definition of not important. I agreed with him and understand a lot more things. From then on, I think I really 开窍 a lot. Without grades, there are still a lot of different ways to get employed, just that I chose the route that most people choose without questioning why.

Another thing I've learnt is about making choices, and this relates to streaming in the educational system. Prof mentioned that if your child is given a chance to go into 2 different streams, make sure you choose the lower one. It's a lot better to be at the top of the lower stream than to be the worst at the higher stream. Actually I was one of the victims of streaming too. I was in EM1 when I was in primary school and special stream in secondary school. It wasn't that bad in primary school because I wasn't really the worst but in secondary school, I was the rock bottom student in the entire school. My level of confidence really took a great dip. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't improve, so I might as well stay at the bottom. I believe that I'm lousy, and I shouldn't have continued studying since my brain can only accept that much information. In secondary 4, just before the 'O' level examinations, the principal asked us if we want to get retained so that we can study for 1 more year. At that level of standard, we DEFINITELY WOULD NOT BE ABLE to pass my 'O' levels.

I didn't heed that advice in the end and continued with 'O's, and luckily I scraped through. I entered PJC which was a new school then. At that place, at first I was still quite demoralised and unmotivated, until my first common test when I did quite well as compared to the others. FYI, I just managed to pass while most of my friends failed. Thus, it gave me a great boost in my confidence and in my 2nd common test, I did quite well for most of my subjects, except Physics. However, due to my over-confidence and complacency, I didn't do well for my 'A' levels.

So what prof actually say makes sense, to be the top of the lower level is better than the bottom of the top level. However, maybe it isn't that true in the lowest levels because the nurture factor may cause the students to be demoralised too. "Teachers really don't care about lousy students, and despise them too" That's what I heard from my friend in normal tech in my secondary school.

So after saying so much above, what I've actually learnt is to analyse things better from various perspective so that I could make better sense out of things.

I also learnt that life is about choices, so think it through before making decisions, but do not regret after making it but look forward and make the best out of your choice.

Next, I understand that we all can do a lot of things if we dare to try. In the past, I would have jumped into programming straight away as that's my forte and I know I can do well in it. However, I realised that the programming guys here are actually elites and they can do a lot much things in a faster time. So during MisMatch, I took a step back to try and do something that I'm not familiar with, design. Actually the initial designer was Li Yen, but she has and she wants to do the actionscript herself too. Thinking that she has too much work in her hands, I took over the design part partially because my brother is a designer.

The first time I open illustrator was when I felt very lost. I don't understand what each tool does because I've totally not touch it before. I keep bugging my brother until he got frustrated with me and don't want to care about me. So I've no choice but to learn everything online and it was a slow and torturing process. But the results I got was quite satisfactory, at least imo.

In Google Wave project, we wanted to start developing the gadget on flex and I started to read up on them. However, Mr Continent, Angad, hopes that he can solo it himself so I end up creating pictures, writing reports, and developing small functionalities like Wave Embed which Mr Continent do not wish to care about.

For the final project, design sort of became the biggest scope of what I'm doing, although I did more marketing than design imo. I've a lot of marketing ideas in my mind and I listed all of them out for discussion and see which are more feasible than the others. Luckily my team are cooperative people and everybody is encouraged to do things that we think might succeed. Execution was carried out pretty well initally, until we realised that Wai Hong is unable to contribute much because of his very heavy workload. Thus, we improvise and I'm happy that we did quite well, at least for now.

So what have I learnt here, is that we can do a lot of things if we dare to try. But the first step is to step out of your comfort zone and try something different. You will be surprised at your potential, and even if you don't succeed, at least you tried. Of course I learnt design and put my marketing skills to use too haha.

The next one I've learnt is that words seems harsher than they are when it's not said but written out. Actually if you map the face and the comments together, you will realise that it isn't such a big deal, but when you remove the face, it does seems harsh, for you will interpret it in your own tone. That is why sometimes staring incidents evolved into fights. And I will try to avoid that next time.

And well, through these very different project scopes I've done, I've learnt more about team management too. I understand that things should be said out instead of keeping them in our hearts because if you don't say, they won't know. So try and communicate and iron out problems before anything happens. I also learnt more technical skills too. But I guess all these are trivial. The things that are important in CS3216 are the things you can't really learn own your own or you don't seem to be able to grasp it. (to Prof they are common sense, but for us it doesn't seem as common to us, until we actually think it through)

There are definitely more things that I've learnt in this short semester but I guess I shall end it here because it's getting a bit long (and my train of thought broke when my mum ask me to send my grandma back home). I guess this is going to be my last entry here and well, blogging will not end because I've another blog and I would be continuing my blogging over there. Well, I just like to retain memories, that is why The Mood Diary came about? Looking back at the past 10+ blog posts, don't you think that they are memories worth keeping?

Thank you everyone, for making this module possible and the experience would never be the same if it weren't the same guys in this class. Stay happy and stay hungry (for knowledge). :)

Poster Design.

2010-04-14T22:55:00.005+08:00

I never knew I could design, until this semester. Step out of your comfort zone, and try the things that you thought you would never be able to do.

Results are, either you fail gloriously and understand that there are just some things that you are not that good at, but at least you tried. Or you realise that actually some things just ain't as tough as you thought it would be.

Dare to try, only then you will truly learn.

Actually I'm quite happy that I do have some design sense, not just my brother.. :)

Wow wow presentations..

2010-04-07T02:49:00.000+08:00

I'm actually quite surprised that I didn't see Joshua's blog post this week. Although his blog entries were short and just list out the points that were mentioned in the lectures, I find it quite good in trying to recall the actual lecture after some days has passed. Maybe because Prof Ben has declared himself the blog king of this sem already. So no point blogging anymore haha.

So why do I still blog? Hmm, I guess I will just finish what I've started, 做人要有始有终吧.. Blogging seems pretty beneficial to me too, although sometimes it just takes a lot of time because I've to think through what has actually been going on in the lecture and try to make some sense out of it.. So well, let me just continue this for another 2weeks and I'll officially end this blog and continue my blogging + ranting in my personal blog.

So this week's lecture slot was for us to present our progress for our applications. Actually I really feel like presenting for my own application but I knew I wouldn't have time to practice enough for the presentation because I had an interview straight before so I shouldn't take everything into my own hands. Thus, I just done up the slides and wrote in some remarks and points and pass the baton to my team members to present. But hmm, in the end I screwed up the interview anyway, so I guess I should say goodbye to the job that I'm most interested in, unless some miracle happened. I guess I was just too ill-prepared that day because of all the deadlines that were gushing in. Never mind, I'll take that as a lesson learnt. :)

Onto the group presentations, I'm really impressed with some of the ideas and how some of the teams actually executed them. Some people took this opportunity to start their businesses and I think it's really a good start. Some teams were very focused on what they want to achieve and were progressing straight to their goals. Some however, may not execute their applications well enough but you can see the amount of effort they put in into developing it.

We can see that no same teams has the same skill set and every team has different levels of competency. Some teams have tried to acquire new skills to use in the projects, while some engaged the help of external parties, some teams have more manpower while some have less. So by right, we shouldn't compare every team together on the same scale, but I guess in the real world, only the fittest survive. So if you set your mind to it, you will be able to accomplish it.

Some teams' presentation actually caught my attention. Firstly, of course, it's Supremacy, the biggest and most ambitious one. And based on the presentation, they are really doing quite well. I'm amazed at what they could actually do and how many parties they can liaise with in this short amount of time. And to change the very complicated game mechanics into a 'Bang' like game, I think they really have gone through a lot of serious brainstorming process and made a lot of big decisions. I truly respect them.

Secondly, beat roulette. I really think that the idea is interesting and workable. I've never heard of chat roulette or similar things before but this idea is really an ingenious one. I hope that the user base could quickly rise and maybe I'll be one of the users in the near future. :P

Thirdly, Foodwerkz. They actually had an idea that was pretty similar to my initial idea when I went up to pitch during the pitching party. However, I didn't remember them pitching their idea. If not, maybe now the Mood Diary won't exist anymore, but then, I think Mood Diary is a pretty cool idea too, right? haha.

Next, stickywars. 2weeks+ ago, when I tried out their application, I couldn't reach their servers. 1week+ ago, they had some ugly looking pictures when the main content in plain text on white background. And now, the graphics look professional enough and the game seem to be working well. I really admire their effort they put in.

Lastly, PeopleBAWX. Bernard did an awesome presentation initially by telling us what is lacking in the developing countries and what they need people to help them. I was so absorbed by their presentation that I keep trying to think what kind of wonderful program have they done to save the world now. They talked about recording videos on tapes and hard disks and distributing them to the broadcasting stations. It was such a great idea. And then they demo-ed the scheduler program. Hmm, actually I don't quite understand why is this very very important and can save the world. Doesn't the broadcasting stations have their own scheduler, be it on paper or any other mediums? Maybe I didn't understand the situation well enough because it is hard to convey the idea within the short presentation. If PeopleBAWX team do read my blog, and you all have the time, I hope you could explain the idea to me. Thank you. Cos the scheduler feels just like a Google Calendar to me.

Actually all the presentations seem very interesting and everyone seems to be producing a lot of work in such a short time. This is indeed not the average module and people you would see in a normal NUS module. I'm actually very glad that I'm part of it, although I think all my other modules are suffering, and I'm trying to rush out all the projects that are due these weeks. I think everyone else is the same as me ba, gambatte everyone!

Security & Privacy..

2010-03-31T16:00:00.002+08:00

This week's lecture is about security and privacy. Actually I've been writing up for this topic so many times I'm pretty sian about writing it again. I've been writing it for the pre-interview tests I went for, and when I apply for jobs that are security related, I've been mentioning about all these. So I shall try my best to write something out for this particular entry then.

I'm actually very interested in security stuff but I'm one of those that is more interested in seeing how things break instead of seeing how secure they are. I'm not a hacker nor do I harm anyone but I'm played with keyloggers and scripts because I'm interested to see what results would I get. I've also programmed my own bot when I was playing maplestory in mapleglobal (that was like 6+years ago) and well, I try to incorporate different stuff as compared to standard bots so that moderators won't catch me. I've also taken several security related modules and the most interesting one is the most non-technical one, Introduction to Cybercrime. The lecturer is super interesting and he keeps talking about all the different stories he encountered or heard of and he really makes u feel that everything you think is secure now is actually not secure. I was pretty paranoid at that time and I went online to research a lot about encryption technologies and stuff. I also switched my wifi encryption to WPA2 from WEP (because my DS only has WEP support to go online to play games) after hearing about all the scary stuff the lecturer talk about. But knowing about all these are actually quite useful in fact. If you don't know how things actually work, you don't know how to protect it.

Back to the lecture, the speaker talks about how a standard phrase that is well known in the security area. Security is only as strong as its weakest link. This is in fact quite true. And I want to point that to the current NUS password scheme. I understand that NUS is trying to allow people to have strong passwords and cultivate a habit to change their password regularly. However, since a semester ago, they have enforced additional rules to make sure that our password contains alphabets, numbers and symbols, be at least 8 characters long, and older 6 passwords could not be reused. Although this is good, it does make people forget their passwords and in the end, people jot them down, which poses a security risk. In another module, we need to register for an account for the textbook quizzes and their password policy is even more stringent. Password need to be 16 characters long, and cannot repeat any string of characters in the password. So that means a password like "MyCatIsAtHome" cannot be used because 'at' is both repeated in C'at' and 'At'. So in the end, we are really forced to randomly generate a string which we record down in the computer. So it is good to have strong security, but don't make it too strong until it hinders people and force people to create security risks. This is also what the CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability) triangle is about, developing strong security without hindering either parts of the triangle.

The speaker also talks about privacy and how sometimes we should give up privacy for the greater good to enforce security, for example, airport baggage checks. To many of us Singaporeans, we don't really seem to notice how much we reveal our privacy to others, and how much implications it may bring. 2 reasons, 1. Singapore is too safe a country and we don't get spammed by telemarketers (not so much) and we don't have much crimes related to privacy. OR 2. In Singapore, there is no such thing as privacy. There is no protection against privacy and there is no human right to privacy. Work surveillance is allowed. Employee monitoring is allowed. Employers can monitor everybody's emails. The government is allowed to get whatever information that is needed as long as they think it is good for the country. (This is what I learn from CS4259, Legal Aspects of Information Technology, it's an interesting module. I recommend you all to take if you are interested) However, things are starting to change slightly right now as we do see that telephone numbers and IC numbers are not being shown publicly on the media now. Only when we know how much revealing your privacy can hurt or harm us, we will then be aware and take note of how we should protect our privacy.

The speaker also talked about the more technical parts of security and privacy like SQL injections, script kiddies and how Facebook protects its privacy but I still think it's more important to grasp the concept rather than go into technical details that may bore people off if they are not interested. I believe that he is here to create awareness and let us know about the danger that is lurking in the internet world rather than try to make us into security gurus, and well, I'm sure the things he presented are not enough to make you a security guru too. :)

Entrepreneurship..

2010-03-24T16:48:00.000+08:00

What does it take to be an entrepreneur? You need to have an idea, a concept, a plan, money & most importantly the never say die attitude.

Although the entrepreneurs that were presenting on Monday all told us that we shouldn't start our own business, they are just trying to make us think it in another way. Are you prepared for the hardship that will come along if you start your own business? Are you strong enough to hold out and have the never say die attitude? If you just want to try out for fun, I guess you should not even start one.. Cos it's money and time wasted.

However, if you think you got what it takes, there are some pointers which they sort of disclosed when they are trying to 'discourage' us from being entrepreneurs. One of them would be there is no one true path to take when you want to be an entrepreneur. What people can give you is suggestions. But ultimately, the decision lies with you. You can heed or choose not to heed others' advice. But don't be indecisive. A wrong decision is better than no decision. If you are the kind who can't make decisions on your own, this is not for you.

Secondly, is how much you believe in this business. You must have a strong mind. Although family and friends should be supporting you, you will realise that after that time, they will try to discourage you from continuing with the business for your own good. After all, this is not their business and when they see you have a hard time managing the business, they will try to ask you to give up just out of goodwill. And for Chinese, every CNY, you will find those relatives talking about careers, families and more.. Most of the time, you will find their words most discouraging. But if you really believe in what you do, you will have a strong mind, and you must hold on to what you believe. In these circumstances, maybe the believing in the higher powers would be beneficial for you.

Next, monetary issues. Don't just think that you can invest an initial sum of money and let it roll and roll without needing to invest more. You must make sure that you have enough money to support yourself during the 2-3years when you are trying to recoup the initial capital. And depending on the nature of the business, you need to know how much you have initially before starting the business. If you just need a website and a server to do your business, maybe you don't need to have so much money upfront. But if you are dealing with f&b or businesses which requires you to stock inventory before sale, be sure that you have enough money to restock several times. You never know when you might incur a loss or find bad debts. In short, you need to have enough capital flow..

Lastly, hiring generalists. I think it sounds very true. Instead of spending money to hire people who are specialized, we should hire people who can 包到完, the do-it-all kind of people. In the way, money can be spent more efficiently and this allows the employees to enhance their resume more, because they do more things here and we can see significant contributions by them.

Other stuff, Hong An said that whoever want to join hungrygowhere would need to have a pay cut. This will allow him to identify people who truly want to contribute and help grow the company. Interesting idea, but won't it scare away potential employees who are devoted but need the money to survive too? School of thought. Tong Yee is really devoted to helping the society and he is the rare few entrepreneur that started without the aim to make money initially. People like him are a rare breed and I really respect him.

Performance and Optimization. Grades, Scholarship and Meritocracy

2010-03-21T23:56:00.000+08:00

Zit Seng delivered the lecture last week. Actually I don't really know how to start because I can say that although all the terms he mentioned sounds familiar (from CS2106 OS) I do not really have much idea about what he is talking about. But the gist of it is that there are many different aspect that may slow down performance, not just the server itself.. Therefore we must determine the true cause of the problem before pointing our fingers at the server or network itself. More often than not, the bottleneck is not at their side. Somehow I have a feeling that Prof invited Zit Seng not only to talk about performance and optimization, but to let us have an idea of how things work, and let us know that we should not always blame others when something happen. Instead, try to look for the true cause and then solve it. We really shouldn't start finger pointing at people when things goes wrong. Yup..

The 2nd part was a impromptu 1hr lecture by Prof Ben about Grades, Scholarships and Meritocracy. The lecture is really very informative and I've learnt a lot from it. Actually, in many of the CS3216 lecture, I keep feeling that I'm actually not in NUS but in some motivational talks or something as every lecture allows us to reflect a lot about life. As a gamer, I would say that I always feel that going for CS3216 lecture is like going after a super high level creep, and when you defeat it, you gain a lot of things, like experiences and artifacts.

So about grades, it is just a key to opening the door for interviews. I do agree with that and I do emphasize quite a lot on it. Because without connections or relevant experience, what an employer can judge, is your academic performance and the way you portray yourself during the interview. But without the key, you would hardly get a chance to go for interviews. And this is really true because this is what happen when I apply for internships and now jobs. That is why grades are important and I do recognize this fact. And maybe because I've a worker's mind, I do believe that grades are important as I foresee myself working for people at least in the near future.

About scholarships, I really didn't know that the government is so ingenious about the whole plan. Prof says that because people only think for themselves and didn't take a look at the society as a whole. It's pretty true. Well, in the end, you are you and if you are a person who can't survive in this harsh environment, who cares about the society. Only if you have enough for yourself, then you will think about other things. This follows Maslow's hierarchy of needs right? Only if you satisfy basic needs and stuff, then you will go for self actualization and talk about support for the nations and other stuff? But at least now, I know that the government works this way because they should work this way.

About meritocracy, meritocracy is defined as a system in which advancement is based on individual ability or achievement. (Dictionary.com) So it means that if you have the means, you can rise to the top, if you don't, you deserve to stay below. Sounds fair? It is, and it isn't..

Prof Ben stated that meritocracy is about equal access instead of equal outcome. Therefore, although there are less people living in landed properties, they are more of them securing scholarships. True. I always believe that parents who are clever will be more likely to give birth to a child that is more clever than parents who aren't as clever. Of course there will be exceptions, but we cannot deny the genetic factor that builds all of us. Some people just can study, and some people just can't. If you can't study, it doesn't mean you are a goner. You may be good in other stuff. Just that you can't take the route that many of us want to take, the studying route. However, if you just have no ability to excel in anything, you just deserve to be at the bottom, and this is meritocracy, so is it fair?

So, meritocracy tries to be fair to provide equal access to all, so on the big scale of things, it is fair, but as an individual, if you are the bottommost part of the society, with no skills and abilities, you will personally think that it's unfair, since from the start, right when you were born, you are doomed, and you are destined to stay at the bottom.

But it is also this false hope of fairness that motivates the society to move, if everyone is equal with equal outcome, there will not be any progress as people will not be motivated since no matter what they do, everyone will have the same outcome. (Sounds like communism?) Another thing, if you search for meritocracy in wikipedia, they will talk about Singapore. Therefore, maybe we Singaporeans think that meritocracy is good because since young, we have been influenced to think that meritocracy is good?

Blogging helps..

2010-03-14T03:25:00.000+08:00

I've always love to write and blog, that is why I've been keeping a blog since my NS days.. However, in the past when I blogged, I always blog in a 你懂啦，要讲什么就讲咯 eh think what then write what singlish style blog.. But for this CS3216 module, I had to change my blogging style a bit to make it more apt for the viewers. (I didn't change on purpose, but it seems that my friends do say that I blog differently for my CS3216 blog)

Initially, it was quite a chore to blog because I need to spend time to think and review what I've learnt throughout the past week and when things start getting busy, you realise that blogging is of least priority but it's just not my style to give things up completely just because it doesn't appear to be significant in the grand scale of things.. However, this blogging actually paid off in the recent interview I went last friday. Although I didn't do really well in the MCQ sections because the questions are super hard and out of my scope, I do write a lot for the essay. The flow just come naturally and I find myself writing a lot in that short 1hr, when I see people finding difficulty churning out even 1 page of essay. When I entered uni last time, blogging helped me too. During the QET, I found it very easy to write and I managed to complete the whole essay without much difficulty and thank god, I passed it. (My English is always borderline in my earlier school years.)

So I'm glad to say that blogging really helps in coordinating my idea and flow when I write, although I know that my english isn't really that perfect. But I think the idea of language is to enable communication between one another. If you are able to convey your idea across using speech or words, I believe that your language is good enough already. Right?

The Wave-y Experience..

2010-03-11T15:59:00.003+08:00

Had our video conferencing lecture early this week with Pamela Fox, from Google. Initially, when we were told that the lecture was held at the video conferencing room, I thought I would have that interesting and fun experience that I had in a certain module last time. Everyone will have a mic and a button to press. During the video conferencing, if you have any thing you want to ask, you can just press the button, and the camera will be focused on you and you can speak to the person. However, when I entered the room, I realised that it was just skype + remote desktop view. The audio quality was not bad I should say but the lagginess in the visuals sometimes make it hard to understand what she is saying, especially for the new robots api part. Perhaps prezi shouldn't be used, we should stick to the default non-animated kind of slides.. But overall it was a good experience.

The first part of the video conference was about the new robots API. It has quite a lot of new features and the active robot API seems to be a great one. Instead of having to listen to keystrokes or events, now the robot can actively monitor and this increases a lot of potential and functionalities. Proxying-for is also an API that interest me because it makes us feel that it's the real person that is doing the editing instead of the robot doing it. Besides that, she also showed us a lot of gadgets and robots that were done in wave. Actually they all look quite interesting but most of them are just CBU applications which illustrates the functionality of wave. So that developers can understand wave more. However, the exact focus of wave? It's still quite abstract at the moment.

The 2nd part of the video conference is about making a wave-y gadget. Actually, I don't know if anyone has realised, all these are principles that can be found on the website if you go search for it. After I saw the design principles, we do understand that developers tend to think that users will understand the application when they start using it. Apparently it is not so. That is why we need help and instructions for the application, no matter how simple it is. And because wave is a collaborative platform, we must make sure that it will not be confusing to users when they use it, so points like, concurrent editing, viewer specific info, and real time editing concerns have to be taken into consideration when coding a wave-y extension. The final portion of the 2nd part tells us about destructive and non-destructive design. It seems to be a simple concept but we fail to realise it until people tested and feedback on it. And such simple stuff often leads to the downfall of an application.

Being a programmer for so long, I realised that programmers have the tendency to focus too much into a problem and ignore simple problems which often have serious implications to the whole application. For example, Square Enix launched a game last year called Last Remnant on the Xbox 360. Everything is cool about it, the design, the art, the story and the game mechanics. However, they fail to recognize the most fundamental thing, is the 360 able to support the game? No it isn't. So in the end, there were massive lags throughout the game and it demerits the game a lot. This is also what I think Pamela Fox tries to illustrates to us when she's giving this lecture. That is why she's is very focused about the UI. The only visible thing that is communicating with the users.

In the last part, Pamela commented on our applications. Actually we haven had the time to really look through everyone's application, so this is a good chance for us to look at it. Her feedback is really from a user's perspective so it's very useful to us. Since we are often too engrossed with the coding. For Note Sticker, she talked about the use cases scenario, which we didn't really think much about it actually. Our idea was to have a global board for sharing purposes only, but it seems that her idea was quite enlightening too. But I think that she isn't really fond of Note Sticker because she doesn't really use it. Some people, like me, likes post it! so much that I've been using it since it came out in Windows 7. And if you look at mac users, I also see a lot of post its on their desktop too. Thus, I think the appeal of note sticker is not for everyone, it only appeals to users who like post it notes.

Overall, this lecture really make us focus on UI and front end design which a lot of developers usually forget when developing an application, which is quite good.

Links: Google Wave Robots v2 & Making Wave-y Extensions

About Team Dynamics (Part 2)

2010-03-08T13:35:00.002+08:00

Team Dynamics is really a complex thing. After I blogged about team dynamics yesterday, I keep thinking about the past projects I've done and how different project groups react to different people and different approaches..

About team work - Some people seem to think that trying to do more work in a team as compared to the rest is the right way to get recognized when a project is submitted, as they can list down more things in the contribution list and thus prove that he/she is more worthy of the grade or reward, whatever there is. I believe that working in a team is about teamwork. If you try to do a lot more and not let others get a chance to perform, it isn't a good way to get recognized. In fact, I think it doesn't really look good on the team. Furthermore, some people purposely try to shoot each other if the peer review is taken into consideration when grading because they thought they would get better grades than the rest. I believe, team work is the most important factor in a team. We should recognize everyone's strengths and weaknesses and assign appropriate tasks to every individual. When someone makes a fault and get penalised, we shouldn't point fingers at the one doing it. We should analyse what is the problem and learn from the mistake. Doing something like "This is your problem, you should handle it yourself, why should you drag us in?" isn't a very appropriate way to solve things. Firstly, the person being accused is ostracized by the others and this may hurt his/her pride/confidence. Secondly, you don't learn anything from it. So I do believe that teamwork is important. Unless however, 1 guy in your team don't come for all project meetings and in the final week, try to be very proactive and try to tie the loose end, I think those people do not deserve the grade at all.. (I've seen a fair share of these people, that's why I'm a bit scared to form groups with totally new people..)

About contribution - We have to recognise that different people have varying level of skills and we shouldn't demand everyone to work equally for the whole project. However, some of the people knew that they weren't of help so they decided to not care about the module. I've heard of one such case from a friend. A engine student grouped with a group of business students for a business module. During the project allocation phase, the engine student conveniently said that he's not good in writing and thus the business people should do the writing. He will format the report and submit after that. This is a case of unsupportive members. Luckily in CS3216, although different people have different skillset, the people I encounter did not refuse to help because they know they aren't of any help. Actually, meeting together for meetings although they can't give much comments is actually giving the whole team moral support already. Trying to volunteer for stuff they knew how to do increase the pro-activeness.. And even if the member didn't contribute much, we know that he/she tried his or her best already.

Actually I still have some more to write but I've to set off to meet for a project meeting already. And ya, punctuality also affects team dynamics, it indirectly shows how committed the person is towards the project. Being prepared for projects is an important point too, and I'm guilty of not being very prepared for project meetings, but I'm stilling trying to improve on this. At least for the project meeting later, I'm quite prepared for it. Hope it would be a good and efficient one.

Team Dynamics..

2010-03-07T12:33:00.005+08:00

I suppose blogging about this now is most apt because we just got back our peer appraisal and we actually know how we perform and how the team perceives us during the project. Actually I think it is very hard to learn and acquire soft skills, these skills cannot really be taught, and these skills can only be acquired by people who actually listen, understand and practise what they learn. What the class tries to illustrate is a real life example of a project team, which worked and failed, but how much can we absorb and learn from it? It depends on the individual. What the lecture could teach is limited, and I guess trying to let us learn from a real life case study is supposedly one of the better ways already.

Actually my perception of team dynamics seems to be different from what the case study (VC) is showing. What I actually see more of, is a big idea, which fails due to lack of commitment and bad planning. It does show some team management issues, but more was focused on the big idea and how they fail to achieve it because they do not have the ability to complete it. To me, team dynamics are unseen forces that acts in the team and it may result in extra competency or broken communication. These forces must be carefully managed to ensure that maximum competency is achieved. But talk is simple, doing it is hard. Although in the lecture, some of these are mentioned, but the way it is presented seem to make it a "dun make your idea too big" lecture.

So here are some points which I think are important in managing team dynamics.

Personality - It is important to recognise different personalities of the team and use different methods to communicate/work with different group members. We have to recognise that there are leaders and followers, people who are proactive, and people who have to be pushed. If you force your thinking onto them, results might not be in your favour.

Roles - It is important to distinguish roles from the start. This is to avoid conflict of roles (eg. 2 members acting as leaders) which is very important in resolving conflicts. Those who are not assuming that role can still contribute, but should discuss with the person who is assuming that role first before doing anything.

Tools & Capabilities - I think this is also very important in team dynamics. Do not over-agree things that you are not capable of and do not have the tools to do. If you keep failing to do things that you are supposed to do, the other team members may lose trust in you and cause a rift among you and your teammates. Furthermore, not accomplishing tasks that were assigned will slow down the whole group too..

Team Culture - Although a team is a small group of people working together, I believe that setting a culture is also important. In my CS3214 project last time, I tried to create one and ask everyone questions about that they feel they want to do for this project and what they want to achieve in the end.. After understanding everyone's needs and wants, we try to create a working methodology together and follow it through throughout the whole semester. Although there are times when there are minor conflicts in the project team, we managed to pull through and deliver most of the things that we want to deliver. Therefore, I think having a team culture is important.

That said, I'm not an expert in team dynamics nor I'm very good at it, but I'm trying to improve on it. And the peer appraisal seems to be a good way to let us reflect on it.

The good points allows us to be certain of what we are doing, and I can see that most people do see what I'm good at. The bad points let us reflect on what we did wrong, or what people misinterpret of you. Although it is not soothing to the ears/eyes, it is even better, because now I understand why do we have to write bad points for the peer appraisal liao.. The suggested improvements tries to lead us to a way to improve our bad points.

From the appraisal, you also can see that misunderstandings might appear if you don't communicate the idea to the whole group. For example, a person might think that you should be coding since you are a computing student. But in actual fact, I gave the coding chance away when some other team mate requested to do it and did the part where no one likes, writing.

It also seem that project management is seriously underrated in project groups. People don't see the value in it when things go well, they will only realise it when things went wrong. Setting the path onto the right direction is pretty important because we should focus on what we should do and not only focus on doing what we like to do. This is an important concept which a lot of people, including me, tend to forget sometimes.. Of cos, only doing project management work in school for such small projects is considered slack too. Cos there isn't much manpower and time for a person to just manage the team and not do anything else. So in addition to project management, the person should still do more, perhaps some coding or some writing.

About writing, I've seen a lot of people think that writers in a programming project seem to be the most useless role to do and do not want to do it. However, in both of my projects this time, even the final project proposal, I am the one doing documentation. Actually it is not an easy job to write the things needed. First, we must know what is our group doing and what have we done. We must understand the overall codes and features (although we can ask) so that we know what to write. We must also communicate with all the team members to understand if each feature is feasible or within their means or not. In the end, when everyone's job is done, the documenter still needs to wrap up the whole thing and ensure that all the features and functionality done are properly and correctly documented. In this module, I took a step back to do the things people don't want to do because I tried to do different things and understand things from a different perspective. I used to rush too quickly into programming and it seems that I've lost a lot of group time. It's always my time my function and interaction is minimal. So I think that it is important to credit the documenter too, don't label him as slack or useless? He is doing the dirty work which not many people likes to do..

From the peer appraisal, it also seem that different people may have vastly different opinions of you even though they may be even in the same team. That is why personality is a very important factor in team dynamics. What you do may have different effects on different people. I still have lots to learn from this.

About setting priorities. I guess it's really important to set priorities so that you don't end up making a group feel that they are less important. I think I did that unknowingly sometimes and I am trying my best to change for the better. However, sometimes I find it hard to meet for impromptu meetings because I live very far from school and have commitments for other projects too. I guess I should plan my schedule better or arrange meetings earlier so that these things will not happen that often.

There are still other points, but I think it is better left for me myself to digest and improve on them..

So team dynamics is actually a very complex skill and it's very hard to acquire. However, if you don't try, you will never be able to. So well, actually blogging about this is cheap too.. I would need to constantly remember to walk the talk instead of just 纸上谈兵.. :)

(I realised that I totally never touch on VC, but I feel that the peer appraisal and team management is more important than answering the questions on VC's case study, it is actually doing what was taught, isn't it?)

Final Project Pitching Party..

2010-03-01T04:55:00.000+08:00

The pitching session this Friday was the best class I've ever had in my whole life of NUS.. It's very very rare to have a chance to listen to everyone pitch about their great ideas and how different everyone are. The comments and questions after each pitch are great too. In normal CS modules, if there are participation points for the module, you will see some hands shoot up. If not, forget about seeing hands shoot up to raise their comments or questions. But this session is really different! Everybody just gave their comments and their 2 cents regarding the pitch, which is really great!

It's very hard to hear people talk about their business ideas in the world nowadays. People fear that that ideas may be stolen and dare not tell anyone about it. However, without inputs from other people, you will not know what's good and what's not good about your idea. In this way, it's harder to make your idea succeed.. Thus sessions of these type should be implemented more often.

I shall blog a bit on the ideas that some people presented.

Supremacy by Tomithy.. Actually I've heard of his pitch way before he pitch in the pitching party.. I like your idea of card games and I admire your passion in forming the development team to develop your application! I hope your app would be successful! But if u do make other card games next time, try to add more strategy and try not to do an educational game. I prefer that lol..

SGBeat's pitch by Kah Hong actually interests me quite a bit. I think the idea of SMS-ing to update your tweets and statuses is pretty good. I do know of some other providers too, and have signed up in one other too, but to know that someone in the midst is doing something like this as well is great. Although data plans are getting cheaper and cheaper now, I still think that this service might not get obsolete so soon. We must remember that we are more tech-savvy than the rest of the people, that is why we always think that this will phase out and that will phase out sooner than what the actual trend would.. We should remember that SMS is still a very common medium now and data is cheap, but not cheap to everyone especially students, and parents may not find a need to give their child data plan. However, Kah Hong's efforts to integrate more into the facebook platform.. I don't know about it would improve SGBeat. A user like me, would just want this service because it helps update my statuses for me. But to play and get achievements, I wouldn't be very interested.. (Edit: After chatting with Kah Hong, he said that in order to survive, they need to differentiate and generate their own appeal, and it seems quite true too!)

Lin Myat's pitch.. Actually when he pitched his idea, I like it a lot.. Actually I even thought of doing it as the final project, with a few adjustments and a change of focus actually.. But this is also a do or die kind of app. It's either you do very well, or you totally dun do well at all. The idea is simple, the execution is simple. However, not everyone in the team agrees and like it.. So well we decide to discuss again soon and maybe implement our idea 2 (which also uses the same concept plugged into a different scenario). My email proposal might need to be kept until end of the exams then.. Maybe then we could pitch at HackerSpace?

Bishi Bashi clone by Jonathan Low's group. Actually I wrote my application with regards to a similar concept. I target it to people who have free time on their hands but doesn't have time to keep coming back to play it. But there are some problems with it.. 1. Stickiness of the app.. 2. Complexity of developing games quicker than people getting bored of them. 3. Competition amongst friends. (Multiplayer aspect).. But although I said that, I'm still very interested in these kind of games.. You guys can look at Warioware & WTF: Work, Time, Fun ya.. It's also minigames that scales up in difficulty.. Perhaps it can help you.. The wii version is much more fun because everyone is laughing at each others actions, but the DS version is fun too.. If you wan to try out the games, I can bring my DS to school for you to try.. For WTF, it's a bit more boring but if you all want to try out I could bring my PSP.. lol..

Ryan's comment about online medical help. Actually I think it's really very useful.. Because I do search about them now, and there are many forums but unorganized forums around. And most of them are based on Americans. I do believe that Asians are a bit different than the Americans so if there are such sites which aggregate these medical information, it might be very useful.

And the guests who came for the pitching party were all awesome too! Wanted to write more but I'm so drained after the Google Wave assignment..

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And I guess Wai Hong & me are the most ill prepared group to pitch that day, partly because we thought the group will still stick together (due to lack of communication), partly also why I rejected some invitations to join other groups, and partly due to conflicting time tables, as a result, we don't get to meet very often.

Haocong first initiated it and left the team. He wanted to work with more people and wanted to work with Chinese. We understand that and we wish him all the best. Shortly after, Li Yen said some other people approached her (what a domino effect), but she hasn't agree yet so we sorted of waited for her reply. But on Friday itself, we realised that she has joined another group and she updated us during the pitching party itself.

So when we got news that 2 of our members decide to leave, I talked to Wai Hong. However, he doesn't seem to be confident of himself and scared he might disappoint me because of his workload. But what's more important than like-minded people doing some application that we want to do? The amount of effort put in is secondary in my opinion. And he did sae that his workload will be less heavy later when he settles all the stuff. So dun worry ya.. We can pull through!

And to the MisMatch team, it's nice working with everyone. We matched with one another, created MisMatch, and left in search for better matches. Good luck everyone for the final project and the road after. :)

Targeted advertising and the happiness indicator..

2010-02-26T15:20:00.003+08:00

Initially when I heard that this week's lecture was from Microsoft and they would talk about Bing, I really didn't expect that I would like his sharing session I would say. Although he touched on Bing in parts of the presentation, it wasn't like a marketing presentation as I though it would be. What he focus on, was actually the consumer market, and then slowly to the idea of targeted advertising..

About the consumer market, he try to let us grasp the idea ourselves instead of telling it to us straight in the face. He makes a big turn, talking about a lot of stuff related to the idea he wants to convey, and then lastly make us realise that actually everyone is different and unique. We have to be objective, and look at things from various perspective.

He also showed us a short clip about some rural village and the people living there. (At first I thought it was fictitious because the village name seemed to suggest something else, like a joke or what, but upon watching the clip more, I find that it really seemed real, and it doesnt really matter if that particular family featured inside is real or not because these situations really happen in the world right now.) So the family shared bank accounts and everything they buy or do, is for the family. They are poor, from our eyes, but they are not unfortunate. They live a happier life, a life that maybe no city dweller could ever experience because of all the materialistic things that we seek and hope for. This brings me to a question, are we actually happy? (Actually I wrote a similar topic in an essay in my secondary school days, and if I didn't remember wrongly, the topic was, "How do you define happiness? So do you think that children nowadays are happier than children from the past?"

I remembered that my essay was commended by the teacher and read out to the class. Although my vocab is limited, the idea which I wanted to express was expressed, and the teacher read out this essay to make us think more and let us understand that you don't need bombastic english to write out something that is good, it can be simple too, as long as the idea is conveyed well. But well.. That was a one-off thing.. My english was never good.. and well.. I was never commended again by the English teacher.. lol..

So are we actually happy? I was actually a happy-go-lucky guy in the past. But as I grew up, it became less and less so. Maybe perhaps we are just pushed too hard and our burden gets heavier and heavier as we grow up. The more we experience and desire, the less happy we become. Some people say they will be happy when they achieve success, but actually is success? Recalling our first lecture in CS3216, we also talked about the benchmark for success. But is it really your success as per se? The guy that was featured in the video clip will perhaps think that success is just able to provide enough food for the whole family. And when you achieve success, will you be truly happy? Or you will seek for more? I guess there's no definite answer for success, and there's no true formula for happiness, and 1 thing I think that is very true, is that success != happiness, although a lot of people will think it that way.

So we recognize that every individual is different. We know that everyone has different needs and desire. And this comes about targeted advertising. "Targeted advertising is a type of advertising whereby advertisements are placed so as to reach consumers based on various traits such as demographics, purchase history, or observed behavior." (Wikipedia) Actually I didn't really focus much on targeted advertising. Although it does seems to provide links to what I want every time, it doesn't really make me want to click on it. It is now that I realised that I wasn't in the committed stage at that time, or perhaps the demographics + price doesn't appeal to me. Price is much more sensitive to me as a no-income student, that is perhaps why they don't appeal to me. And guess what, the number of ads presented to me is also seriously reduced because I use AdBlock Plus in Firefox. But did I ever clicked on such advertisements? I think I did, when I was looking for printing services for my CS3214 report last time. And I guess because I was seriously committed to finding a printing service, targeted advertising works on me. So indeed it is useful..

But living in Singapore, whereby petrol prices changes are all led by big brother Shell (although cartel is illegal in Singapore, what they are doing is not actually a cartel because they don't discuss it before raising their prices altogether, or so it seems) and telcos don't engage in price wars and competition, Singapore indeed is a weird economy, weird in terms of theory, but in actual fact there's a reason for this I suppose. Competition isn't good for the industry as the economy is too small? Maybe so. Look at Mediacorp and SPH and their 3 long years of intense competition. The result: both companies lost money for the whole of 3 years and consumers benefit.

Last part about the competition being Bing & Google search engine to search for Prof's Google Profile, I think the result would not mean which search engine is better, because searching for a particular site using a search engine would depend on how the page is optimized for search, which is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I think the relevancy of the search results would determine which search engine is better, but.. how do you determine relevancy? But apparently, Google Profile isn't really that searchable, even on Google, which is ironic.. Maybe we should find its sister.. Goojie.com (Don't bother searching it on Google, you can't find it.. lol)

Helping GetHelp!

2010-02-21T19:07:00.004+08:00

Since this is a case study to let us focus and analyse more on user interface design, I shall not talk about the idea itself but only focus on the UI.

Part 1. Usability vs Aesthetics

On first look at the application, I do find it attractive. The pictures look nice, it looks clean and it does appeal to me on first look. But on closer look, you will find a lot of inconsistencies that can be improved and addressed to make the UI more attractive to the user.

For usability, what matters is appropriate feedback for the user and simple, straight to the point interface. Cluttered web pages turn off users and make them less likely to return to the page again.

Now I shall list a few points which I think can be improved on.

1. The type of pictures should be consistent. If you look through the images, you will realise that some of them are very cute, but others are more professional looking. If they want to be cute, I think it should be cute all the way. If they want to be professional, be professional all the way. A bit of here and a bit of there, makes the focus of this application blur.

2. Consistency of the layout. If you look carefully, you will realise that the Home Page icons and layout looks different from the other pages. The badge picture from the Home Page is different from the rest of the pages. Some of the tabs are on top of the page, while some are hidden by the header panel. There is no line break between the overview and recommendations tab in the Home Page but for the rest of the pages, there is a line break between them.

And 4 pages use tabs (badges, profile, stats, invite) are in image form while the other 3 pages use text as headings (New Project, Overview, Recommendation). This will create confusion as they do not know whether it is a submenu or a topmenu because they are of different style but placed at the same level.

3. Order of the layout. Since the profile tab (Home Page) is the default page, it should be placed as the first tab right? Being on the 2nd tab isn't really the optimal choice. I think the tabs should be arranged in and order according to either the flow of the application or importance of the tabs.

4. Colour combination. Since Facebook has a default theme of blue and is not customizable, GetHelp should not use red for their buttons as they have very high contrast with one another. Use a more subtle colour combination to make the whole interface more soothing.. In addition, the usage of grey fonts on the page is not apt either. It makes the fonts less visible to the user and at a low brightness setting, it's hardly viewable. Thus, they should stick to more standard colours.

5. Size matters. I think GetHelp! has inappropriate sized icons within the application. For example, RSS, Twitter and SMS images should be smaller or equal size to the rest of the details. Making it unusually big seem to make the user focus more on them, which is wrong since they are not of higher importance. And they forgot to put something that should be placed real big inside. That's their application logo. If you look through all the screenshots, you will realise that there's no mention about their application name/logo at all throughout the application. This means that people cannot even remember the name of the app! That's a big mistake I would say.

Now I would focus more on the usability aspect.

6. Appropriate Feedback. Appropriate feedback is most important to the user because it allows to user to know they did something correctly. For example, in the Home Page, the profile tab is coloured to show that this tab is currently active. That is good. However, the New Project* button is red seem to steal its focus too, which is not that good. However, that's the only thing that is good about it. Cos for the rest of the pages, no feedback is available. You won't know where you are because there's no feedback. For example, in the statistics page, you did not see the stats tab light up. In addition, the picture on the header seems to be in mirror image with the tab. The user might be confused as he may think that he is on the wrong stats page.

7. Simplicity is the key. If you look at the different pages, you will realise that they try to cramp in as much information as possible in every page. This is actually not a wise choice. I believe that simplicity is the key. A page should just display what the page should do, and not clutter it with other seemingly useless stuff. For example, in the Home Page, there are small icons beside the deadlines, estimated time and location box. They wanted to be cute but it brings more confusion to the user. Will the icons make some widget appear to ease the input of data? I think not. So the extra icons there will bring about confusion to the user.

8. Lack of focus. Similar to the previous point, being too cluttered will result in lack of focus. Look at the Home Page. On first look, there seem to be 3-4 forms that can be filled in separately. However, there is only one button, and the button is on the first form. What happen to the button at the rest of the forms? OH! There's only 1 form. So I believe that a page should focus on what he or she should do. If the input of many details are needed, GetHelp! should create different pages in steps, or use a popup to guide the user through the process. And to prevent loss of focus, one should not clutter the page with unnecessary stuff that might attract the user's attention.

9. Groups/Categories. Without proper categories or search functions, in the future if the application is really popular, one might find thousands of help requests in one page, and this is not good as potential help requests may be missed out because the user is overloaded with requests.

10. Self-explanatory buttons. Buttons/fields should be self explanatory to the user and should not be ambiguous. If a particular button requires more explanation, a simple ? icon should be placed beside that button/field so that the user can refer to the help if needed. One example of the ambiguous buttons are the RSS, twitter and SMS checkboxes. When you check on one of them, does that mean you will subscribe to those modes? or post to RSS/twitter/sms? or other meanings? And how does Facebook know all of them? By default, we don't give twitter id or mobile phone numbers to them. And would we be charged for SMS services? for receiving notification? or this SMS service is to send SMS to all your friends to seek help? Thus, providing ambiguous buttons will confuse the users, which is not good.

Part 2. Number of options/ freedom given to user when posting a need.

I think the number of options and freedom given to the user when posting a need is quite adequate. Below are some points as to why I think so.

1. Main topic. I think the introduction of the main topic is pretty good because it allows other users of this application to know what kind of help is needed at a glance. To see if the user really requires the help you can give, the details can provide good explanation for it.

2. Tags. The introduction of tags is good. It allows the users to refine their problem into smaller tags so that searching is easier. However, in the screenshot, it seems that the tags do not have an input field. But if there is, it would be great.

3. Description Box. The description box is an open textbox to allow the user to key in any additional information that the fields don't provide for the user. This allow the users to add in any additional information that he or she wants to put in.

4. Customizable icons. Customization of icons is good because it allows users to easily identify their problems and post. However, I think GetHelp! should also provide a list of icons too so that people who do not have icons to upload or want to get help for some common tasks/programs can just use the default icons.

Part 3. Cycle of interaction & incentives

1. Cycle of interaction. Since this is not a game and doesn't seem to have a lock-in effect, users do not come back every time to use this application, they only come back when they have questions to post or want to help solve some problems. Theoretically, if users do come back to solve problems, this app would be attractive and viral because users post problems and problems get solved. However if users do not come back to solve problems, the cycle of interaction would break as in the end there will only be lots of users asking questions and no one answering.

2. Badges. I think using badges as incentives are not appealing nor engaging because firstly, the badges doesn't seem to look attractive and it's not really a game, thus badges don't seem to be useful here.

3. Statistics. I think that this is more relevant and good incentives as people are willing to show that they know more and are helpful to their friends. Therefore I think this is good..

Part 4. Other problems you think the team might have faced

I think besides UI problems, it's really hard to get people to use the application. As I've said earlier, this application is not viral at all because it is used on a on-demand basis. Therefore it's hard to get users to add this application unless they need to find help.

However, if the help is really urgent, people might just google the net to search for answers right? It's a wider world out there and you are not restricted to the users of the application. Furthermore, if it's so urgent, one might just take his/her phone and contact his friends directly. In GetHelp!, the help that is needed cannot be urgent if not I think you won't get a reply in time.

Thus, in the end, the idea is good, but it really needs a wide and motivated user base to really make it succeed, and it's really hard to build that user base in my opinion.

The Pitching Session..

2010-02-18T13:56:00.000+08:00

Actually I don't understand why is there a need to blog about this cos it's not really about learning and it is actually 'optional'? I still remember people asking around to see if everyone is going for the pitching session. So if one of us never attend the pitching session, then he would have to lose this opportunity to blog about it? But since I attended the session, I would mention about 3 things that I've observed/am interested in during this pitching session and how they widen my perspective. (I don't call this learning because I don't think I've learnt anything, but I understand and see things better only)

1. Is social interactivity really important? Or they are just following the trend?

If you really sit through and listen to what each person requires us to help them do, you will realise that most of them just want their site/work to be on Facebook. Most of them want it to be done using Facebook Connect, but they don't really know how it can be done. So why do they need Facebook Connect? Is social media so important to them? Or they are just following the trend others are doing? Flixster seems to have achieved a higher traffic after they launched their Flixster app in Facebook, so I think most of the pitchers want to get higher traffic so that more people know about what they are doing?

I don't deny that social interactivity is indeed very important in the context nowadays. However, most of the people in the industry just want it because everybody says it's important, not because they need it. I guess some people also don't know why they need it.

For example, Mr Jace Liew from module-review.com wants their website to interact with Facebook so they can reach a wider audience. They hope they can gain a wider user base and improve on user experience. But I think he is thinking it wrong. Currently, his website is only catered to the NUS students and provides only module reviews for the NUS community. He might have said that exchange students can use it to map their modules, but is putting it in Facebook really necessary? A simple Google search with the relevant NUS module + the word 'review' will get people to their website already.

And they can continue browsing/bookmark the site if the information inside is useful. Why is Facebook Connect needed?

Moreover, if an exchange/current student wants to search for module information, where would they first go to? Facebook? no.. They will ask friends or proceed to NUS-related websites (eg. CORS) So I believe that in order to really gain a wider user base, he has to collaborate with NUS itself to let more people know about his website. And when it becomes successful, and wants to expand, he just go and collaborate with other teaching institutions. When the user base has gained quite substantially, he can then place it on Facebook so that prospective students can also find out which institution is better for them. I'm not saying that connecting his website to Facebook now is totally useless, but I don't think it would be very useful for now. (Actually I've seen him promoting his website to the NUS thread in HardWareZone, but the lack of useful reviews shun people away from the site. If he really wants to get more reviews, he shouldn't wait for them like a sitting duck, he should start collaborating with NUS or provide incentives for contributing and reviewing.

So the point I would like to bring across is, Facebook might be useful, but the industry seems to blindly follow them without knowing what they want. Without knowing what they want to achieve from it, I don't think the integration of social media with their sites might be useful. So I think we shouldn't blindly follow what others are doing but think and understand why we should do it.

2. Generating revenue in Facebook

I guess this is more relevant to us and 6waves did a good job by educating us on how to monetize our applications. The DAU vs ARPU, casual vs hardcore games, they are all very important to us and particularly interests me. Being a gamer myself, I've always try to see what games will interest me and what games do not and why.

Consoles such as xBox and PS3 have achievement related games which will allow gamers to show off how many games they have played and how much effort they took to unlock all the achievements, of which some are really impossible because they require you to play a perhaps 60hrs game 3-4times to unlock all achievements. But yet, some of the gamers still managed to unlock them! These are hardcore gamers.

There are also casual gamers who just play games to pass their time and the portable consoles & the online gaming community comes to play. Most of these games have simple mechanics and engaging storyline to capture the audience throughout their game. Others have lock-in effects such as social interactivity thus people don't really want to quit the game because their friends are still playing it. If you quit the game, you will lose contact with them.

The last group of people are the non-gamers (but they still play games!). They can't bothered to learn the game mechanics and wants something that is simple, no-frills, yet fun and interactive. A simple click to play game (eg. Pillowfight) will appeal to them. They do not want lock-ins and their main aim is to relieve boredom or reduce stress accumulated.

I understand these groups of people better because I was a hardcore gamer, dropped to a casual gamer because of school commitments, and perhaps become a non-gamer in the future. And 6waves helps us distinguish between these types of gamers and adopt different strategies for different people. And through 6waves presentation, you can see the power of marketing. If you have a good game but no marketing, you may not do as well as a game that is mediocre but has good marketing. I also see the power of cross selling too in their presentation. And these are all relevant to us because I really intend to try and monetize my applications if possible and understand and predict what the market wants.

3. The Ubisoft Branding

When I saw Explosive Barrel's presentation about their collaboration with Ubisoft, I admit I was shaken. I think this is a very good opportunity to boost my resume and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to collaborate with Ubisoft. Besides that, Explosive Barrel also have a series of flash games which looks very appealing to me. It would seem fun to be able to work in a working environment like this, I believe I could learn a lot from there. IF ONLY..

1) CS3216 is not graded. (The main role of Facebook Connect isn't really a good role because I guess we would be screwed if we only did that and minimal development)
2) I've graduated. (This is my final semester and my level 4000 modules are starting to crush down on me because I've been putting too much focus on CS3216)
3) The timeline is longer. (April 1st is really a very short time and I don't think I can be very committed if I don't want to stay in NUS 1 more semester (actually 1 year cos lvl4000 modules only open once a year) to retake my lvl4000 modules..

And with all these considerations, I guess I would have no choice but to miss this opportunity.

And from their presentation, you can learn about how they market their project too. They knew they weren't a very famous company (at least compared to Ubisoft) So they tried to sell the game first, before selling their company and what they are doing. When the branding of Ubisoft came out, I guess a few of us were blown away at the chance to collaborate with Ubisoft. If they have started by talking about their company and what they want us to do after that, I don't think they can capture that many audience. So this is a good presentation to learn from as well.

And this wraps up what I think I've understood and experience during the pitching session. I think I've particularly learnt a lot of things from 6waves and I hope I can apply it for the final project. Yeah!

My FB Assignment 1 Project Group.

2010-02-12T01:00:00.002+08:00

I always wanted to write a post about my project group but I can't find the time to do so. Although the actual feeling is diluted from then, I still want to pen down what I still remember cos I really think it's an affinity to work with this particular group..

My group consist of 4 members, Li Yen, Haocong, Wai Hong & me.. Everyone is in their final year of studies besides Haocong, who is a Year 1/2.. Li Yen & me actually formed the group first and we are seeking for designers to help us design our app, but it turns out that designers are in high demand and in the end we form a team of 4 programmers. Because of that, the initial 2 programmers, Li Yen & me became a flash programmer and a designer instead, leaving our comfort zone to learn new stuff.

During the project, we are all very proactive. Wai Hong is a guy that doesn't seem to need any sleep. I think he's the most active at night and thus we don't see his stuff progress much in the day. But after a night of rest, you can spot some changes in the things that he's doing.

Haocong is super enthusiastic and would continue programming even after we finish our project meeting. He is always the one who solve the bugs and problems because he started everything very early. Like Wai Hong, he always continue his work into the wee hours of the night, doing something remarkable with the application. Often, we can see a lot of weird weird stuff on the pages because he is doing some debugging. And well, he's the person who is pro enough to crash the whole AWS instance in the first week of development. haha.. This also proves that he works hard enough and like to venture into the unknown.

Li yen is one inquisitive girl who wants to know and wants to learn everything that everyone is doing during the course of the project. As a female, I think she is more meticulous and always look into details. It's is a good thing because she always help us spot minor mistakes which we 3 guys didn't really spot while doing our stuff. But due to the very short timeframe of the project, it's very hard to go into details and due to the time constraint, it's a bit hard to learn what everyone is doing. But thanks to her, we didn't overlook a lot of minor details that we might have and this is great to the project.. And she is an invaluable flash designer too. Without her, the core gameplay of the application couldn't have been done. What's an application without the core mechanism right?

And the last person is me. At first I feel very lost because I'm not that good a PHP programmer so when everyone seems to be 'snatching' the programmer title, I decide to take one step back. I wanted to help with flash but it seems that it's hard to split flash programming between 2 people if you are not working together at the same place. In the end, I did all the documentation instead and stepped into an unknown field of designing. At first I really feel that I'm the most useless in the team because I can't help out with anything because I'm not as good in PHP, I can't help out in Flash & I don't know how to design. But now I'm actually glad I force myself to learn some designing tools because now I'm not daunted by designing anymore. Although in the last few days before the submission, I went back to programming together with Wai Hong & Haocong and I still prefer programming.. Cos I can solve and fix more bugs and problems and I like it more..

Our project group also seem to be a unique group, we don't stay back overnight in school at all.. But although we didn't stay overnight in school at all for this assignment, we always continue developing the application into the wee hours of the night and everyone is still communicating via MSN or wave (cos Wai Hong cannot access MSN)..

In the end, we managed to create MisMatch and I feel that we have done it pretty well considering the time constrain. And everyone continues to develop new features for the application even though the project submission is over. This means that we are passionate about this app and what we are currently doing. So I'm really glad that I've met such a group and I think it's really an affinity for 4 strangers to group up in a project group to do something that we all are passionate about.

Thanks everyone..

Learning in the past 4 weeks..

2010-02-09T21:00:00.000+08:00

I've learnt a lot in this short 4weeks of CS3216, really a lot.. During the workshops, I learnt about a lot of stuff.. And some of the workshops made me realise that actually I know the stuff, just that I'm not willing to acknowledge that I know them because I'm not really proficient with them.. And I guess CS3216 really force us to stay out of our comfort zone so that we can learn the most things in the shortest possible amount of time.

During workshop 1 and 2, things that were taught in the workshops are pretty much very simple to me. Actually I keep telling myself that I don't know HTML, CSS, PHP, JS & AJAX. I cannot say that I know them because I don't really know them well. I cannot say I don't know them because during the workshop, those things that were taught, I knew them! So actually the first 2 workshops make me realise that I wasn't as lousy as I thought I was.

During workshop 3 and 4, I pretty much stepped into the realm of the unknown. Firstly it was Photoshop & Illustrator. I always tell everyone that I can't design for nuts and I totally don't know how to use them except the healing tool for removing pimples in the photographs lol.. But during my Facebook Assignment 1, in the group of 4 programmers, I was placed in a role of a documenter and a designer. A DESIGNER? I thought to myself. How can I be a designer? I'm an idiot to designing! But the main reason why I became a designer in this assignment is because my bro is a good designer and I can seek help from him if I don't know anything. And being forced out of my comfort zone, I've no choice but to start experimenting with the tools, asking questions and getting scolded by my brother because I don't even know what the tools are. But after a few days of designing, I find myself getting used to it.. And tips given by my brother is indeed very useful. By the time the illustrator & photoshop workshop started, I've already understood the basic concepts the software and can catch up with the progress of the workshop.

In workshop 3, I also learnt how to do better presentations. Actually most of the tips given are common sense, but when you really put those common sense into words, you will focus more on them when we want to do a presentation. I never knew that doing up a presentation is so hard until these useful tips were presented by YanJie during the workshop. It sounds really useful but I guess not everything in applicable in all kinds of presentations.. And when I hear MESA, I immediately knew this was done by a typical Arts students.. Because they like to use acronyms in their presentations.. And although it seems useful, I don't really like to use them..

In workshop 4, I learnt about Flash and wow it really isn't that hard to do ya.. I keep thinking that it's super tough because Flash videos look super beautiful and I'm sure I can't do up anything so fanciful. But I was wrong. The basics seems simple enough and now I think I'm getting more and more interested with Flash already. In the Google Wave workshop, we learnt that we can create gadgets and robots but till now I'm still not very familiar and don't really understand them. I guess after the Google Wave assignment I would be better equipped with the skills ba..

Besides the workshop, lectures often refreshes me about concepts and theories which I knew from before but forgot about them.

And I think I learnt the most during the 2 assignments given in this short 4weeks of school. In FB Assignment 1, I documented most of the required stuff for submission and I learnt how to design. In the final 2 days prior to submission, I'm back to programming, helping Haocong to solve bugs and fix programming problems. I also done up a few pages which isn't really crucial to the project/aspirations but I think is vital to the application, such as Achievements Guide and Tutorial pages. Seriously, I feel comfortable and more productive doing programming then design/documentation. But I guess we really need to step out of our comfort zone to learn much more things.

In the FB Seminar, I learnt how to analyse things better as I think when we take turns to give points about the application, I realised that they can analyse much better and deeper than I would. And also, during this assignment, the presentation tips and skills are put into use and I think learning by doing is way better than learning by listening. I guess I'm a hands-on person ba..

So actually do you all think that the medals in MisMatch looks nice? They were all designed by me! The initial idea of what to draw inside was thought out by Liyen, but I improvise quite a bit (because I don't know how to design some of them and some seem to look better when I do some trial and error with the illustrator tools) So I shall post some medals I like here and the initial concept that I did.. The rest of the medals can be viewed from the Achievement Guide page in MisMatch.. Feel free to comment on them so that I could improve my designing skills too.. :)

This is the v1 of the medals.. But these medals I drew doesn't seem to be cute enough for the game. So after asking my bro for tips on how to make it cuter, it became this..

It really looks much cuter right, and the Gold Medal is now really gold! The former one looked orangey..

And here are the custom medals which I like a lot..

These 2 medals are the hello world medal and the tic-tac-toe medal, which you can get once you add the app and once you get a 3x multiplier combo in the game.

The first one is the Oops you found me! medal and the 2nd one is the Casual Expert medal.. You can get the first one if you clicked on the devil on the insane mode and you can get the 2nd one if you played the casual mode >10 times..

Do you all like it? haha..

The Facebook Seminar Week..

2010-02-08T01:00:00.001+08:00

Last Monday was the Facebook Seminar Week.. Facebook Seminar was actually one of our assignments that is worth 10%, well.. a relative 10%.. Cos I think all grades and scores you get here is not important except the final project.. Basically we are to choose an application in Facebook and present it to the class. The good thing and bad thing is, we only have 7mins to present and we have to bring the message across clearly in this short 7min..

I was grouped together with Cedric, Bernard and Carolyn.. I think it was an honour to work with them as they are all very good with their analytical and presentation skills.. We chose the app called FameLeague because it was Bernard's friends app and we felt that it certainly had the potential but was executed wrongly. If anyone has not added this app, please DO NOT do so. If not you will be irritated by it. lol..

We are only considered the only group who presented a not very popular and lousy app as compared to the other groups. At first when we were deciding on an app to critique, we went to look at the top 10 most popular apps in Facebook. We actually wanted to do some popular apps at first, but in the end we chose to do something different. And actually I don't know whether it's a good thing or not.. But I think we managed to pull it off? haha..

Initially we had a big problem trying to squeeze everything into the 7 min presentation. There's too much information we wanted to present but cannot present. We also cannot just jump straight into the application because there is a lot of prior knowledge that we need to communicate to the audience so that they know what FameLeague is trying to do in their application. We spent a lot of time trying to refine the presentation and in the end we managed to squeeze it into 7min while conveying the correct message.. (I think, you will know why later.. lol..)

So onto the actual FB Seminar.. I initially thought it would be a boring 2hrs because normally presentations are boring. Furthermore, we have to stay throughout the whole presentation and still have to make notes because there's an additional component after the presentation, application and mutual critique. But I was wrong. The presentations are super interesting and everyone used interesting ways and tools to convey the message to the audience. Overall, I think everyone did very well. One team even created a video presentation and it was wow!

Here is the video..

It was certainly an enjoyable night that day.. After the seminar, our google wave group met up for ard an hour to chit chat and get to know one another more. Initially when we first sat down, it feels awkward, because we did not know how to start. But after chatting a while, well it feels good! I seldom get such a proactive group, and it's actually what I like! So I'm looking forward to do the project with them now!

After the FB seminar, it's when things to start getting busy. We have to do a application critique on a group's presentation that was assigned to us. I got the SuperPoke application done by Tomithy's group. My Tuesday was actually very busy normally and I normally can blog only after Thursday. But the deadline was Tuesday 2359.. So I decided to skip the day lectures to write the application critique before going to school for the late afternoon's lesson.

We also have to critique on other people's critiques and I spent my whole of wed, thurs and friday doing it. Although the guidelines state that you just have to critique on enough blogs that you think would be enough to get the 10% of the 10% FB Seminar Assignment, but I almost commented on everyone's cos when I read the post, I would want to write some comments to express how I feel. So in the end I felt very busy because my free time is all occupied by the mutual critique. And this module is super interesting because during this critique, a flame war even started, and Prof actually encouraged the flame war until he went in to stop this "cat fight".

And well, after a fast one week, Google Wave assignment started and I guess we have to start doing it already.. And till now, it seems that I still don't have much time to manage my other modules, which seemed to be suffering badly already.. I hope the CNY break is enough for my to settle the other modules so that I don't lack behind so much.. And I hope I could file the stack of notes that is piling up on my table. I'm usually very neat and tidy but my table is in a mess now because I would prefer to catch up on my work/sleep instead of tidying up my stuff..

Updating my Lenovo S10-2 Drivers..

2010-02-07T00:30:00.000+08:00

http://wirused.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/updating-my-lenovo-s10-2-drivers/

About SuperPoke & Tomithy's Group.

2010-02-02T13:16:00.008+08:00

I'm tasked to do SuperPoke for my application critique assignment and I thought to myself.. "What exactly do I remember about SuperPoke?" Hmmm..

1. Very wow slide design..
2. Pillow fight has way more active users than SuperPoke despite the lousy interface. and..
3. I poke for AIDS!

That was what I can remember initially.. And next I took out my notes that I've done during the presentation.. And it says..

1. Nice slides (remember to research about what tools they use to implement it)
2. Poke is registered in Facebook so no one else can use the word Poke in their application.
3. Interesting, fast and viral, take things apart (Why we care)
4. Bad (bad trival, good simple and clear entertaining, ugly abuse superficial)
5. Word of mouth is a powerful tool
6. For causes

So the first part of the application critique is to focus on three points and explain why you feel
that they are the most important points.

Hmm.. 3 points.. Actually I'm not sure whether its 3 points about the presentation or about the application.. But well let me try and do it my way.

1. The presentation did not really talk in depth about the application itself. Instead it was trying to let us understand the underlying potential of this 'poking' business. By understanding how much potential this 'poking' business has and how viral this SuperPoke can be, so that it can lead us to what they are trying to lead us to in the end.

2. Illustrating the Word of Mouth concept - After letting us understand the potential about SuperPoke, they are trying to illustrate to us that Word of Mouth really works, with or without pokes. They started a "Rumour Has It" application which I thought is really interesting! This small application just needs to start a rumour and everyone around us would be infected with it. And well, it really works! Just take a look at Prof Ben and how he started the lecture yesterday? He mentioned about the"Rumour Has It" app and how he will try to break that rumour that class will end very late yesterday. This is also the message they are trying to bring across to us, I think. And I think he did it, for that period of time. If there wasn't any other presentations later, I believe I could remember this message clearly and vividly and do not have to refer to my notes I've made.

3. Bring this word of mouth concept into Causes - I really think this is a good concept. But hasn't it been already implemented? Look at Causes now.. Don't you think they are spreading messages to seek for donations via word of mouth?

I knew their concept is different. They said they can seek corporations to donate a small amount of money for every 'poke causes' that people send, just like how a lot of big corporations are setting aside a small amount of money for every dollar they earn, or how farmville sells their sweet seeds in order to provide to charity. (mentioned by another group in a different perspective) However, how many corporations would want to sponsor that? Many businesses wanted to give back to the society, but many other businesses wants to achieve something else (perhaps fame) when they give back to the society. And this massive spam of 'poking' doesn't really increases the corporations' fame. People will just be too excited to poke people instead of knowing who is doing this charity. Unless 'Poke Causes' can get very popular in Facebook, corporations might not be interested to donate to charity via this channel. But this actually make us think a lot during the presentation. And gave us a good experience overall.

Now some thoughts about their presentation/application. Hmm hmm hmhm hmm hmhh hmhm mm hm mmh mmhh hmm hmmh hmmm.. Hey this is worth 10% of the FB Seminar grades! Let me think some more..

So after summarizing the points above, it seemed to have conveyed the message pretty well, but it could be better I think. Talking about MESA (Message, Experience, Structure, Aids), I think they did it pretty well.. But I guess the Aids was too good and good pretty distracting. Furthermore, during the presentation, there were disruptions because the slides doesn't sync with what Tomithy have to say, perhaps maybe the one clicking did not really know when to click and proceed on with the next slide. So I think the A of MESA should be brought backward slightly to make the presentation look more complete. They are now doing a AMES actually. But this might only be my personal opinion.

Looking at what I've written earlier in the notes (Pt 1. Nice slides (remember to research about what tools they use to implement it)), I'm sure that a techie like me is pretty distracted because I was trying to analyse what kind of tools they actually use as it wasn't the standard powerpoint nor keynote.

Looking at the slides over and over again, I realised that they are trying to form mnemonic look alike by starting with C (why they Care), then B (the Bad), the A (the illustration and the proof of concept), and lastly A+ ('poking' for causes).. It was good, but it didn't really help me during the presentation because clearly I didn't see it during the presentation. Maybe more focus should be placed into this to allow us to see it more clearly and to allow us to remember more clearly.

About SuperPoke, though it wasn't really mentioned at all during the whole presentation (I went to research on it), I think it was a brilliant idea but the execution was wrong. Social interactivity is the main reason why Facebook is popular and SuperPoke knew it. However, the users who were being 'poked' were not obliged to 'poke' back because it didn't had a deadline and it doesn't matter at all (You won't be boo-ed or something). Pillowfight became much more addictive because you feel a sense of urgently to fight back if you will lose a fight and it would be reflected on your stats. SuperPoke's UI is much clearly and better as compared to Pillow Fight but it didn't succeed as it did capture the urgency criteria. This clearly illustrates that UI isn't the most important factor in gaming nowadays.

"What's most important is the idea and how you go about executing it."

And I want to say something before I end my entry. CS3216 is full of potential, ideas always come and go like a flash. In CS3216 we are given this chance to grab hold of this idea and execute it so I guess we should really appreciate and cherish it. So everyone let's work hard and create some awesome apps that may rock the world in the future for our final project! (I'm TOTALLY not interested in the Google Wave assignment actually, lol..)

Link: Tomithy Group's Presentation Slides.

New Matriculation Card..

2010-02-01T01:06:00.003+08:00

My old matriculation card died last semester when I found it harder and harder to scan to open the door.. I didn't really ill-treated the card and I guess it properly spoilt due to wear and tear.. I initially thought it was okie because my this semester is going to be 'slack' since I only got 4 modules and 2 of them are UEs.. But I was wrong! Just in this 3 weeks, I've stayed in school for dunno how late so many times and we have to come back to school on saturdays and sundays, where COM1 is locked..

And whenever I tried to use my card to try scanning but cannot work, some people will be irritated with me cos they are thinking why should a non-computing student come into the faculty and snatch our space.. At night, whenever I want to go out of COM1, I would have to borrow matric card from others so that I can come back after that. This cannot do.. So I went and contact comp center for more info. Initially I emailed ITcare and they said it will cost $16.05 unless it's their card fault. I found it so not worth it cos I'm only going to use it for a few months.. But after being irritated so many times because I was locked out of my own faculty, I decided to go comp centre to get my card replaced.. When I reached there, I was pleasantly surprised.. The first replacement is free! It takes 1week to replace and now I can finally enter my own faculty!

So here is my old matric card..

And my new matric card..

The difference between this 2 cards is the layout and format of the card.. I'm now no longer an undergraduate, my career is a undergraduate.. I'm no longer a SoC student, as the faculty is not shown on the card already.. But I'm still glad I got this new card, as it does what it should do. :)

MisMatch..

2010-01-30T16:29:00.003+08:00

After 2 weeks of mad rush, sleeping past 3am in the first week, coming back on weekends, almost totally no sleep in the 2nd week, we finally finished our CS3216 first assignment, MisMatch. Let me talk abit about our application.

MisMatch is a game that involves the matching of cards on a grid. Players playing the game need to memorize the position of the cards and match the cards with a corresponding card to form a match, removing the mismatch. Players who manage to perform feats or meet certain requirements will receive bonuses and unlock achievements which will be displayed on their profile. The cards that the players will see are profile pictures extracted from the player’s friends’ profile to provide customized experience to every player.

And basically that is the description of our game. We have 3 levels of difficulty namely the casual, hardcore and the insane mode. Players can choose the different level of difficulty to suit their play style and achievements are categorized into 3 different levels too. Therefore, players who are more achievement oriented can choose to fulfill the requirements while the casual players can just focus on achieving low level achievements and the game play.

MisMatch doesn’t just end here. Although the beta version has limited features, there’s a lot of potential waiting to be tapped in this game. For example, we will impose penalties on players that do not get a match within a certain amount of time by rotating the whole grid clockwise or anti-clockwise. This will greatly ramp up the difficulty and hardcore players will like it even more. In the insane mode, devil cards will be placed and your hard earned score will be reduced by half if you open them.

And there’s more. In the future, we might release custom tile sets as achievements so that players can customize their grid when they play the game. Story mode will be created and the player can progress through the story and play MisMatch in totally new ways that were never thought before. And when the multiplayer mode comes up, friends would be able to play MisMatch together, competing against one another to see who the best is.

With so much potential and surprises packed in MisMatch, wouldn’t you be moved? It’s really a cool application that is worth investing your time in. You will never regret once you start playing it.

Actually that's what I wrote in my pitching speech submission.. But I hope everyone will feel attracted to the game after reading this. Even if you are not very interested, just come and support our application for a while okie? Play MisMatch here and report any bugs or new feature requests here..

Thank you for your support! I will be posting news and updates about the application via the wall.. So stay tuned!

Imagine Cup & Amazon Web Services..

2010-01-29T16:43:00.003+08:00

I guess I'm one of the later people to blog again, cos the busy schedule of shuttling around classes and the mad rush to complete our MisMatch application let me with no extra time to settle down and blog. I need some quiet and peace before I could start blogging, that is why you don't see my blogging often nowadays on my WordPress Blog too, because when I tried to settle down and write something, I will end up doing up some stuff that's related to the application. So I'm now trying to convince myself that it's okie to blog this late for this week because of the lousy excuses I've made up..

Okie.. About the lecture this week, it consists of 2 parts, the Imagine Cup & Amazon Web Services. However, the imagine cup talk was pretty short and it totally pales itself as compared to the wonderful AWS speaker, Simone, who brought us through how cloud computing works and why the future is in the cloud. It was truly a good marketing speech, but how good it is, I'm skeptical about it. (Everyone would have their own biases when they are trying to talk about their own product.) And I could give a few comments about it later since we have been using AWS for quite a while already.

So more about the AWS presentation. The best takehome message of that way was this.. “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.”

Many times when we are doing things or solving problems, we always look at it in one way and in one direction only, limiting our scope. We may lament that our internet speed is too slow to do this and do that, but if you really try to think of it in a broader scope, you will realise that you can deliver it personally in a much faster time.. This is what this message is trying to tell us I guess. And this also teaches people to think out of the box! We are normally obsessed with the things and technology that we currently using and comfortable with, so its actually quite hard to experiment with things outside our comfort zone. So to think out of the box may seem easy, but it's hard to do in practice.

About the cloud.. Cloud computing actually allows users to skip the complexity and cost of managing and maintaining data servers. Data are stored in the cloud and delivered to the user on the web browser when needed. It reduces frustrations that many companies might face and allows the companies to focus on their core competency. This is also the idea behind outsourcing. So we can say that companies will outsource their data centers to Amazon, with added flexibility because they use everything on demand.

So what's the difference between shared hosting and cloud computing? In shared hosting, all the data are stored on a single server and will allow for a single point of failure if the server goes down. Although backups are maintained and services can be restored without much delay, for businesses that heavily depended on the data, it means a loss of millions or billions of dollars for every hour lost. With cloud computing, data is replicated across servers around different data centers to ensure that there will (almost) never be any downtime for the business. And because of this, we can also get data from closer proximity servers so that you can get your data faster.

So the pros of cloud computing can be summed up to be 'no' downtime, flexibility, scalability and less frustrations to allow them to concentrate on their core competency. So what are the cons about this amazing cloud?

The pricing model is too complicated. We are charged for everything under the sun and I mean literally everything. You pay for the running instance at an hourly rate, you pay for upload and download bandwidth, you pay for memory, you pay for disk space, you pay for execution instructions and etc. Just about what a computer usually does itself on its own cost money! AWS don't want you to get into this complex stuff and provides very updated activity tracking via the AWS portal. However, the payments will not be shown for all the activities unless you expand the + button to view details. And what's the cons of this? Average users will be daunted by the pricing model and prefer to stick with their monthly/yearly hosting plans. Companies that are more systematic (esp government sector & stat boards!) will demand a detailed analysis of the pricing model and how it will save money/increase efficiency for the companies. When unable to provide concrete details and precise estimates of costs, I guess companies would not want to risk their businesses on the cloud unless it has been proven that it is indeed better or when everyone else shifts to the cloud.

It's a bit too expensive for average consumers/SMEs to use. SMEs/individuals usually do not require such services because they typically cost around US$60 per month when you can get good hosting services at around SGD$200 per year! So if the companies do not need to store so much data and require that much uptime, they would not need to shift to the cloud. It isn't attractive at all..

The last con was actually the pro they have been talking about, the distributed-ness of the data. AWS said that we wouldn't be able to feel the distributed-ness and it feels like we are only on one server. But I don't think it's true. If you actually developed the application crazily for the past few nights, you would realise that there's a lot of hanging (not responding), HTTP 500 error, and other problems. This does not only occur to me but to many other groups who are doing more data-intensive apps. Wai Hong and I were trying to analyse what's the problem with the server and he came up with a very good explanation for it and I think it's very true! As AWS distributes our files across the globe whenever we update something, there will be certain lag time created when we are updating it. The intensity and frequency of the updates we did probably created some inconsistency with the files and cause alot of 500 error.. It gave us alot of trouble as sometimes out of 4 people, 1 person can access the updated page only while the rest can't.. And the HTTP 500 error happens so frequently we normally have to refresh 5-10times before we can see the updated page, and this is really a big problem for the developers, especially when the app is due soon. However, when I played it again today, the app works perfectly, and I guess it's because there's no updates to the file already..

So in short, I do think that cloud computing is a great idea but I don't think it will catch up on everybody as fast, probably not in Singapore yet..

Software Engineering? Project Management?

2010-01-21T17:38:00.003+08:00

I guess I'm one of the last to do up the blog post again. It's not because I don't want to do it early, it's because my timetable is packed from monday to wednesday and thursday is the mad rush for submission of part A of Assignment 1. Today, I gave myself a bit of a break and now I'm starting to blog about the class, I hope its not too late. It's still within the week right? And I still can remember about the class we had. haha.

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Lecture this week is about Software Engineering.. During the lecture, we were introduced to the SDLC, roles of different people in the group and some software engineering principles and technique. The lecture today seems to be catered more to non-programmers or non-IT students, providing a basic insight for them to understand this field better. However, it is still a refreshing experience to revisit some of the concepts lest we forget about them.

Actually most of the computing students should have learnt all these during the course in NUS.. Of course as a Year 4 IS student, I would know all these theories and technique more than the rest of the class, but knowing them isn't really enough. Humans are forgetful, normally when we hear something very inspiring, we will try to remember them, but most of the time, after a while, we will tend to forget. And even if you do remember the theories, do you actually remember or apply them to actual situations? And this is part of how to execute a project, which nicely follows the first lecture to show us the initiation process (how to start a project).

Actually this whole thought process actually started sems ago when I was taking my CS4254 IS Project Management. In this module, we actually learnt how to deal with the project and different aspects of the project, such as human, time, and resource management. At that time, I was greatly inspired by what I read, but come to think of it, it's actually common sense! But it seems that human's common sense isn't really as good as we think it is. That is why people have to pen down theories and concepts so that we can follow and adapt to it. It is like the student syndrome that Eliyahu M. Goldratt has mentioned before (Students will tend to procrastinate until the last minute before they will do work, so no matter how much time you give them, they will only start work at the last minute) When someone reads this theory, they will find that it's actually common sense and why do they need to jot down certain things that everyone actually knows? Because humans are forgetful, and they need something to guide them throughout the course of life. This brings me to another interesting book, called the Rules of Love by Richard Templar, which teaches us how to love and how not to love. Love seems natural enough you might say, but these books really force us to think rationally and not do something out of the norm when dealing with emotions..

The next part of the lecture is about Scrum, which is presented by 3 ex-students of the course. Having listened to their experience about using scrum, I'm so envious of them. I would also like to do something like that, but till now, the groups I've been managing are just project groups in NUS, which forces the group leader (me) to do work too. When you are too busy with the workload and deadlines, you will lose track of certain things.. And as what Prof Ben said, in school you can't expect to have a group member to just ask questions and manage people without doing any work right? But the closest to scrum I've done, was to manage the 7 people team in CS3214, which was a super fun experience now that you come to think of it. I used to provide a weekly agenda + ask for updates every week, and this is the closest to the Scrum management every day whereby you spend 10min to ask 3 questions to get the status updates.

1. What have I done?
2. What are you going to do today?
3. Will any of my work done today affect anyone else’s work? OR Are there any dependencies before you can work on your part?

In CS3214, we have a google group page where I (normally)/others can write their current objectives/problems encountered throughout the project. This is also similar to the scrum board that the presenters told us of. But as a newbie that time, and without any training, I've encountered several problems which I think if I were to face it now, I would have handled them way better than that time. We also had a gantt chart then, but the gantt chart is only for show cos if all the exact man hours were to be factored in in the gantt chart, I think it will greatly exceed the allocated time unless sleep and weekends are all taken away from the people. (That's would not be a good reflection of the project group so the gantt chart is for show only in CS3214)

During the lecture, Prof Ben also mentioned that the Year 4s are the better ones cos we have more experience than the Year 1s. However, this is actually not the case for my group. We have 3 year4s and 1 year1 and the Year1 owned us! lol.. But this also sparked our enthusiasm to do well too and so it benefited the team as a whole.

Prof Ben also mentioned that the Business people should listen and understand more about the software engineering stuff so that they can understand better who is trying to smoke them when they manage the programmers next time. But I don't think this is true! I think it should be us the IS people who should be managing the programmers/developers next time, if not why do we need to do and learn all the software development stuff in our year 1 and 2 and business and management stuff in year 3 and 4? So that we can better understand and bridge the gap between the business people and the IT people. We can rectify unrealistic aims of the business people with our IT knowledge, and guide IT people to the right direction with our business knowledge. That's what IS people are for right? To be the bridge between these 2 vastly different groups of people.

A little bit about the Saturday's workshop last week. I'm a very GUI person so throughout the UNIX session, I get what they are trying to do but I still prefer the GUI programs made for us. But this is also maybe because I'm very used to MS-DOS last time and I can't seem to break free of that and understand and remember the unix commands. But I'm getting better at it now cos my group loves to use putty and terminal to do the stuff, and I felt quite stupid cos I can only look at them do things while I couldn't do much of them.

The PHP session was a bit too basic for programmers even though I've only done PHP programming in my CS2102 that one time. With that little knowledge, I doubt you can do much development from the things we learn from the workshop. To learn more on our own, I think the best site is http://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp. The SQL workshop is also quite simple but its more useful than the PHP ba..

The KFC lunch really comes as a surprise cos I expected those buffet lunch with beehoon and stuff only (those catered by the school when there's workshops) However, the KFC doesn't really seem to be enough since we have big eaters in the class. But I was having a sore throat that day, so 1 drumstick + 1 whipped potato was enough for me luckily. Thanks Prof Ben for the sumptuous lunch! BUT! Humans are greedy, after such a good lunch last week, I couldn't help but think what's lunch for the next workshop (Tomorrow) haha.. I hope it's good too!

And tomorrow we will be learning about HTML, CSS, JS and AJAX.. I've done all 4 before, but it's been some time since I touched them, since IS lvl4000 modules are all IS management modules. It would be a good refresher course.

Phew. One entry done! No wonder Prof Ben said that it's not that easy to maintain this blog. I really think so. I don't want to give slip slop work so I will try to blog when I'm free, but looking at the number of people who have already blogged since monday, I would feel the stress and have to try blogging asap. But anyway, today is the only time I'm free, cos Saturday and Sunday would be taken by CS3216 too.. How busy!

My First Lecture in my Last Semester

2010-01-16T00:29:00.007+08:00

Attended the 1st CS3216 lecture earlier this Monday and it feels really different from the rest of the modules I've taken since Year 1. Even though the lesson ended at 11.15pm because the Show & Tell session was unexpectedly long, I wasn't feeling tired at all after attending this nearly 5hr module. In fact, I was so hyped up I couldn't sleep at night, thinking of all the different things that were said during the lecture, the different thoughts I had, and the endless possibilities that could happen during the module..

One of the things that Prof Ben said was about learning. From young, I've never really thought about what to do and what should I do when I grow up. I follow the mundane system of going through the same path most of the children in Singapore took, Primary School -> Secondary School -> JC -> NS -> University. I learn for the sake of doing well for examinations. I've always been influenced that this is a elitist society and without paper qualifications, you cannot succeed in life. But looking at my peers who graduated from NUS, they all said that actually paper qualifications are not exactly that important in work life later on. However, I still believe that having paper qualifications does enable more chances for you to grab hold of, it isn't really that useless after all. But whether or not we can make good use of the chances is up to the individual, and I hope I could be one successful person in life.

This course emphasizes on learning and making a difference, it may seem easy when you look at the surface, but there is actually no depth in learning and how you make a difference. Many a time you think that you have learnt something just because you have revised and studied for the module, but how many times did the things you learnt actually internalize within you and becomes part of you? I guess it's not a lot.

Asking about the meaning of life and the definition of success, I always thought that it was a trick question which no one could really answer. But Prof Ben's reply to these questions pulled my heartstrings and I realised that perhaps I haven't been living my life the way it should be lived till now. A lot of thoughts flowed through my mind, and that's perhaps one reason why I couldn't sleep later that night. And the portfolios of the cohort has also stunned me. People who are younger than me are all doing something they like and meaningful, and I actually did nothing for my past 24years of my life. I've been miserably following the system assigned to me and my whole life in NUS is about the miserable x.xx number..

Actually I've tried to do something I think interests me and it's blogging. I've been blogging way back since 2004 but it was kept private. I finally decided to make it public late last month because blogging about my interests (tech stuff) to a small group of friends (non-tech people) is boring. Nobody appreciates them and I felt demoralized. The decision to make it public was just a trial test but I'm surprised that the traffic of the blog went pretty well, at least I didn't expect that much traffic for a blog with random ramblings from me. I hope it will become a success and I would finally have something that is interesting for me to talk about.

The second part of the first lecture is a Bingo game. I was actually quite reluctant to participate at first when I hear about it because I don't mix well with people I'm not familiar with. But since I need groupmates and I need to be more proactive and outgoing (which I've been trying to improve), I decided to give it a try. And well, it wasn't that daunting after all. I was quite humble personally (or it's a lack of self confidence), I didn't fill in any of the guru or whiz boxes at all. And because of this + the show&tell, people don't really know who I am and what I'm capable of and thus I found it hard to find groupmates for the 1st 2 assignments even though I approached many people personally. I guess when I was choosing my teammates, they are choosing me as well, and I wasn't part of their consideration list. I hope in the later part of the course, I could prove myself and get recognized for my effort. :)

The last part of this class was the Show&Tell session. I was the 2nd in the group and I advertised about my new blog, nothing much about me and my capabilities. I didn't realise that the things I did in my internship or in school can be something interesting to the rest of the people. I always think that work is work and school is school, and they are boring stuff. But after listening to them, the talks and the talents, I was really motivated yet ashamed at the same time. My achievements which I thought was quite okie is super insignificant as compared to some of them. Their confidence and the way they portray their thoughts and feelings makes you envy them. Compared to me, I was just an insignificant small fry that I don't think anyone will notice throughout the whole show&tell. But I've decided to change. I now look at things from a different perspective and it makes my final semester in NUS more fulfilling and satisfying.. I've decided to throw my CAP and everything away and do what I want to do in this semester. (But I still want to graduate and not flunk my exams ya. haha.) Cos I believe that when you do what you love and interested, the grade comes anyway. haha.

CS3216 is a class that is really different. A class of enthusiastic and really talented people. I would really want to see how things unfold during the course of this semester. I do not regret attending this module at all, even though I initially wanted a very slack semester and not care about school this sem. I guess I'm those people who wanted a leave an impact before I leave school. 加油 WiRuS!!

Grouping Excel Tutorial.

2010-01-15T00:31:00.001+08:00

Hi, there are people who aren't really clear about how to use the excel file, so I shall give a short example here.

For example,

During the formation of the Google Wave Grouping, you have found 2 additional guys, Person A and Person B.

You have joined Grp 1 for FB App, and Grp 3 for FB Seminar..
Person A - Grp 3 for FB App, Grp 7 for FB Seminar..
Person B - Grp 5 for FB App, Grp 10 for FB Seminar..

You now need to find a Person Z that can fit into this grouping, to find out the person who can fit this list, you need
to uncheck 1,3 and 5 from the FB App column and 3,7 and 10 for FB Seminar.

The people left are the person that can fit and join this group. In this way, you will not need to ask too many people
that will clash with this certain group.

CS3216 Grouping Excel

2010-01-14T19:43:00.006+08:00

As we are not supposed to group with one another in the 3 different assignments, I've come up with a excel file with simple filters to allow us to narrow down the range of students that we can group with for the next assignments as it will get messier and messier..

To use the excel file, just filter out the groups of the person you wish to work with for the Google Wave assignment (Including yourself).. In this way, if u decide to team up with the person, the excel file will automatically filter out the people that has worked with that person and you will not need to spend extra time asking other people that you can't form groups with..

Hope it helps.. It's nothing fanciful but I think it can help out quite a bit..

Download the file here.. I will update the file again with all the groupings after friday..

[7.58pm] I realised that Ryan and Sebestian are in the same groups for both Assignment 1 & 2..

[8.17pm] Added photo thumbnails into the excel sheet.

About me.

2010-01-14T14:47:00.002+08:00

I guess I've to advertise myself a bit as it seems that everyone is choosing everyone else based on qualifications.. No doubt everyone has pretty good qualifications to start with..

I'm a Year 4 School of Computing Information Systems student. Very interested in IT stuff and programming. I'm also a very quick learner.

I'm a blogger, have work experience, passionate about CS3216 and has done pretty well (A range) in programming related modules such as CS1101, CS1102, CS2261 and CS3214. That's about all the programming modules I can think of. One thing about me is that I like to start things early and complete them asap. So things assigned to me will be done on time and you do not have to worry about me handing up any tasks late.

I've a light workload this semester (4modules with 2 s/us left) and I do not have any fyp on my hands. So I'm able to devote myself into this module and not cause any problems to others.. I'm good in programming and particularly excel in coding engines and developing algorithms for programs.

Here are some of the projects that I've done:

CS3214: Developed a Business Management Portal for commercial training and education companies using EJB 3.0 & MySQL. Project Leader of the team.

CRA: I developed a Gaming Equipment Approval System for them MOSS, MS InfoPath & MS Excel singlehandedly, learning them from scratch. I also help enhance and improve on an existing HR Training Profile System. I also conducted presentations for the department & wrote reports and user manuals for the system.

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This is my resume for the application for this module..

Hope everyone is pleased with it.. :)

The reason I did not put this up earlier is because I have a 3 day week and thursdays and fridays are my free days.. I didn't realise that even not attending to my email for like 2-3hours (lectures/travelling time) would cost me to lose chances to join certain groups or find certain people. So I hope I'm not too late.

Sharing my tech blog entries.

2010-01-10T21:26:00.004+08:00

Hi everyone.. In order to share my interest with the rest of the class and increase my traffic on my own blog :P, I'm going to share my tech posts here by sharing my blog links here. I hope you all are interested in it ya.. haha..

Here are some of the more recent tech posts on my blog.

- How to add RSS to your site?
- Easy way to upload many pictures to WordPress..
- Installing my Fuji Xerox DocuPrint C1110..
- Synchronizing my rainlendar..
- Hooted a Fuji Xerox C1110 Network Colour Laser Printer..
- Wireless Encryption
- My undervolting experience

All the tech posts are posted under the Computer Geek. and Gadget Crazy categories..
I also like to eat so I always provide my own food reviews under Food Galore` category..

So please support my blog ya! Thanks!

Quantity or Quality?

2010-01-08T11:39:00.002+08:00

I've been looking around at other module mates' blog to see what they hope to learn in CS3216 cos I believe the things we all wanted to learn are different.. But looking at some of their blogs.. I realised that they posted a lot of other posts that do not exactly relate to the CS3216 context.. And I wonder how do we actually get the maximum possible marks for this particular segment.

I know that bell curve will not be imposed on this module, but people tend to compare.. Looking at 1 blog with 50posts and another with the bare minimum of 13 posts for 13 weeks, which do you think is better, quality of content aside? I actually do have another blog which I like to research on technical stuff and I didn't post them here. I would prefer people going over to that blog instead of me posting it here. But if posting it here would net me more marks for this segment, I should post here too.

But I hope miscellaneous posts wouldn't have much effect on the marks on this segment, it should only be an indicator to show that we attended the lecture and learnt something out of it right?

What I hope to learn in CS3216..

2010-01-04T15:13:00.010+08:00

This is the topic that I'm supposed to blog about for my first post. Technically this is not my first post anymore because I was so excited that I got into this module I posted and revamped the whole blog template to have a personalized and not a template-ized blog. So, what do I hope to learn in CS3216? I seriously have no idea. I need to think it through.

Let me think of what I've done to get me into this CS3216 module.. It is definitely not easy to get in.. I remembered this module was offered 2years ago when Facebook craze just started and everyone wants to be part of it. I applied for this module together with Lester but I didn't get selected because perhaps my resume and experience do not look attractive enough. Lester got in though. And my secondary school/JC friend Yan Jie (The tutor now) got in too.. At that period, I thought to myself. In what way was I inferior to those who got into this module? I think that I have what it takes to get into this module. But perhaps what I think I know is not enough to let others think that I'm good enough. And to be good enough in other people's eyes, I have to show people that I'm good enough. And that started my journey to aim and get into this module.

To be frank, I'm actually not that good after all that that period. I don't know much except for basics such as CS1101, CS1102 and perhaps my JC Computing. And maybe my interest in programming. If you ask me what I hope to learn then, I would just say that I wanted to learn how to create successful facebook applications and learn more programming stuff.

So I worked harder in my studies. And my results really showed that I'm better in my programming modules and I'm just in the wrong major, I shouldn't be in IS haha. During my CS2261, I started very early for my final project and was the first to bug the lecturer with questions on things he haven't taught yet and was the first to submit and finish the project. During my CS3214, I was the team leader and before the start of the project, I asked a similar question to my project mates, "What do you all want to achieve for this project and what is the desired grade that you all hope to achieve?" From the answers I roughly knew how much effort each and everyone wanted to put in and tried to distribute workload suitable for everyone. But I guess my desire to be the best few teams gave unnecessary pressure to my team mates and we all went crazy during that period. But I still think that it's a fun and enjoyable experience, maybe because our grades reflected the efforts we put in into our project. What I've learnt here is that time and people management are more important than skills in a project team.

Camping overnight in COM1.. Nope it's not us..

My CS3214 Project Mates..

Last summer, I went to find an internship job to get some industry experience and learn more about how companies work. Initially I thought during an internship, you will be provided a mentor to guide and aid you as you learn the ropes during the course of the internship. But on day 1 of the internship, I realised it is not the case. I had a supervisor who drafted out the project specifications for me and the rest was on my own. I was dumped a few thick books on MS InfoPath and SharePoint and I'm expected to learn everything myself, because my department do not know how to develop them at all. I admit I learned a lot there, especially from the vendors who developed the SharePoint portal for them. The vendors actually asked me how much I earned here and told me that I was seriously overworked and underpaid but well, it was an experience for me. During the course of internship, I realised that I've indeed grown and I understand that confidence matters a lot when doing work.

So in this semester, I tried applying for CS3216 again, my last chance though (Year 4 already), and I got in. When posed with this topic, I asked myself what I really hope to learn? Perhaps it's programming skills? project management? time management? people management? build up my profile? build up my confidence? I think I've gained some of those during my journey to build up my resume to join this module. And so what do I seriously hope to learn now?

Perhaps I would hope to be able think out of the box, and to learn how to deal with all the incoming challenges so as to know how far I could go? I would perhaps hope to improve on all my skillsets that I currently have.. I would like to mix and engage with people of different faculties to gain more exposure. Actually I just hope to be able to relive the joys of school and enjoy the process to take something I'm interested in.

And I guess that's what I hope to learn. I hope it's not too demanding? haha..

I've gotten the CS3216 module!

2009-12-26T13:50:00.003+08:00

After failing to get this module in my 2nd year of studies (1st time this module is released), I strived and work hard to boost my resume and portfolio in order to try it again.. And this time.. I got it! Yeah!