CS3216 - Conclusion

I apologize for using such a bland title, but I guess nothing else is quite as direct.

let go over this in chronological order.

First, managing people is the most important thing in a team. In my facebook app assignment, I was (unfortunately) the person with the most software engineering experience, and that wasn't a lot. Grouped with angad, yinchao and liuliu, this turned out to be quite the disaster because we decided to scale back the amount of technologies needed to just sql/javascript/html/fbml. The problem here was that it became too easy, and there isn't enough for people to do. I realized that early, but did little to stop it(partly because i had no idea how to) and the other quickly became dissented, eventually, they dropped.

The next lesson, is not to let self-doubt get you. I am a fairly confident person, and I know my capabilities very well. Never throughout the assignment did I feel that Angand and I were incapable of meeting our targets, but sometimes, just sometimes, there will be these little bit of yourself that asks, "is this really going to work?". The key here is not to just shove these self-dobuts right back to where they came from, that just means they will come back much more strong re the next time. But to answer these doubts with action. If you feel like you may not reach a target in time, you jolly well do something to make sure that doesn't happen. Self-doubt is the worse thing that can happen, since it destroys your morale and self-esteem.

Lesson three, ask questions, stupid or not. If you feel something isn't right, raise the issue until he gets it or you get it. Don't be afraid to ask stupid questions, "if you ask a stupid question, you look stupid for a day. If you don't ask a stupid question, you stay stupid for life." I know a lot of people are still uncomfortable with asking questions, it is obvious that most questions during talks are asked by laurence, tom, john loh, john lewd and adhiraj.

Lesson four, grades don't matter, nobody looks at what grades Mark Zuckerburg got. It really is about ideas and execution. Grades may be a metric used for hiring, but our goal in life isn't to work right?(pls. read Adrian Tan's speech if you have no idea what I'm talking about)

Lesson five is on success, this is actually something I already knew, just reinforced in this module. Success is defined differently by different people, and there are seriously no sure path to success. Some people are satisfied money, others by spiritual enlightenment, even more prefer to pursue interests and be good at it. The key here is to be yourself and not be influenced by other people's success. Look at the entrepreneurs that came to talk to us, everyone of them have a different success story, sometimes even conflicting ones, put them in each others shoes and maybe they will flop and fail miserably. Listen to your heart and be yourself, theres a good chance that you will fail on the first, second, third try, but then again if you try enough times you chance of success will tend to 1.

The most important lesson though, is to not try too hard, which was what prof ben told me after 2 of my teammates dropped. Pushing too hard leaves no room for anything else. There was this concept brought forward by honking writer 黄易, called 遁去的一, basically if you have 50 slots for chairs. If you fill all 50 slots with chairs you lose the ability to change anything, your pattern is stuck. However, if you had 49 chairs in 50 slots, you will have 48! patterns(I hope I remembered by circular permutation formula correctly). Its just like playing poker, obviously there are maximum returns if you go all-in. But you're out of the game totally if you lose, however, just keeping 1 chip alive gives you a(very long) shot at getting back into the game. Something like that. Thats actually reinforced by Randy Paush's speech, you don't really need to go all out to make your dreams, but if you lead your life correctly, you'll find that everything comes together for yourself.

It has been a blast taking CS3216, thanks to all my wonderful classmates, TAs and 1 particularly evil professor. I theresay nothing I do in NUS will come as close as this. I hope all of you guys keep your passion for whatever you are doing, and in the immortal words of a certain prefoessor "do the right thing".

Cheers
Orry

Network, Grades and Meritocracy

As someone taking CS3103 this sem, which is the nightmare known as networks II. I actually understood quite a bit of the stuff that zit seng was talking about..

Understood, yes.. But how to apply? No idea..

Sigh... Like Prof say, what he's doing is an art, quite hard to learn over 2 hours.

The second part of the lecture is much much more interesting. dealing with meritocracy, one of the 5 cornerstone concepts our wonderful country was built upon.

I don't know why but I felt there was a little contradiction in prof's arguments.

1) He has reached the apex of the academic system through his mad studying abilities

2) He believes grades don't matter, except for the first job.

3) He hires people based on grades first, ability second.

So can we conclude that

1) Regardless how good one is in his respective field, we still need decent grades? Like how our athletes need certain grades to enter a SPORTS school.

2) Our first job will determine our second job, our third job, up till the point you decide that being hired isn't worth the time and make your own living. So then your grades will affect your first job, which then cascades down. Eg. If I have straight Bs and end up in a semi-decent job in a semi-decent company, as opposed to getting straight As and ending up in the same job in an excellent company, then the difference in prospects is still huge regardless of personal abilities.

What I feel is that, although our system is still meritocratic somewhat, it is only based on the academic skill, someone NOT a government scholar will never rise up to ministerial level.

Making up for lost groud...

So I promised to write something regarding the VC lecture, but apparently my procrastination got the better of me..

In retrospect, now is probably a much better time to reflect on the lessons I learnt from the VC team, considering now is when I actually have to factor in so many issues with team dynamics.

First and most important lesson, recognize your limits. There are some things in life that are impossible, eg. Marrying Keira Knightley. However, most other things in life are not difficult, give some effort and time. Correction, given ENOUGH effort and time.
In a project scope with very limited time and when members have limited technical skills, clamping the feature creep is crucial to the final success. The problem with VC is that they keep coming up with new and cool features that end up requiring repeatedly rebooting the project from step 1.

Second lesson draws directly from the first, the team morale will suffer if there are too many functions that cannot be implemented, or when they have to frequently restart at square 1.

So that brings me to my third lesson, iterative design, which all of you reading this already know. Start small, always make something deployable, and then slowly expand. Even if you have to rewrite everything to incorporate an extra feature. You still have a working version deployed that you can fallback on.

Thats all for now. Stay tuned for the next installment on google wave.

Settling old debts

So I need to do either a blog post on microsoft guy or VC..

Hmmm..

Actually, its going to be: why I'd rather blog about VC over microsoft guy, then I'll write another post on what I learnt from VC.

Now.. Back to Chewy, first impression he gives me is that he's a salesman, and not just any salesman, but a pyramid scheme salesman, don't ask me why, it's just a gut feeling.

His lesson of "other people are not the same as you are" is not anything groundbreaking or new. He just packaged it nicely with his stand up comedian act. Lets look at things from a different perspective.

When microsoft just entered china, they sold their chinese products with similar prices with that of their american counterparts. Guess what, you could buy a full copy of windows 7 for 4 RMB, fully cracked, bugless, guaranteed to work, and a much better 1 to 1 product exchange service microsoft ever imagined. Needless to say, Microsoft got owned, and they adapted, to significantly reducing their prices to levels affordable to the chinese public, but setting the language packs to chinese only(meaning you were stuck with win7 that said 我的电脑 and you can't change it to My Computer), this was prolly to ensure others won't exploit the price difference and sell them overseas.

Guess what, it still didnt work.

So what does this tell us? Other people are NOT the same as you are. What works in the states and europe will not work in a completely different demographic. Well we get that. So whats the point of complaining that marketeers are not putting in effort???

/aside What is a Marketeer??? Is it like a musketeer? Except with a marker? /end-aside

I'm pretty damn sure there have been companies that have tried lowering prices aggressively to try to get an edge in the market, someone would have tried something already if something is wrong. Either that or it just didn't work. Yes, I agree if you wanted to beat the field you need to do something special. But hey, I sure as hell don't see microsoft doing anything agressive with their marketing strategy..

I understand that coming back from the states, he must be really bewildered by how our market works, but here's something you need to learn from bush. You canNOT force what works for you down other people's throats! Bush tried that with his version of freedom and democracy and justice and tried shoving it all in one go down Iraq and Afghanistan. Guess what, it DIDNT work. So you don't get to take whatever "aggressive marketing strategy" you have to asia and come and judge us. Because you have no idea how the population here think and live.

Remember, others are different from you.

External Pitch

To be honest, I'm writing this because prof ben emailed us saying we owe him blog entries.

Well.. To be very honest, I didn't really have a very strong impression on the external pitching session.

There are some lessons that I've learnt though.

First off, you don't always need to know what you want, but you should have at least a rough idea. There was some guy that wanted us to build a sims cities app, with no details and too much room for things to go wrong.

Next up, the idea is awesome, but its only occasionally useful. Jace(beleren, hohoho) has an awesome idea. I loved it. I mean, 1 week every semester I have to go through tons of stats to find out when I should bid for what modules, who are the lecturers, then I would have to research on the lecturers and the past lesson plans. It would be wonderful to have a site that did all this for me. However, the site would be only useful once every semester, which was a HUGE problem since most websites thrive on ads, and ads will only come if you have hits.

Personally, I feel that this is an idea with massive potential, just off the top of my head, I will setup the site so that it is endorsed by the school itself. Secondly, I will want it to review not only modules, but also lecturers, since I feel the content doesnt really matter, but the approach to which it was taught does(I have AlOT to say about a certain OS lecturer). To make users come back more often, schools that are affiliated to the site will automatically update the system with their lecturers and modules, students(who sign in with matric no) should be able to give feedback(read: whine) at any time without retribution. Lecturers should also be able to sign in with their accounts, but they will not be able to see any reviews that users set to private.

Lesson 3, always show people the good side of the picture. 6 waves claim they have 11 million monthly users, that is however, spread between a dozen games of 300-600k users each. Exactly how many of these are repeat users are not known, so the exact numbers should actually be far less impressive. But obviously whoever you're selling it to doesnt need to know the details :p

Thats all for now.

GetHelp?

Its been a week or two since I last blogged, being bogged down by the final project(YES, the final project), NM3216, and various other modules I lagging behind in(read: all other modules).

So then only an hour ago when yecheng asked me if I've written my case study on gethelp, did I realize I actually have more work from cs3216 than I could imagine.

So onto getHelp, my first impression after reading through the case study is that its really similar to spreadem, the facebook app I built for the the first assignment. The first thing that comes to mind is the profile page. The aim of the app is for the user to come back as often as possible, and placing the "new projects" page at the start of the page will encourage users to only come whenever they have a need, and not to come on every now and then to view new 'gethelp' requests.

The next issue I see is in overviews page, like I said, this should be the first page users see each time they log on. Also, by placing award receivers on the overviews page, there's a risk that it gets clogged up by receivers, thereby masking out the help requests.

When creating a new project, the "call for help" button is situated in the top right hand side, by the form. In this case, it is not intuitive to have the textbox there because in most cases users will want to add more details with regards to what they need. This page should be modified so that the "call for help" button is after all the options, so that the user can at least make sure he didn't miss out anything.

In the individual needs page, the layout makes it rather casual, most users who are looking for help should be rather urgent or serious, yet the layout doesn't reflect how desperate they are, nor are there enough space for users to give more details, suppose I need to learn how to build a server that supports 200 people for a multiplayer game(I actually do), I will need to give way more information than the space actually allows.

Next, the referral system, this, I'm guessing, will allow users that can see the project and send referrals to others. However, this is limiting the possibilities for collaboration, suppose I get a request for help, one that I cannot assist with. Now it should be obvious that I will want to refer someone else. But with 4-500 friends it can be REALLY hard to know what EVERYONE is good with. It will be much much more efficient so send that request to everyone, and even if they don't know how to help, they can FURTHER pass down the request to all their friends.

UI wise, at the bottom of the new projects page, there's a list of SQL code which really isn't supposed to be there, should be some weird bug or just for testing purposes. Also, the slanted icons look nice, but the texts should be horizontal at least, increase with the readability.The helpers and probables should be collapsable, since the list might be very long if the project is rather popular.

Lastly, to really maximize facebook, users should have the opportunity to view all the (unresolved)requests and help people that he didn't in the first place. Hence, in the overviews page, there should be a "view latest" which shows all the new requests provided by ALL the users, instead just that of his friends. By association there should also be a search so users can look for similar help requests or just to look for something within his expertise so he can continue gaining badges.

Mafia Warz

I had a strange feeling I'll be doing critique on mafia wars while Jiwei's video was running, I guess thats +1 for prediction markets working.

On to the app, from someone that aims to design games, this thing is crap.

No, seriously, it really really sucks.

It's mechanics are almost non-existent, there is little-to-no strategizing involved, everything is just point and click.

The game dynamics are worse, its just do this, invite friends, do that, level up. There's little variation from level 1 to level (Arbitrary Large Number) except the number of friends that one needs. I remember when I wrote my application for 3216, I said most apps on facebook have minimum user interaction, both between the game and between players, meaning all you need to do is repeat very similar tasks day-in day-out in order to progress. Mafia wars is the very representation of that.

But why is it still attracting 24 million users monthly?

First, most people use facebook when they're bored or tired of work, they need something to take their minds off whatever they were doing, mafia wars lets them do that. Its simple(really simple), its instant gratification and it doesn't require a huge amount of time commitment(per use). Players can log on, do a few things, level up and go back to whatever they were doing. And most importantly, it never ends.

Secondly, the idea of being a mafia lord is very enticing to most people. For adults, these fantasies were planted by movies like Godfather and 上海滩(coast of shanghai, mob movie by Chao Yun Fat) since young. For youngsters, its games like GTA and serials like The Sopranos. Mafia wars provides it users an illusion of being a mafia lord, it gives them an avenue to imagine. By having no graphics, no effects etc. users have to rely on their imagination to 'fill in' what they did. This is the same as other 'imagine games' like farming and opening a cafe, prying on the busy daily lives of people nowadays and giving them an escape.

Thirdly, peer pressure, when 10-15 friends throw mafia wars invite on you, its hard NOT to join, and once you join, you are again given the illusion of socializing, of playing the game together with your friends. When in actual fact there is minimal socializing going on. This pyramid scheme style of recruiting new players is downright dirty, since it 'forces' players to recruit new players in order to advance, and the sad thing is that players just do so in order to play the game.

On a side note to the lead generation fiasco. While Zynga is very very dirty and full of fertilizers, you have ONLY yourself to blame if you get scammed.

To quote my guild leader "No amount of internet security will solve the gaping security breach sitting in front of the monitor"

And guess what, that is one thing that ISNT taught in school. We're taught to never take candy from a stranger, but we're not taught to NOT click on the link that says "CONGRATS!! YOU ARE OUR 999999th VISITOR".

Lastly, there still doest seem to be a defining authority on internet scamming, if I rob some Scottish in Scotland, chances are good I'll be sentenced by Scotland local court. But if I scam a Scot? Too bad, you stupid Scottish!(I sincerely hope no one here has an affiliation with any Scots). Now we have to trust the facebook authorities to take care of what are scams and what are not, but who is facebook to decide when they have their own apps, their own adds, who do we complain to when we get scammed by facebook??

p.s. To answer prof Ben's statement of "Flixster not exactly a facebook app". I think, its rather much more than a normal facebook app. Compare it to marketplace, one lists items people want to sell, the other lists movies. Not too different right?
Also, lets just consider that flixster.com did not exist before facebook, the current flixster app would've been great right, you can connect with friends, organize outings, write reviews, create quizzes etc. Which is what most other non-game apps do as well.

Reality is a bitch..

Reality hits you hard..

Thought I could have a little break after I complete my facebook application.

That thought apparently is just a fantasy..

Saturday was a blur.. Went for workshop, followed by another 3216(not CS) project meeting, then went out to buy materials for that project.

Sunday, trying to read my readings and settle my seminar...

Here's my todo list:

Monday:
Reflection essay for NM3216, for playing 4 games that one have to obtain himself and a 22 page redaing.
1st draft of game design project with prototype and basic rules.
Facebook seminar..

Tuesday:
Seminar blog..
Slog through 40 other blogs and comment
3103 tutorial
3103 lab
Many weeks of 3103 lectures..

Wed:
Many Many Many sets of new media readings..
2101 tutorial

Thurs:
Google Wave Assignment!!!!

Dear Ben, I know you are starting a "cs3216 for mortals" course next sem.

But if it's possible, do keep the current program available and remodel it into a pseudo ATAP program.. I.e. industrial attachment+cs3216 - other modules..

p.s. All my classmates for CS3216 will become my default beta-tester for my NM3216(Game Design) project. Penalty for rejection will be death by tickling... Muahahaha...

FInally...

The whole of last week was over in a flash. And this is me finally having time to write it after staying awake for 50 odd hours.

First liuliu and yinchao dropped, leaving me and angad on ourselves.

Then AWS lecture, the technical aspects really was interesting, but not exciting.

On the other and, Simone, was a much more inspiring presence by himself, I imagine that he will have to explain all these technicalities to customers who don't really care except for their profits. He probably speaks quite well. I hope he enjoys the perpetual summer here in singapore.

Photo of Tanenbaum was... well.. Lets just say he wrote my OS textbook, and that was a module I did NOT enjoy.

What really was entertaining was how prof ben got a taste of his own medicine with "It depends"

Now.. back on assignment 1. Finally finished after 3 sleepless nights, we had to shave alot of functions because we didnt have the required knowledge and the time to figure everything out. But I was very proud of my final submission, although it was ugly piece of code I've ever written, with almost zero abstraction, copy-pasted code everywhere and we have to scramble through our pages just to find a piece of code to edit.. It was still immensely satisfying to see soemthing of your own creation work.

One thing I will tell you though, is that while the current implementation won't draw alot of users due to buginess and lack of features, the underlying concept is one that I believe in(oh the whole project has gone a longgggg wayyyyyy)..

And lastly, thanks Su Yuen, Jason and Yuen Hoe for being around com1/msn when we needed you guys/gals..

Post lect reflection, and my very late piece on success

Back from jogging, first time since I injured my back last june. Felt really good, and much greater clarity of thought.

First off I think alot of people are freaked out about the mid assignment milestone. Last night, at 3 am, between the 12 people in SoC basement and outside tech services, 11 were CS3216 students. On hindsight, they weren't actually that hard, and they exists so that we would plan our application better, so I really didnt have to camp overnight in SoC..

On to the software engineering lecture, so I've yet to take CS2103, and I don't plan to do it in NUS, since as a CM major there are pitifully little core modules I can map for SEP. Now the lecture by prof ben is really quite intro, and as he said himself, it's aimed towards the non-cs people, whereas for us the main course of the day was the sharing session by wei man and justin.

Now this is where it gets quite interesting, earlier this week I was involved in a little leadership crisis myself, since I was really had no experience taking charge, especially in a software engineering project, and so my work allocation was really terrible. At least that can be justified, since I really had no idea what to do, but I also neglected on the team communication aspect, and that if I had properly spoken to all my team members, I would have saved myself alot of trouble.

That said, all is well now, and I dare say this is one hell of a useful lecture :).

Now, I know this is really late, but I have my own little piece on success.

There was this issue of reader's digest, where there was this food for thought column.
And the story went like this, a very rich, retired old man was enjoying life on his yacht fishing around the pacific. He met this fishermen one day, and they had a great time chatting. To his horror, the fishermen had no concept of financial investment, or any sort of long term planning at all, so he took his time and taught him how to invest in stocks, build up his portfolio etc etc.... After he was done, the fishermen looked at him puzzled, and asked, 'so what would I do with all this money?' To which the rich man answered ' You could retire to a small island and fish in peace everyday'
And the fishermen responded immediately, 'But thats what I'm already doing now'..

Well, I know the whole point of this anecdote is to tell you that happiness lies in a peaceful and contented life.

But think about it this way.

The rich men, had he been in his 30s, how much would he had enjoyed his life is he spent the rest of his life in fishing peacefully in a serene little town?

I mean, none of you would go back and tell your parents, "I think true happiness lies in a peaceful and contented life, I shall go become a fisherman in Indonesia" after reading this right??

So what I want to say is, success is a state of mind, it's always up to you yourself to determine how successful you are, all the fame and glory in the world does not make one successful if he/she himself/herself thinks otherwise. Not only that, but your own priorities can change, what you value with your life today you may toss it aside the next morning. So don't go all in and think of what you must achieve at all costs. Take a deep breadth, go with the flow, and enjoy the ride.

Grouping woes and 3216 reflection

I just realized for my previous post I kept ranting about the china/google situation that I left out my post show-and-tell session.

Lets get that in first.
Apparently everyone was talking about prof Ben's speech, on learning how to learn and stuff..

What I think, really affected me is when he said that teaching is a calling, and that he wants to teach students to learn how to learn. I just read an article on how students from 清华 just blindly regurgitate books and teachers who try creative methods get punished by the school and the party.. And here we are, given the chance to do anything we want and magnificently flop, to work with all these talented people(seriously, with that kind of show-and-tell, we can charge performance fees) is a really lucky oppurtunity.

Next up, 'the world is in deep shit'.. Really.. not just the economy.. For the last 4000 years, the human race population is kept under wraps by the most efficient forms of population control, War and Famine. Now, war is minimal and the worse type of famine is flu, people are living longer than ever, and are wanting more than ever. Yet it is econs 101 that wants are unlimited but resources are finite. So we keep taxing the planet itself, like prof Ben said, energy is the big thing, its the most important thing we take from the environment.

In keynes theory(correct me if I'm wrong) the Economy is NOT zero-sum, meaning that its possible to have every country in the world having positive economic growth.. however, we can't really sustain that, since our planet will run out of resources really really fast. Already the US is left with 40 years of steel and 20 years of coal, so...

Well.. i don't really know what I can do to help, but I can jolly well try.. Laurence got it right, 我生存的意义就是, 让世界因为有我的存在, 改变一点点.

Ok.. Now onwards to ranting.. If you do NOT already have an application group by this moment, DON"T think of getting an 'actual' designer. They're all taken by now.
I mean, think about it, we're the best NUS is supposed to offer(well, at least, the better) just get any 3 others, suck it up and learn how put your ideas into reality, I dunno how hard its gonna be, but I sure as hell am gonna try. I've seen groups with 4 engineers/ computers(socians).. Mine is something like that, and I am pretty sure all of us will be both designing and coding.

Take a step back, take a deep breadth, have some self confidence, and forget about grades.. Given the average intellect of the class, I'm pretty sure all of us will do well as long as we put in the requisite effort/all-nighters..

I guess thats all for now.. I just finished a marathon chatting session looking for group members consisting at its peak, 2 FB convo, 3 MSN convo, 2 Gchat convo, 1 Wave, and 2 QQ conversations, at the same time.. Finally done, yet still I'm 1 short for my seminar group.. Please drop me a msg if interested.. Thanks..

Post Google, Post show-and-tell thoughts..

For the less informed: Times and Google Blog

Quite stunning news, in fact, also inspiring.. Having just returned from China, I can attest to how bad the internet situation in China. It would seem they have a temporary IP jammer that blocks your IP each time you try to access sensitive content. We were tasked to work on a project that involves industrial pollution in china. Guess what, all the photos are blocked when you try to click on the links, your IP is then recored(I speculate) and any URL that links out from your search page are then blocked.

eg. Suppose I open a google page and search for 'starbucks', I next open a page for 'dalai lama', The dalai page will be blocked. And when I go back to click on a starbucks links it'll be blocked too.

T
his is added upon the fact that twitter, youtube and facebook are blocked. It would seem that China has willingly excluded itself from the internet. And with the incoming google departure Chinese netizens may be left with a regional network for themselves.

Now, I want to do a bit of speculation as to what will happen post-showdown. Google is taking a very unconventional hardline stand against the traditionally very hardline China. This should imply they've expected that China will not give in, coupled with the "breaking borders" award they announced on the 6th, which is given to outstanding individuals/websites that uphold freedom of speech and human rights, we should see Google taking a much more active role in maintaining integrity on the web.

Google's share price dropped by 3.84% after the announcement, but David Drummond, the Chief Legal Officer of Google, seemed unperturbed when interviewed by CNN, citing that profits in China are insignificant. He may well be right, already there are critics questioning if everything is a self-orchestrated publicity stunt, whatever it may be, the announcement has, without a doubt, gave Google a massive publicity boost. Now on the absolute high ground in terms of human rights and freedom of speech, Google is expanding it's brand name beyond the field of IT, to some other field that can affect everyone in the world. One wonders if it may become like some sort of red cross, since it allows information to be conveyed across the internet like no other.

The next to consider is the domino effect. China has been known to protect it's domestic industries against foreign industries. Google's stand may lead to various other MNOs deciding to do the same, Google leaving may not be a big deal, but how many different MNOs can China lose in a time of economic turmoil. Not only that, but this stand has propelled Google to a moral high ground, meaning future enterprises that enter or associate themselves with China will face pressure from human rights groups should they comply with the rules China impose. Should that become the case, the negative impact will make things really difficult, because its not worth it to lose the rest of the world for the market of China. 1.3 Billion VS 5 Billion is simple maths anyone can do.

That said, I'm really excited about how this whole thing is gonna play out, never has a corporation stand against a country, and the funny thing is that most netizens of china are with Google. Today a group of Chinese went to the Google HQ to offer bouquets, they were denied by the security guards and the official statement made by the science park is that one has to make an official request to offer flowers, or its illegal, or 非法献花. I think will be epic, the history of China has traditionally consisted of revolutions after revolutions, this particular government has been pretty good at preventing a change in leadership, with their various tools, but it would be interesting to see how they deal with this particular episode(my guess is extreme downplaying)

Anyway, here's something from world war 2, written by Martin Niemoller, a polish priest..

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak out
because I was a protestant;
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out.

Best day in NUS

//Something I wrote for my chinese facebook page after being //inspired by the 1st
//session, shall come up with an english version soon.

今天上了两节不同的3216.. 浑身都是激情... 好像就是之前3个sem在NUS受的crap都值得了..

首先是NM3216, 一开始老师就说: "Playing games are fun, but learning why playing games are fun may not be fun." 话虽如此, 但是她还是光明正大的在班上打起了游戏, 还越打越起劲.. 一直到了break..

之后是小组游戏.. 非常之exciting哇.. 而且同组美女巨多~
不只如此, 第二节课还是到settlers玩桌游! 巨爽无比!!

然后晚上CS3216.. 这个就是完全不同的league了.. 完全是自我挑战, 自我发挥的module.. 虽然第一天就已经发了25%的assignment, 而且还是一月28号交!! 但是不知道为什么就是感觉很好..

虽然大家都狂骂美国霸权主义怎么样怎么样.. 但是在NUS给我感觉最好的老师是prof Brown(直接是美国人), prof Kan(秋民彦 - 哥伦比亚大学) 还有prof Ben(麻省理工)..就拿来跟其它的lecturer(cough, Ku Ching Yew, cough)比是完全不同的概念..

然后3216的show and tell, 从9点搞到了11.15.. 50个人加起来可以办一场演唱会, 一场舞蹈表演, 编一个不下于魔兽的游戏.. 反正就是大家都很牛X, 可以做一个NUS GOT TALENT, 收视绝对保证.. 有会倒背ABCDE的, 会跳桑巴的, 会N种乐器的, 有各种business idea的, 会用模型车漂移的, 会声乐的.. 原来大家都这么talented..

人品从去年底就一直爆发.. 本来有点担心会有所下滑, 但是貌似趋势是持续往上攀升..

如果我能让我选一个命格.. 就给我自以为势吧!

What I hope to learn in CS3216? (Official title)

Actually..

I can't really answer that question, I really didn't have a checklist in mind when I signed up for the course. I know there's all kinds of cool APIs like actionscript, flash, wave API etc, business models, negotiation techniques and whatnot, but its never the proper way to learn if all you learn in the end is what you've set out to learn in the first place.

I started off with applied mathematics, but instead I found programming. I can't say that was what I had in mind in the first place, but it most definitely is a much more rewarding experience.

If I have to say something(at the expense of sounding like Watson).
I want to learn something USEFUL.

Now, the real title for this entry should be,
"What I hope to achieve this Semester"

I'm taking CS3216(obv), NM3216(Game Design), NM2101(Theories of New Media) and CS3103(AKA CS2105++). A nice set of modules that I hope can complement each other and at least allow proper entry into the world of Game Development.

I hope to confidently put forth the ideas in my head into programming languages and therefore reality.

I hope I have fun this sem, instead of memorizing calculus and stats formulas or learning OS, I want to enjoy programming, much like the fun I had in CS1101X.

I hope to have fun playing the games I designed.

I hope others have fun playing games I designed.

I hope I take my work seriously enough to NOT leave everything to the last minute(seriously).

And of course I hope to learn something useful.

Rushing for deadlines - Before School starts :(

Schools starting in 2 days, stuck home writing papers for my Wuhan Winter
Program.

Looking forward to school starting, taking NM/CS3216, NM2101,CS3103.. Hopefully NM and CS3216 complement each other.. Hopefully...