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Friday, Apr 18, 2008 - 01:52 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Officially Sick

Finally managed to squeeze in an overdue fever/cold into my schedule. I'm getting my appetite back at least, so I suppose the worst of it is already over :P

Wednesday came at a bad time, given that I knew I was coming down with something the day before, with invigilation duties for the CS1101C practical examination from ten to twelve and the CS3216 poster presentation after that from one to four; Wearing formal wear with a tie made it just that bit worse.

Hopped onto a cab to campus for the second time this semester to hand off a CD containing my poster to my teammate for him to take care of the printing at Technical Services. The printing itself has another short story behind it: I tried my luck the day before at the Unimax Copy Centre outlet at JEC, but even they didn't have an A1 printer, and though they were very helpful in referring me to a couple of their branches in the city area - or even emailing their head honcho for a rush job - that obviously didn't do anything for me. Makes me wonder just how many large-scale printers there are in Singapore.

Before that I had the surprise of the month when waiting for the bus at a bus stop. An elderly man walked by me and whipped out a watch while mumbling "Rolex" in a way that made me unsure whether he was furtively trying to make a sale, or was not in the soundest state of mind. Either way, he moved off swiftly enough while I was trying to get my thoughts in order.

Well, back to the invigilation. Usually I'm on the receiving end of things, so being the guy writing the time on the whiteboard, droning out instructions and checking matriculation cards was surely a change. And I discovered first-hand how difficult it is to sit and watch while not doing anything. Pacing up and down was much better, despite my woozy-headedness. Amused myself by reading the problem for lab six of the module, which was pasted upside-down on the glass partition of the door, while doing those labs.

Simplified, it's about a Monkey King, who has 0 to 2 descendants, each of who may have 0 to 2 descendents too and so on, and each of whom is liable to pay a certain number of bananas to their king as a tribute. Given that the king decides that for each of his descendants whom pay a tribute, only one (and at least one) of their descendants have to pay a tribute as well (if that descendant has any descendants), can we determine if a certain total number X of bananas can be collected through some combination of descendants? Obviously it can since its a lab problem, but it may be an interesting question especially for non-Computing students to mull over.

Sadly a few of the students didn't seem to have typed all that much in the one hour and forty-five minutes allotted, so either they had come out with some incredibly brief and elegant approach, or they could have done with more practice. It must be taken into account that the bulk of them were Engineering students who probably were thrown into their first programming class ever - playing a small part in introducing them into the segfault-ridden world of C++ programming was on the whole quite fun, if time consuming. Either way, it was over soon enough.

Had an hour or so to the poster exhibition, which I probably enjoyed a little less than I should have since my temperature was really starting to rise. Some of the groups were really quite impressive - one even had a flat-screen television set to advertise their app! But before I go on, here's our group's poster in all its glory:


Click to enlarge

The actual file sent for printing was at 300dpi and over 60MB large (learnt my lesson from some related work done during NS, 72dpi is alright for the Internet but just doesn't show up well on paper).

Might as well throw in a photo from the event:


Didn't look quite right due to illness... right?

Had to leave the dismantling of the stuff to my teammates and leave for home at four sharp. On the bright side, sleeping without any concerns for the first time in weeks, even when sick, is a nice experience.

On the Facebook application itself, it is true that the engine for a mostly fully-functional 2D graphical MMORPG without even Flash or Java requirements was completed (which left little time for content, but that's another story). The trouble was that, some way into development, it dawned onto me that the architecture probably wasn't sustainable if it became popular, what with each client spamming an AJAX call every five second, and each such call hitting the database multiple times. Of course, there was a lot of optimization possible but not executed. For instance, the selection of variables represented is a bit haphazard, and large chunks of eval'ed Javascript code might have been preloaded onto the client and accessed through far more economical alias functions. Even then, the real-time client calls would probably overwhelm the server/database once a fair number of users gathered in a single location.

Other stuff could have been done better included the team management aspect. I had three certainly smart people, two whom are pretty accomplished programmers, and I didn't really employ them half as productively as was possible. The right thing to have done was probably to have designed the application as a collection of very well-defined functions, and doled out these definitions for them to work on. Unfortunately there was also the issue of sometimes not knowing exactly what wants, and having to make modifications across multiple functions at a time, which would be very difficult to coordinate. Quite an art. The problematic home connection to the school database due to some funny permissions or other also caused me to spend some hours fixing together a passable web-based database management interface. Sigh.

While Prof Leong did frequently emphasize that the module was about "making a difference" and not solely about eyeballs (in reference to which we added a Baby Beholder with the paltry sum of nine eyes to the MMORPG), it was slightly disappointing to again end up with promise and not results. However, I did gain some additional insight into what makes successful Facebook apps (at least when measured by eyeballs) tick, and probably will have another go at it soon, just for fun.

Still, my "researching" a fair number of games so far has imposed onto me the perception that a truly well-balanced and absorbing game is the rarest of things. I have expounded on this a couple of times already, and I think I am finally close to seeing the light. "Pride in work" becomes quite inconvenient when it translates into "perfectionist streak" though, and maybe one day I should just release stuff early and let the users figure it out. Heck, I didn't even manage to crunch the basic combat/economy numbers for the Alt/Reality MMORPG to my satisfaction. Hearing that it usually takes "...at least 1000 hours of programming to have a simple tech demo going, and perhaps up to 10-15K hours of programming to have an almost complete client/server" from an actual developer makes me feel a bit better about it, though. I couldn't have spent much more than about a couple of hundred hours on that, all things included.

The word of the day is... reauchambeau. Google it up yourself.



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