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[ April 2008 ] | |
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TCHS 4O 2000 [4o's nonsense] alvinny [2] - csq - edchong jenming - joseph - law meepok - mingqi - pea pengkian [2] - qwergopot - woof xinghao - zhengyu HCJC 01S60 [understated sixzero] andy - edwin - jack jiaqi - peter - rex serena SAF 21SA khenghui - jiaming - jinrui [2] ritchie - vicknesh - zhenhao Others Lwei [2] - shaowei - website links - Alien Loves Predator BloggerSG Cute Overload! Cyanide and Happiness Daily Bunny Hamleto Hattrick Magic: The Gathering The Onion The Order of the Stick Perry Bible Fellowship PvP Online Soccernet Sluggy Freelance The Students' Sketchpad Talk Rock Talking Cock.com Tom the Dancing Bug Wikipedia Wulffmorgenthaler       |
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bert's blog v1.21 Powered by glolg Programmed with Perl 5.6.1 on Apache/1.3.27 (Red Hat Linux) best viewed at 1024 x 768 resolution on Internet Explorer 6.0+ or Mozilla Firefox 1.5+ today's page views: 184 (29 mobile) all-time page views: 3403213 most viewed entry: 18739 views most commented entry: 14 comments number of entries: 1228 page created Sun Jul 20, 2025 14:39:36 |
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- tagcloud - academics [70] art [8] changelog [49] current events [36] cute stuff [12] gaming [11] music [8] outings [16] philosophy [10] poetry [4] programming [15] rants [5] reviews [8] sport [37] travel [19] work [3] miscellaneous [75] |
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- category tags - academics art changelog current events cute stuff gaming miscellaneous music outings philosophy poetry programming rants reviews sport travel work tags in total: 386 |
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- + hamsters - Racking up those experience points from the side-quests of attempting a few past year papers, taking a single level in Mugger in the process (with specialization in Logical Elimination/Advanced Resignation), armed with my Trusty Pilot G-1 Grip of Smooth Writing +2 [Resistance against Uneven Ink] and Twin Powered Sharp EL-546VA Calculator of Accelerated Computation +3 [Bonus Defence against Lengthy Near Meaningless Calculations For The Sake Of It +5]. Happened to come across yet another webcomic deserving of a mention through my directionless surfing. Oh, and Russell's Teapot got its day in the sun. UROP poster presentation over, don't really want to talk too much about it, but here's the poster (words probably slightly smaller than ideal, but designed from pre-presentation knowledge and observations only):  United take on Chelsea for the title in a few hours, so here's a warm-up match: Time for the long-overdue accountancy work, and it seems I am on... *whips out {TP} Sharp EL-546VA {of AC} [+5]* $2754.75/$2750. I could plausibly claim a virtual net profit on the season by sitting out the remaining few rounds (not allowing for the time value of money, though local interest rates are (just barely) positively lousy these days), but let's not set up stall as negatively as United did to my regret against Barca, shall we? Not sure where the New Paper has gone to, so I'll grab the (opening) odds directly from the Singapore Pools website this time: $50 on Arsenal to beat Derby (at 1.20) - Gunners' season may have ended, but Derby are still Derby $25 on Liverpool to beat Birmingham (2.20) - Probably the best value of all the week $25 on Man Utd to beat Chelsea (2.85) - Market has it down as a draw, but United are made for these matches And the hamsters, always the hamsters...
- art - Reminder to self: Do the poster for the UROP presentation on Tuesday tomorrow, print it on Monday. Did a short search on producing decent architectural 3D models for my next (long-due) webgame project, and possibly my HYP. I was nearly back to being content with trueSpace (recently acquired by Microsoft, what did I say about the best place to go for world domination?), and then I stumbled upon Google SketchUp (32.5 MB). Which is free, and by the looks of the examples, offers enough power for what I have in mind (isometric projects only anyhow). Not that Google are above a bit of self-promotion too: 
It is already, you needn't have bothered And Apple helpfully suggests that I download Safari while updating QuickTime, and after I finally did so more out of curiosity than anything the first thing it did was to ask if it could be my default browser. Frankly though, I haven't seen anything from either Firefox or Safari great enough for me to forsake IE (making a cool anti-establishment statement aside), so sue me. Experimented a bit with a sustainable illustration style for the webgame, and for ten minutes a pop I think this is the best average standard I can crank out so far: 
Nothing to crow about but saves worry about colouring, etc. Should add some flavour and not take too much focus from the gameplay. Only paper and pencil (and scanner later) required! Arsenal lead Reading 2-0 before half-time at the moment, but the odds on an Arsenal bounce-back victory (1.22) were too short for me. Liverpool look good against Fulham, especially since I don't think they are going to blood their second stringers just yet. Even West Ham having it as good as 1.27 against Derby shows how terrible the Rams are, and that's surely not worth a try. I'll have... $20 on Tottenham to beat Wigan (at 2.50) - seems like no one believes in Spurs any longer. They're still ok, though $40 on Liverpool to beat Fulham (1.75) - the table doesn't lie after 34 games, and it says Fulham are just not very good $40 on Man Utd to beat Blackburn (1.48) - returns a bit low here, just enough for me
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.
- + hamsters - - Gmail Chat Days of sleeping in the wee hours (beginning at 3 am, then right up to six in the morning for the final push) meant that it was a weight off my shoulders when I finally handed off a nicely printed-and-bound 48-pager to the undergrad office today. Or it would have been, had I not overlooked the fact that I actually needed two of the same for both evaluators. A quick rush down to the photocopying shop on campus solved matters, conveniently within the Central Co-op where I picked up a bunch of rewritable CDs to duplicate my source code and executables on, an envelope to stick the chosen CD within, and double-sided tape to paste the whole thing to the back of the bound report. There were two short project descriptions to be filled in too, and I finally managed to collect printed material from the community printers instead of having them hopelessly lost in the middle of stacks of other students' lecture notes. At least I wasn't the only one in this predicament. The office was sure busy today. Didn't know whether to be happy or displeased when I summarized the 48-pager into a five page and a bit NUROP paper and discovered that it contained all the salient features. Then again, a lot of the papers I have encountered probably fall into this category. Which means that there may be a market for extracting only the essentials from papers. There remain a few bugs in the code, which unfortunately has ballooned just about to the point where a rewrite under a more disciplined OOP approach may be profitable. Probably will have to do that for the actual competition, under rather less pressure I hope. Then again, maybe it's just the frustration from staring at the code for hours on end that discouraged progress. Well, what's over is over. Let us see how the evaluators like it. More equations? More figures? More theory? More empirical work? Too fluffy? Too choked with details? Who knows? We'll see. Came across an eyecatching book at the COM1 lounge today - A Ph.D. Is Not Enough: A Guide to Survival in Science. Didn't have the time to get past the first few chapters, but what I read struck me as sound advice. "Soft" skills of presentation and networking etc probably as important as competency, pursue long-term research goals with a series of smaller (and achievable) projects so that one has something to show... all sound painfully obvious (as pointed out in quite a few reviews) - on hindsight. "...that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill..." - Solomon et al, Ecclesiastes 9:11 (3rd century A.D.) The author, Feibelman, suggests on Page 4 that "there has to be a theme to your work - some objective - something you want to know." (so far so good, I think most researchers actually have some interest in what they are investigating?) "There has to be a story line. (Do not start with: 'I have been trying to explain the interesting wavelength dependence of light scattering from small particles.' but rather 'There is a widespread need to explain to one's kids why the sky is blue.')" i.e. practical research sells? I'm with that. Made me recall a short vignette in Jurassic Park, when Hammond met Wu: "Norman always said you're the best geneticist in his lab," he said. "What are your plans now?" "I don't know. Research." "You want a university appointment?" "Yes." "That's a mistake," Hammond said briskly. "At least, if you respect your talent." Wu had blinked. "Why?" "Because, let's face facts," Hammond said. "Universities are no longer the intellectual centers of the country. The very idea is preposterous. Universities are the backwater. Don't look so surprised. I'm not saying anything you don't know. Since World War II, all the really important discoveries have come out of private laboratories. The laser, the transistor, the polio vaccine, the microchip, the hologram, the personal computer, magnetic resonance imaging, CAT scans - the list goes on and on. Universities simply aren't where it's happening any more. And they haven't been for forty years. If you want to do something important in computers and genetics, you don't go to a university. Dear me, no." I think this does have a ring of truth to it, especially in certain fields. Take gaming for instance - probably the true bleeding edge would almost never be at some Ivy League, but instead at some big developer. For massive searching, likely Google. For world domination, probably Microsoft. And so on. Ending off with the obligatory hamster pic (they're getting extremely squeezable): 
My hands are clean!
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