Stairway To Heaven

Well, it is indeed a tragic fact that there are many more followers than leaders in the world. I realize this when we launched our first Facebook app last night. Initially, we thought that most people would love to try something new, but the fact is that more people intend to watch others first, then decide whether they want to join. When we first added the news feeds, we fully considered about people's privacy concern. i,e., we only post news feeds on the initial gossip creator's wall and never show the feeds on other related persons' walls. That's a way to eliminate duplication of the same message displaying on one's news feeds. However, the initial gossip creator may not be a big node in the social network. It's the people being gossiped that really make the difference! Why these people get gossiped? Because they attract followers' eyeballs, they are different from these followers! Unless these people love to gossip, otherwise, our app wo...

Monday's presentation was full of interesting sparks. Of all the eleven teams, only one chose to present FB app, which is Sims Social. The others all chose to present ipad apps. That's not so surprising as Ipad(Tablets) is the most recent platform and there are a lot of blank spaces for us to fill in. The ten ipad apps shared in the seminar covers various fields like e-payment, news-media, education. What surprised me most is that many of us find education a very promising area for mobile app development...As ipads are being utilized as an educational tools in various educational levels, education is really going to be a great pie. Wait, I need to finish comments for my assigned app first. Pulse News, a news media app with good social features. News media are getting more social and mobile and probably "cloudy" in the recently years. Organizing news media contents can be a promising area since there are always interesting things happening around and people just have...

When it came to the end of today's lecture, many classmates started to choose their teammates for the mobile-cloud project. I felt a bit lost when I realized that I still didn't form my new group yet. The IOS guys should be very popular and they should have already been booked ahead. As the programmers normally tend to form groups with technical guys, there might not be enough programmers left in the end. It would be good to form a group as soon as possible. Unfortunately, I didn't take the good timing for grouping. I am still not over with the FB app yet. However, many groups have already formed. I do feel a sense of insecure. Who will I be working with? The cruel thing is the that stronger people will tend to choose to work with strong team members. What if there are not enough programmers in the team? That's almost impossible to get things done.The fortunate thing is that the people in the class are really astonishing. But I'm also not that confident on my progra...

Really awesome to work with my FB app teammates. They are really great great great people! Fast learner, elite programmer, dedicated executor , warm-hearted contributor. The app is around the corner, we are going to publish it in a few days. Though there're still many problems remaining to be solved, I really feel some sense of achievement. My teammates really rock. Even with no web programming base at the beginning, we picked them one by one at a very short time. Even though I am the slowest learner in the team, I also have self studied HTML&CSS(Wrox HTML5 24 hour  trainer), PHP(O' Reilly Head First PHP&MySQL), Facebook Graph API(plus many previous FB Apis), a little bit of JavaScript,MySQL,J_Query, J_Son from W3schools,Google and many online resources. Our app consists of four pages, two of them are very important pages. I help develop one of the important pages. It should not be hard, but really takes me quite a lot of time for me to make something. It takes some tim...

I've got to reflect on the things happened yesterday. I'm pretty worried about the FB app when Prof mentioned in the class that our team has got no designers or web programmers. So are Yingbo and the other two members. One senior in the class suggested that people with the foreseen picture in mind and most passionate becomes the leader. Yingbo came up with the idea and she knew most of the app we are going to build, she undoubtedly became the leader. Since we both lives in RVR, I was assigned the job of developing the pages together with her.After discussing for a short while, we immediately developed a page in the first evening. I'm pretty free yesterday except one lecture in the afternoon and one make-up lecture in the evening. I should have developed 2-3 pages in the morning, but I didn't.  I was wasting some time on project team grouping in another hypermarket project. Though I spent half an hour studying the syntax of PHP from W3, the fact is that I did not make...

This is the first week we take CS3216, anxious but excited. The first lecture was encouraging. It's full of interesting shares from Prof. Leong, the seniors and the classmates. I was not confident at the beginning, but these talented people in the room just make me feel good. They are nice and passionate:-) In the show-and-tell, people shared their fabulous talents in various ways. There are designers, guitar soloist,nerdy engineers,dancers...I was really astonished by many great works they have done. I can even recall most of their great works now, an electromechanics robotics hands with sensor controls, handicraft-buildings made from hundreds of matches, a fancy video with automatic Microsoft voice, an original guitar solo song for his girl, a wheeled robot with complex control algorithms, a serious Q/A website for sex,an ipad app,a web app, a WOW video, poster design leaflets... So many interesting stuffs! I myself played a short guitar song, "Don't Panic" by ...

These few days, I was spending some time doing random stuffs in a start-up company inside the campus. The company was initiated two years ago by a year3 Electrical Engineering student and his Prof. Their service is mainly focused on Human-Machine Interaction solutions. The founder is currently doing his Masters in NUS and has already settled up two company branches in China. In my view, he is pretty successful. He has settled up his own company at such young age and he is really making a difference to the world. Though the founder earned only 500 dollars/month when he first graduated from NUS to open up his own company, he is doing quite well now. As I know, the Singapore branch has so far made a wireless projector controller, a Tai Chi cross-platform app that can run on Ipad,PC,Web,etc(implemented using a game engine called Unity), an automatic temperature reader.They have sold 10 of their project controllers to a Korean company for 80 dollars each. The Tai Chi game is sold to a gov...

Robert Frost (1874–1963).  Mountain Interval.  1920.                           The Road Not Taken TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,         And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.       I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two r...

This evening, I talked with a friend who just came back from Silicon Valley via an immersion program called iLead. He is not an IT guy, but he becomes more like a technician and an entrepreneur after spending two weeks in Silicon Valley. He shared his stories of visiting various Start-ups in the Silicon Valley. Two of the stories captures me deeply. One is about a website idea he has initiated with three of his peers. Their idea was highly appreciated by the NOC coordinator.Very coincidentally, they met a start-up company with a very similar idea the next day in Silicon Valley. It's called Udemy , a company that provides a platform for people to upload their ORIGINAL tutorial videos and earn money share out of the tutorials people requested to buy to view. I was very interested in the idea since I tried to make a similar business model this summer, making money share by helping other people/companies make benefits. Udemy shares 30% of the profits the video uploaders earn. Groupon ...

When I was little, I saw a father in a river town teach his kid how to swim. The father dragged his kid to the middle of the river, and then swam away. Helplessly, the kid cried out. Not until the kid could make another sound, his whole body had already sunk underwater. The father did nothing but watch his kid struggling. The kid desperately flapped his hands and legs for survivor. Gradually, the kid was able to take a short breath. It was not long before his body sunk underwater again. Once his month gets out of the river, he kept on yelling for help or scoring his father. However, the father did not swim close, nor did he allow anyone to help. Before long, the kid struggled to the bank, keeping on crying and scoring on the father. Something magic happened the next time we met the boy. He can swim really fast, even faster than guys with life buoys. The boy swam among the fastest ever since and he was the youngest among those swimming peers. CS3216 is like a special swimming lesson tha...

"Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven. Ooh, it makes me wonder, Ooh, it makes me wonder." "When all are one and one is all, To be a rock and not to roll." —Retrieved from Led Zeppelin - "Stairway to Heaven"