Stairway To Heaven

My life is really buggy these days.  So buggy that I even cannot figure out what I am doing and where I am heading. I really need to stop and think for a while. 1. CS3216 is not about grades, but all that count are grades.That's a bit mysterious. Honestly, I do think my group is doing pretty good in the final project, except the time management is not well conducted. My group members are all very intelligent people. Hu Qiang has a very clear mind on what direction he should be heading(not only in terms of UI). Yingbo is fast in coding. Aldrian thinks really deep and  comprehensive. I am also doing pretty well in this project. In the first week, we've developed the ePub file handler(Aldrian), REST api(Me), reading page(Hu Qiang) and  the basic javascript functionalities(Yingbo). However, when I look at the final project requirements, it says the prototype needs to be as good as the previous assignments and that counts for 10% of the total mark! I'm very worried thoug...

I didn't realize the real problems our app is going to face until Zit Seng shared his thoughts on Monday's lecture. Loading time is critical. We won't meet a user's satisfaction if it takes too long (say more than 2seconds) to load. That's pretty disastrous for a HTML5 app as the app may include heavy framework js/CSS files. On one hand, we shall do as many computation as possible on the server side and cut down clients' JS files to reduce the loading time. On the other hand, we can hardly make it as we need these files to perform offline functions. This challenge will unfortunately happen in our new HTML5 app. Even people in China will be accessing it. What if it takes 10 seconds to load the page?! I also felt worried when Zit Seng said that we shall avoid .htaccess and reduce http requests. Thanks to him, we can at least avoid some of the bad designs in our app. We previously thought to use more javascript to process the ebook reader. Later we decided to u...

Prof. Ben keeps emphasizing that CS3216 is not about hard coding, but about solving problems and making a difference. 1. What is the app that we are going to build? We are trying to build a HTML5 reader that works on different platforms including desktop/laptop browsers, tablets (ipad,etc) and smartphones (iphone /android). I initially came up with the idea of making a HTML5 ebook reader when Hu Qiang and I discussed with an ebook retailer who are currently making a native ipad reader. We think that more people will be able to explore the app if we make it a cross-platform one despite of their physical devices limitations. We also would like to take the advantage of HTML5 and the cloud to allow content synchronization and offline reading.Yingbo enjoys reading novels on her ipod touch and she finds the idea pretty interesting. Aldrian also thinks it's a good project, then we four decide to work together and make it happen:) 2. What is the exact problem that our app is trying t...

I was very excited to write sth last night after Monday's class. However, I was stuck with a bug in the previous assignment and thus lost the passion to write this blog. Here I am today, to write some thoughts down before my passions gone. About Project Management. 1. Idea First or Team first? I agree with Yingbo that it really depends on the projects. If the timeline is as limited as CS3216, team definitely goes first. It's very dynamic to polish the ideas and make them work later. But for very large projects, ideas should not be easily changed, then teams would have to go next. I experienced the team first approach in the first two projects. It works perfectly fine. In that approach, everyone actively contributes and there are no hierarchies or non-negotiable conflicts in the team. Though there may be unequal workload distributing problem due to merits of different people in the team, people will be dynamically switch their roles when they finish t...

Fig1.Home page(create new help) I think the team's goal of making it super easy for users to post helps is really good. However, this page involves too many checkboxes and privacy issues that on the contrary increase the complexity of posting a help. For instance, how can you calculate the reliable people? The criteria we assumed in our algorithm may not match the user's mind. Neither can we assume that all the friends have SMS and other information included in their profiles.   It's also very sensitive to post to all friends' walls. In our first assignment, we tried that and the whole news feed will be filled with the same content. That's very annoying. The checkboxes also have some overlaps. Say if one selected "all my friends"+"reliable friends", same people will be informed twice or even more times. That's even more annoying. Furthermore, the additional "needs quick help" option makes it even more complicated. The text input of...

Long time no blogs. Record some random stuffs here. 1.Monday, entrepreneurer's share. VSee-- a successful online conference provider. CEO:Milton--a computer scientist graduated from Stanford and UC Berkley. Ideas: It's hard to promote your product, even it's a good one. I know from Milton that many great people have tried to do video conferencing but failed. The technology is really challenging but Vsee survived. I admires Milton a lot, for his perseverance. It's really hard to imagine that  one can hold this belief for so long(five years) when there is no sign of getting profits. I know it's not about making profits(at least for Milton), it's really about creating values and making a difference. But how can one survive in this REAL world without worrying about his/her essentials? By essentials, I mean the basic needs for food, living, etc. without relying on other people's help. Well, maybe those who are just too rich to worry about those stuffs or t...

Today we had our pitching session in LT19. Prof. Ben invited many speakers from the industry to share with us their ideas. Some of the ideas are really interesting and worth recording. Personally, I like the idea of Cliquefund, a new investment idea that focus on impacts rather than profits. It sounds like a non-profit charity funding, also like an angle with no technology support. I think the idea would be beneficial for the people or companies who receive the fund, most likely startup companies, but may not be fair for the investors. This idea will definitely make a good social impact, but I'm really doubt whether this idea will actually become reality as the monetary really depends on the investors, whether they are money-oriented or not. This idea reminds me of a facebook app named Causes, which makes small portion of money out of the funding people raised for a social problem. There are nice people around. Hopefully some investors are that nice, too. How Cliquefund makes the...