This friday, we have a talk by Melvin from Hoiio about optimal algorithms. See you there!
Date/Time: Friday, April 4th at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town
Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MFree pizza is served before the talks.
Talk: Quest for the optimal algorithm
Talk Description:
Algorithm development is often a messy process, much of which never makes it into the publication. This talk goes behind the scenes and traces the ongoing development of ever more efficient algorithms for the Gene Team Tree problem. We will end with an open data structure problem needed for a faster algorithm and a collaborative problem solving session.
Pre-talk preparation tips or instructions: Below is the open data structure problem that we will be discussing.
Input is a list, P, of n points on the number line in increasing order,
[p_1, p_2, …, p_n].
The gap between two adjacent points p_i and p_i+1 is the distance between
them, i.e. p_i+1 - p_i.
The max gap of P is max (p_i+1 - p_i) for i from 1 to n-1.
Design a data structure for P that supports a single operation delete(p), which
deletes point p from P and return the max gap of P. Assume we have a direct
reference to the point p so there is no need to search for it.
a) perform n deletions in O(n lg n) time (solved)
b) perform n deletions in O(n) time (open)
Speaker Profile
Melvin is a programmer at Hoiio and the maintainer of Magarena, an open source card game with a challenging AI opponent. Melvin received his B.Comp (Hons) and Ph.D. degrees from NUS School of Computing.
Friday Hacks #68, March 28
This friday, we have a talk by the awesome Beng Eu about he built NUSMods. See you there! (Also, a little birdie tells us that Jeff Moss might be attending FH this week :))
Date/Time: Friday, March 28th at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town
Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MFree pizza is served before the talks.
Talk: Lessons from Building NUSMods 2.0
Talk Description:
Ever wondered how you could go about building an app like NUSMods?
I’ll be sharing the challenges faced and lessons learnt from building and rebuilding NUSMods - from the early stages of iterating on its MVP based on user feedback and metrics, to the upcoming 2.0 version.
I’ll also give a preview of some interesting new techniques used in NUSMods 2.0, which will have multiple points to integrate and promote contributions from the student community. To end off, we'll discuss the future of student-made apps, and how you could contribute too.
Speaker Profile
Beng is a final year Computer Science undergrad. He loves building stuff that explores the full capabilities of modern web technologies.
Friday Hacks #67, March 21
This friday, we have a talk by Lee Chun Munn from Institute of Systems Science about what’s new in Java 8. See you there!
Date/Time: Friday, March 21th at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town
Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MFree pizza is served before the talks.
Talk: What's New in Java SE 8
Talk Description:
The presentation will introduce new features in JavaSE 8. We will discuss features like lambdas (aka closures), defender methods, streams, Nashorn the new JavaScript engine, profiles, etc.
Speaker ProfileLee Chuk Munn is with the Advanced Technology Applications Practice for National University of Singapore, Institute of Systems Science (NUS-ISS). His current responsibilities includes developing courseware, and teaching graduate and public courses in enterprise software engineering, software architecture, web technologies and enterprise Java. Prior to joining ISS, Chuk works for Oracle and Sun Microsystems where his main responsibilities includes helping customers and partners across all industries in the APAC region, to develop, size and tune applications deployed to Java EE Application Servers. His interest includes peer-to-peer networks, application frameworks, Java Virtual Machine and dynamic languages. He keeps himself busy by contributing to various open source projects.
Friday Hacks #66, March 14
This friday, we have a talk by Chia Yuan from DSO National Laboratories. See you there!
Date/Time: Friday, March 14th at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town
Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MFree pizza is served before the talks.
Talk: Automated Reasoning: An Emerging Powerful Approach to Find Bugs in Software
Talk Description:
Software bugs are pervasive, but current techniques to find bugs are limited. Over the past decade, there are major algorithmic advances in constraint solvers, which enables the application of automated reasoning to find bugs in software. In this talk, I will give an introduction to this field, and talk about how automated reasoning relates to existing techniques such as testing and static analysis. I will briefly talk about existing automated reasoning tools that programmers can use to improve the quality of code. Then, I will talk about the leading edge research that we are doing to scale automated reasoning to real-world programs, often at least in the order of hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
Speaker Profile
Chia Yuan is a senior scientist at DSO National Laboratories, Singapore. He works on applied formal methods to computer security, in particular the application of automated techniques to improve software and systems security. He obtained his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in December 2013.
Friday Hacks #65, March 7
This friday, we’ll be having a Project Intern themed Friday Hacks!
We’ll have two speakers this week!
We’ll have a talk by Rahij on the work he did while at Groupon, followed by a presentation by Michael on the lessons learnt during his internships at Google and Quora.
See you there!
Date/Time: Friday, March 7th at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town
Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MFree pizza is served before the talks.
Talk 1: Designing and building out software architecture that scales.
Talk Description:
In school, you've probably learnt about different kinds of software design and architecture, and different ways to structure your product to make it scalable. But how and when do you decide to adopt a specific software architecture in your product? When is it overkill and when does it really make a big difference to the stability of your product? I will be talking about some of the work I did at Groupon, regarding software design and implementation, when scaling our product to serve over 50,000 requests per minute. I will end with some pointers about Silicon Valley in general and how/why you should do an internship in the bay area.
Pre-talk preparation tips:
A brief read up on Ruby on Rails, node.js and web architecture should be sufficient.
Speaker Profile
Rahij is a third year undergraduate, majoring in Computer Science at NUS. He has previously interned at Groupon and will be interning at Facebook in Summer ‘14 and Scribd in Fall ‘14.
Talk 2: What actually happens during Internships.
No, its nothing like the movie.
Talk Description:
Every wondered what an Internship at a tech company is like? Contemplating an internship this summer? I’ll be sharing experiences from my two internships, what I worked on and what I learnt.
(I also have some Quora swag to give away :p).
Speaker Profile
Michael is a third year Computer Science undergrad at NUS. He previously interned at Google on the Google Docs team. He also took last semester off to do a software engineering internship at Quora. He’ll be going back to Google this summer.
Friday Hacks #64, Feb 21
This Friday, we have a talk by Indra from SimplerCloud. See you!
Date/Time: Friday, February 21st at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town; Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3M
Free pizza is served before the talks.
Talk: DNS Spoofing - The Basics and How to Prevent it
Talk Description:
How can you take down a country's Internet and prevent more than 6 million users from surfing web pages for 8 hours without even standing up? Try DNS cache poisoning. In late January 2014, a case of DNS spoofing in China caused all web queries to be routed to a single IP address in the US, suspending two-thirds of all Chinese internet traffic for several hours. The Domain Name System (DNS) is the fundamental addressing system that runs the Internet. This talk gives a brief overview of how it works, and briefly addresses DNS cache poisoning, also known as DNS spoofing, how such issues occur and can be mitigated. Learning a bit about DNS cache poisoning could go a long way towards preventing major issues.
Speaker Profile:
Indra Pramana, CEO, SimplerCloud
Indra Pramana has more than 18 years of experience in the Internet and hosting industry. He started his career in 1995 at PT Rahajasa Media Internet (RADNET), a leading Internet Service Provider in Indonesia, before joining Webvisions Pte Ltd (now ICONZ-Webvisions Pte Ltd) as VP, Network, one of Asia’s largest hosting companies, in 2000. He has a Masters Degree on Information Technology from the University of Indonesia, Jakarta.
NUS Hackers Facebook Group!
We’ve just started a new NUS Hackers Facebook Group!
The purpose of this new group is similar to our existing Google Group (groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/nushackers): For people to ask questions and share interesting things within our community.
Our goal as NUS Hackers is to build a healthy community of passionate hackers in NUS and Singapore. To that end, we hope that this new Facebook Group will provide a low-friction avenue for people within our community to share and interact.
We’ve realised from your feedback that our current mailing list can be quite intimidating, to the extent of being insular, and this discourages people from sharing and interacting with the community as much as we’d like.
We take your feedback very seriously and constantly try to improve the way we work. We’d love to hear from you.
Friday Hacks #62, Feb 7
This week, we have a talk by Alex Teo from D’Crypt. Do note the change in venue, it’s back at UTown again! See you there
Date/Time: Friday, February 7th at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town; Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3M
Free pizza is served before the talks.
Talk: Bitcoin Mining at D'Crypt
Talk Description:
Bitcoin is a P2P digital crypto-currency that has taken the world by storm. At D'Crypt, we have recently developed a Bitcoin miner that runs on our high performance FPGA-based compute node named Raptor. We would like to take the opportunity to provide a short overview on Bitcoin and to present our work on Bitcoin mining.
Speaker Profile:
Alex is currently an engineer at D'Crypt Pte Ltd, a local engineering company that works on embedded cryptographic solutions and services. He recently graduated from NUS Faculty of Engineering, majoring in Computer Engineering. Alex designs custom FPGA-based applications that run on our high-performance compute nodes at D'Crypt.
How to win a Hackathon
Camillus Cai was part of the 3 person team that won Hack&Roll 2013, and later a part of the 4 person team that won 3rd place in PenApps Fall 2013, the largest student hackathon in the US (and possibly the world). He’s now one of the organisers for Hack&Roll 2014.
Are you dead serious about winning?
Hackathons are supposed to be fun events for networking and learning, but sometimes, you might just want that top prize that badly. Whatever your reasons are, hackathons, like any other system designed by mere humans, can be gamed with impunity.
Plan well in advance
Most hackathons, including ours, require you to produce original work during the course of the competition, while imposing no restrictions about the planning that you may have done beforehand. This makes the degree to which your team plans and prepares decisive in the outcome of the competition. Everyone we know who has won a hackathon had usually put some thought into their product before turning up.
However, not being able to write code before the competition begins also removes the feedback loop in the engineering process, resulting in an inability to validate ideas and architectures. Thus, the measure of a good plan is not whether execution transpires as planned, but whether the plan facilitates effective action in the face of unforeseen events.
One corollary of this observation is that a highly detailed architecture-level analysis that one might do in a drawn-out software engineering project is at risk of becoming more of a hinderance than an aid. While your high-level analysis should establish the conceptual basis for the application or service you want to develop, it should remain as a starting point, and not become the centre piece of your app.
Time management is especially important in a hackathon because you have to get a lot of work done in very little time. One way of organising time is to divide the competition period into discreet phases of development like “setting up the stack”, “prototyping”, or “achieving a Minimum Viable Product”. This is not dissimilar to the concept of code sprints, except that each sprint is as atomic as possible.
Each phase should have a set of deliverables, and a reasonably accurate time frame for achieving them. At any point in time, you should be keenly aware of how your current phase is progressing, and not get distracted by additional details that you can only decisively deal with at a later time (the oft-quoted example of such a distraction is premature optimisation). When transitioning between phases, the entire team should stop to reevaluate the progress made so far in relation to the high level plan, making changes to the plan going forward as necessary.
Polish in a hackathon product is unexpected, and if present in yours, scores an inordinate number of bonus points. If development is moving faster than expected, consider continuing by touching up on the look and feel of your product, rather than trying to extend its feature set. On the other hand, consider pivoting or rehashing the problem if you find that the team is consistently falling behind on the development schedule: the end state of a hackathon product is not immutable, and a simpler (or even different) product that works well will do far better in judging than a grandiose idea with a failed execution.
Have a concept of operations
Elect the visionary as the team leader. Assign the most technically competent person to be the chief engineer. The period of the competition itself is not a good time to discuss things in committee.
Make sure that everyone on the team knows their role in the development process, and is working within their domain of expertise. This arrangement of labour tends to evolve organically if the team has worked together before, but the process can – and must – be engineered if you are putting together a team for the first time.
Collaboration tools like Git and Asana are immensely helpful. If you are using them, make sure they are set up and accessible before turning up at the competition venue, and that everyone on the team knows how and when to use them.
In particular, task management systems like Asana are invaluable in keeping the development process organised towards the end of the competition when the team is operating under fatigue. However, these systems require effort to maintain. When the team is fresh and on the same page at the beginning of the competition, it is easy to lose the discipline to keep your task record up to date.
Size up the competition
Walk around when taking breaks to observe what other teams are doing. If you encounter another team that is doing something similar, you will be faced with a decision to accept the competition, or to do something else.
Direct competition between teams is a tremendous waste of resources, and should only be entered into if your process or product is clearly superior to its opposition. Pay careful attention to morale and team dynamics in addition to the scope of the competing product. A tired or stressed out opposition will quickly lose cohesion when confronted with subtle displays of success on your part.
Avoid accepting competitions that cannot be determined decisively by specialising, or pivoting to a slightly different niche from the opposition.
Manage your pace
While working fast allows you to do more than other teams, working too fast leads to fatigue. Never burn out team members by trying to achieve too much in too little time. Burnt out people are disproportionately less productive, less cohesive, and are more prone to bad decisions than people who are working consistently at a slightly slower pace.
As a team leader, be aware of the mental state of your team at all times. Block off whole hours for rest and reconstitution if necessary. Avoid heroic code sprints, except perhaps just before the end of the competition. Rapid tempo should not degenerate into haste – you do not want to be faced with a massive regression half an hour before the buzzer.
Don't be a dick about winning
Remember that hackathons are supposed to be fun, and that each team is there for its own reason.
You are free to play this meta-game with other people dead serious about winning, but always be considerate and do not ruin the event experience for everyone else. Above all else, do not discourage people there to learn.
There are no talks planned today but we would like to invite you to show us all the cool stuff you have done over the semester. It can be school-related or personal; serious business or just for fun; anything goes!
Date/Time: Friday, November 15 at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MSign up here://bit.ly/fridayhacks2013Free pizza is served before everything.
Date/Time: Friday, November 8 at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MSign up here://bit.ly/fridayhacks2013Free pizza is served before the talks.
Talk: Java Coding for Performance (Lee Chuk Munn - NUS)
Talk Description:
Abstraction is very important when writing software. However, even though highly abstracted programs are easier to understand and write, many times they ignore the underlying implementation, and as a result the performance of the program suffers. This talk will tell you how to fine-tune your Java code for the mission critical parts of your program.
Speaker Profile:
Chuk is with the Advanced Technology Applications Practice for National University of Singapore, Institute of Systems Science (NUS-ISS). His current responsibilities includes developing courseware, and teaching graduate and public courses in enterprise software engineering, software architecture, web technologies and enterprise Java.
Prior to joining ISS, Chuk works for Oracle and Sun Microsystems where his main responsibilities includes helping customers and partners across all industries in the APAC region, to develop, size and tune applications deployed to Java EE Application Servers.
Chuk has more than 20 years of working experience and more than 30 years of developing and debugging software.
His interest includes peer-to-peer networks, application frameworks, Java Virtual Machine and dynamic languages. He keeps himself busy by contributing to various open source projects.
Date/Time: Friday, November 1 at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MSign up here://bit.ly/fridayhacks2013Free pizza is served before the talks.
Talk: MAKING HISTORY - Introduction to the HTML5 history API (Giovanni Casinelli - Dimest)
Talk Description:
From Hashbang to pushState: how to deal with URLs from the client-side. The talk will cover how client-side URLs management was done in the past and what's the modern way to do it, through the new HTML5 history API. How to use some cool javascript library like History.js is also discussed.
Speaker Profile:
Giovanni is an entrepreneur and computer engineer from Italy, currently based in Singapore working on his 2 startups: BonAppetour and Dimest. He’s addicted to his work, science, space, and Quora.
Date/Time: Friday, October 25 at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MSign up here://bit.ly/fridayhacks2013Free pizza is served before the talks.
Talk: Big Data, Predictive Modeling, and You (Nick Jachowski - PhD student in Geography)
Talk Description:
This talk will introduce the topic of big data & predictive modeling from an academic as well as an industry view point, using case studies (with code examples!).
Topics to be covered (however briefly) include: R, Python, SQL, Bash, Hadoop, machine learning, statistics & entrepreneurship.
Speaker Profile:
Nick is part programmer, part engineer and part scientist. He likes to make things – both in the computer world and the real world. Most of things he makes are related to applied environmental science. Currently, he is in his forth year of the NUS PhD program in Physical Geography where his research focuses on coastal ecosystems modeling.
This week we have Fazli Sapuan and Fazli Sapuan. Followed by talk(s) which are hopefully A.I. themed (maybe), and then a series of ad-hoc lightning talks by members of the community.
Date/Time: Friday, October 11 at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MSign up here://bit.ly/fridayhacks2013Free pizza is served before the talks.
Talk: Into the Deep (Blue) - Computer Chess (Fazli Sapuan - NUS Student)
Talk Description:
The theory of computer chess has been explored as early as 1948, but it was not until 1951 when Alan Turing developed (on paper) the first program capable of playing a full game of chess. Since then, computer scientists have made great strides over the decades; most historically, then-reigning chess world champion Garry Kasparov was defeated in 1997 by an IBM supercomputer named "Deep Blue".
This talk will cover general computer A.I. theory and the internals of a modern computer chess engine. And also, more specifically, how the widespread adoption of 64-bit datapaths in commodity-grade computers was able to boost the performance of chess engines. Finally, the talk will also cover the interfaces developed for chess engines and how you can use such interface to develop your own chess application.
Speaker Profile:
Fazli likes to hack random projects for fun and without any apparent reason. Fazli has made super cool chess software such as Vulpine, a chess GUI, and Cloud Chess, a high performance online chess A.I. app. Fazli feels writing in third-person is really weird.
This week we have Cedric Chin and Divyanshu Arora.
Date/Time: Friday, October 4 at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MSign up here://bit.ly/fridayhacks2013Free pizza is served before the talks.
Talk: Picking a Startup to Intern At (Cedric Chin - NUS Student)
Talk Description:
The most commonly repeated advice about tech internships is that you should do two: one at a large company, and one at a startup. Picking a large company to work for is fairly easy: Google, Facebook, Palantir are reputable places to work, and are fairly well known. On the other hand, picking a good startup to work for is difficult. What you want to do is to pick a good company while they're small - 5 - 20 people small. The problem is that when companies are small, it's not clear if they are good. My talk will focus on how to do this, with some success.
Speaker Profile:
Cedric Chin is an Computer Science major at NUS. He ran the NUS Hackers from late 2010 - mid 2012. He’s interned at enough startups to know that they’re all trainwrecks on the inside - even the good ones. Previous internships: Kicksend, Viki.
Date/Time: Friday, April 19 at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MSign up here://bit.ly/fridayhacks2013Free pizza is served before the talks.
Talk Description:
Kelvin will talk about what graph databases are and how they can be used. He will show 2 examples using neo4j (a graph database running on the JVM).
Speaker Profile:
Kelvin is a software developer with more than 10 years of experience across multiple industries including government, logistics, bioinformatics, insurance and telecommunications. His special interest lies in using agile software development principles and techniques to continuously deliver business values to his clients at a sustainable pace.
Talk Description:
Miha Ciglar will present the technologies behind the Acouspade directional sound system, as well as the “Syntact” new musical interface, which he developed within IRZU – Institute for Sonic Arts Research and its spin-off company Ultrasonic Audio Technologies. While Acouspade uses ultrasonic radiation to create a tight beam of (audible) sound, Syntact provides contact-free tactile feedback, by utilizing airborne ultrasound. It creates a force field in mid-air that can be sensed in a tactile way, and thus, it allows a musician to feel the music’s temporal and harmonic texture. While an optical sensor system is interpreting his hand gestures and mapping the descriptors of hand motion onto sound synthesis/processing parameters, the musician can physically engage with the medium of sound by virtually moulding and shaping it – i.e. changing its acoustic appearance – directly with his hands.
Speaker Profile:
Miha Ciglar is a composer and researcher in the field of audio technologies. He holds a MSc degree from the Academy of Music and the University of Technology in Graz, Austria. In 2008, Ciglar founded the Institute for Sonic Arts Research - IRZU. He is the initiator and curator of the international sonic arts festival EarZoom, which takes place annually, since 2009 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In 2011 he founded the start-up company Ultrasonic audio technologies Ltd. Ciglar was the conference chair of the 2012 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), which will be held at IRZU in Ljublajna, Slovenia
Date/Time: Friday, April 12 at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MSign up here://bit.ly/fridayhacks2013Free pizza is served before the talks.
Talk: Building real time apps with meteor.js - Gaurav Chandrashekar (NUS Student)
Talk Description:
Meteor is an ultra-simple environment for building modern websites. What once took weeks, even with the best tools, now takes hours with Meteor.
The web was originally designed to work in the same way that mainframes worked in the 70s. The application server rendered a screen and sent it over the network to a dumb terminal. Whenever the user did anything, that server rerendered a whole new screen. This model served the Web well for over a decade. It gave rise to LAMP, Rails, Django, PHP.
But the best teams, with the biggest budgets and the longest schedules, now build applications in JavaScript that run on the client. These apps have stellar interfaces. They don’t reload pages. They are reactive: changes from any client immediately appear on everyone’s screen.
They’ve built them the hard way. Meteor makes it an order of magnitude simpler, and a lot more fun. You can build a complete application in a weekend, or a sufficiently caffeinated hackathon. No longer do you need to provision server resources, or deploy API endpoints in the cloud, or manage a database, or wrangle an ORM layer, or swap back and forth between JavaScript and Ruby, or broadcast data invalidations to clients.
Speaker Profile:
Gaurav Chandrashekar, currently a senior at NUS, spent 4 months at Spotify, Stockholm, in knowing more about localization and setting up translation platform for them.
This week we have Dr Yiqun Hu and Alvin Jiang from PayPal Singapore R&D Lab. Dr Hu will be sharing with us an interesting research done on sound. Following that, Alvin will be sharing with us more about the work done in the R&D Lab in Singapore. Be sure to come down on Friday!
Date/Time: Friday, April 5 at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MSign up here://bit.ly/fridayhacks2013Free pizza is served before the talks.
Talk 1: SWCode - A talk you can't hear (Dr Yiqun Hu and Alvin Jiang)
Talk Description:
Inaudible sound - transmitting information in the gap between what you should be able to hear but can’t (and why).
PayPal Singapore R&D Lab:
The PayPal Singapore R&D Lab (previously the Innovation Lab) was founded 5 years ago as part of the Singapore Development Centre to Innovate new products and services. Comprising of members with various specialities in mobile, research and business backgrounds and headed by an experienced innovation manager, the team has recently won global eBay awards as well as been recognised in the local press for products that have been deployed globally.
This week we have Dr Michael Brown and Melvin Zhang. These talks are suited for everyone! So come and listen to them!
Date/Time: Friday, March 22 at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MSign up here://bit.ly/fridayhacks2013Free pizza is served before the talks.
Talk 1: The Unix Philosophy (Associate Professor, NUS School of Computing)
Talk Description:
While Unix is best known as an operating system, the founding fathers of Unix developed it around an entire philosophy on how software should be developed. In this talk, I will discuss the history leading up to the development of Unix as well as some of the underlying principles and practices that make up the Unix Philosophy.
Speaker Profile:
Dr. Michael S. Brown is currently an associate professor and assistant dean (external relations) in the School of Computing at NUS. Dr. Brown’s research interests include computer vision, image processing and computer graphics.
Talk 2: Automating your command line workflow with Make (NUS Alum/Programmer@Hoiio)
Talk Description:
Make is often used to compile a program from its source files. However, Make is not specific to compilation, it just helps you to invoke the compiler. Make keeps track of dependencies between files and the commands for generating the files. Instead of specifying the command you want to perform, you tell Make to produce a particular file and it figures out and invokes the commands to do so.
This talk covers the basics of writing makefiles and the examples of how Make can be used to automate complex workflows.
Pre-talk preparation
Install GNU Make on your system so that you can practice writing a makefile during the talk.
Speaker Profile:
Melvin is a programmer at Hoiio, where he is building APIs that allows
developers to easily add telephony capability to their apps. In his spare
time, Melvin maintains an open source card game named Magarena.
Melvin received his B.Comp (Hons) and Ph.D. degrees from NUS School of
Computing.
In the spirit of hacking, we’re starting a new series of posts exposing some of the projects made during the hack&roll.NUSMorge is a timetable merger, built on top of the Beng’s open source web app nusmods.com. It was built in 24 hours by team “Nange”, comprising of Yao Yujian, Wong Shen Nan, Joey Cheong and Ng Zhi An, who won “Best Freshman Effort” spot prize.
Here are some reflections by their team members:
Yao Yujian
I had my 24-hour hackathon from this Sunday to Monday. Really great experience. Stayed up all night long coding non-stopped and produced something that actually works. Take a look at my GitHub profile page - there were 108 commits during that period! This is kind of funny because it is exactly half the number of commits I have pushed in a year.
Working in a team of four was also great. I don’t have to style the page, write up the server backend, or parse the data - all pushed to others :P.
Anyway, here’s the product we have hacked out: NUSMorge, a time table merger that takes in names and corresponding NUS mods url and produce a merge of everyone’s time table so that you can clearly see all the free time slots. It even allows you to hide some of your lessons (for example, if you decide that you can skip that lecture, or that the lecturer has cancelled it) so you can maybe find more free time slots. For more information, please see this introductory page. It is also open sourced.
Ng Zhi An
What we built
Our team (Nange) built NUSMorge , a simple way for NUS students to visualize multiple time tables together. Check out our intro page too!
The Stack
NUSMorge is built on Node.js with Express serving our requests, mongoDB taking care of unique links, with mongojs as the glue. The rest of it (creating the table, merging the table, parsing the input url etc.) is Javascript, with help from jQuery.
NUSMorge also makes use of the json file crawled by NUSMods. NUSMods is a timetable builder which many NUSStudents use. We take in a long url from NUSMods, and parse it into our own representation, and displays it in the our timetable.
Challenges
For most of us, hacking on something was a relatively new experience, what more having to work together as a team and come up with something at the end of 24 hours.
Communication is vital, stating clearly the route endpoints you expect to get, the object representation, error handling etc. All these were essential for your code to work together, and for the application to even work at all. It was hard to get the message across just by talking, so we drew and scribbled, and that really helped in our understanding.
Fatigue started to dawn upon us three quarters of the way through, but with the help of snacks and sugar, we managed to complete our application before some of us took a snooze.
Encouragement from each other helps a lot too!
Learning Points
Stay focused, stay motivated. 24 hours isn't a long time, to be able to ship something that works, it takes hard work. What is important is to get things working, then start adding features in if you have time.
Learn to distribute work, and learn the strengths of each member. Everyone will have an easier time this way.
Keep updating each other. Everyone should know what everyone else is working on this time. There needs to discussion and communication, so that members don't go working on the same thing (like writing two different ways of parsing), or working on wildly different things.
Source
Our project is on GitHub.
Friday Hacks #44, Mar 15
This week, we will be adding a twist to our regular Friday Hacks.
Instead of the regular talks by speakers, we’ll just be having a hacking session. You are more than welcome to bring your own projects, homework, etc, down and join us!
In addition, this weeks Friday Hacks is themed: Getting Started with Open-Source.
We will be spending the entire Friday Hacks helping students take their first steps in contributing to open-source projects. There will be members on standby to guide you along. This will be especially useful for students that are unfamiliar with open-source contributions but are interested in starting!
Those who are active contributors to open-source projects are welcome to join and guide the others as well.
As always, there’ll be drinks, pizza and a fun crowd to mingle with.
We look forward to seeing you there!
*Tell us what you think about this alternative format of Friday Hacks :)
Nick will be sharing with us his work on an open-source wireless sensor network which utilizes the Arduino platform.
Derrick will be sharing his experience working in the valley and taking questions from the floor about tech and the tech scene in Silicon Valley and Singapore.
Date/Time: Friday, March 8 at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MSign up here://bit.ly/fridayhacks2013Free pizza is served before the talks.
Talk 1: Arduino, Applied Science, and the Internet. (Nick Jachowski, PhD student in Geography)
Talk Description:
This talk will describe the step-by-step development of an open-source wireless sensor network which utilizes the Arduino platform. The sensor network was made in the context of applied environmental science, but it can be used for a variety of wireless sensing applications. In addition, the system incorporates internet connectivity to allow for real-time data streaming on the web. This talk will cover the basics of hardware engineering and design in addition to the various levels of coding required to interface with the hardware and with the internet.
Talk Prep:
This talk will explain the basics so no prior knowledge is necessary, but you may want to read the wikipedia entry on Aduino if you don’t know what it is.
Speaker Profile:
Nick is part programmer, part engineer and part scientist. He likes to make things - both in the computer world and the real world. Most of things he makes are related to applied environmental science. Currently, he is in his third year of the NUS PhD program in Physical Geography where his research focuses on coastal ecosystems modeling.
This week we have Cristobal Viedma and Amarnath Ravikumar, who will share with us on building a web architecture that scales, and design patterns in Drupal respectively. Anyone who is interested should definitely come for the talk!
Date/Time: Friday, February 22 at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MSign up here://bit.ly/fridayhacks2013Free pizza is served before the talks.
Talk 1: Breaking the monolith: Fast distributed web services using sets. (Cristobal Viedma, Head of Platform, Viki)
Talk Description:
In the early days of a startup is common to build a monolithic architecture, as time passes by and growth comes, moving to a distributed architecture is unavoidable to scale up with high-availability and good performance.
In this talk we’ll have an overview of how Viki is moving to a distributed architecture and how we leveraged into an in-memory database, Redis, using sets as our main data structure for fast responses.
Talk Prep:
During the talk a number of examples using Redis will be given. If the attendee is interested, installing Redis to play as the life examples go might be useful (but not required).
Speaker Profile:
Cristobal is the head of platform at Viki, a video site focused on international content and community-driven translations. There, he works with the rest of the engineers supporting different web services and APIs to make sure Viki scales with high-availability and good performance.
During the last few years he worked as a researcher in mobile systems and services, focusing in e-health and context-aware content delivery, in Stockholm. There he also co-organized different developer conferences and events such as SWDC and AndroidOnly.
Prior to this, he started up a company called Bluewalks in the mobile sphere that aimed to help travelers from all walks of life.
Talk Description:
Have you ever wondered how your framework of choice has implemented the software design patterns that you have heard and read so much about? I did; so set about fishing for design pattern implementations in the Drupal source code. I must say I was pleasantly surprised. Do stop by to find out more. What? Not sure what design patterns are? Never mind, stop by anyway - it’s never too late to learn: Spoiler: They’re a lot of fun!
Talk Prep:
I’d be showing some examples directly from the Drupal code base. It’d be easy to follow along if you have a copy of Drupal 7 on your machine (no need to install). Download from here. Alternatively, you can use the awesome repository viewer on Drupal.org.
Additional code examples at my GitHub repo. Examples are wrapped in a Drupal module. You can learn how to install a Drupal module from here.
Speaker Profile:
Amarnath Ravikumar works as an Engineer at Teamie and joined the team in May 2011.
At Teamie, his role is to handle the overall architecture, plan and monitor execution of client projects, developer initiatives and new platform features. Through a six-month attachment at PayPal earlier in 2010, he had led an internal effort to build an automated test suite for localization projects. At PayPal, he was at an excellent vantage point to observe and learn how a high-performing web application is managed and delivered reliably.
Amar graduated in 2011 with a Bachelors in Computer Engineering (Honors) from the National University of Singapore where he was the President of the NUS Student Chapter of the ACM, part of the executive committee of the Electrical and Computer Engineers’ club and an active member playing key roles in other campus student organizations.
An avid Drupal-ist, Amar loves working with small teams to plan, build and ship scalable, high impact web software. More recently, he is excited that one of his Drupal patches made it to Drupal Core (sort of).
This week we have Wong Yi, who will share with us on game programming. Anyone who is interested in this field, or is curious about game programming should definitely come for the talk!
Date/Time: Friday, February 15 at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MSign up here://bit.ly/fridayhacks2013Free pizza is served before the talks.
Talk 1: Introduction to Game Object Component Architecture (Wong Yi, Game Programmer, SUTD Game Lab)
Talk Description:
Traditionally, objects in games were often developed using a hierarchical, object oriented approach where behaviour and data are inherited from base classes. The component based approach instead treats game objects as a generic container with individual behaviour as separate modules that are aggregated to collectively derive the desired behaviour. This session takes a look at the use of the component based approach in the development of Dark Dot, a flock based top down shooter game for the iPad.
Speaker Profile:
Wong Yi had a long time passion with gaming and entered the game industry as a programmer for Mikoishi after graduating with a degree from NTU. There, he was in the team which developed Dropcast, his first commercial game and also Singapore’s first Nintendo DS game.
Wong Yi then joined GAMBIT, now currently embedded within SUTD and known as SUTD Game Lab. While in GAMBIT, he developed the PC and Windows Phone 7 versions of CarneyVale Showtime as well as Dark Dot for the iPad. Now in SUTD Game Lab, he continues to develop commercial games and is also involved with the Game Innovation Programme set up by the SUTD Game Lab.
This week we have Michael Rawlinson, who will share with us the job prospects in the UK. Those interested in the Interactive Entertainment Industry should definitely come for the talk!
Date/Time: Friday, February 8 at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3MSign up here://bit.ly/fridayhacks2013Free pizza is served before the talks.
Talk 1: Interactive entertainment is a worldwide market; hear a perspective from
the other side of the world – the UK. (Michael Rawlinson, Founder of "Grad in Games", ex-CEO of UKIE)
Talk Description:
Michael will outline the development of the UK interactive entertainment industry from the perspective of the industry and the consumer and offer some thoughts on the options for its future development over the next few years.
Michael will outline the relationship between academic students and industry and highlight the current obstacles to gaining post graduate employment and offer a number of tactics and strategies to improve your employment chances.
Michael will explain his new business idea for exchange placements between UK and Singapore students, and will look for feedback from the group on the likely interest in such a offer.
Speaker Profile:
Michael Rawlinson was CEO of UKIE (WWW.UKIE.ORG.UK ) the trade association for the UK interactive entertainment industry for two years until his departure in April 2011. Prior to this he held several senior management positions within the organisation for the previous 9 years.
During his tenure he transformed the organisation from being solely focused on representing publishers when it was called ELSPA to broadening it remit to encompass the whole of the interactive entertainment sector.
Other highlights include:
the creation of the first Pan-European content classification system – PEGI (www.pegi.info ),
establishing an accreditation scheme for undergraduate degree courses in video games programming and video games art and animation via Creative Skillset, (//www.creativeskillset.org/games/accreditation/ ),
establishing PEGI as the legal system for video games classification in the UK
growing and developing a vibrant and active trade association membership.
Since leaving UKIE Michael has undertaken a one year business and leadership study programme at master’s level and set up a business consultancy.
Michael is currently working on a new business venture, Grads In Games with the vision of harnessing the talents of graduates from video games relevant courses to enrich and stimulate future video games creation.
Following the success of last semester’s workshops, we’re happy to announce the return of hackerschool this semester. The goal is the same: to teach tech skills in an easy manner, that will get people past the initial hurdle and give them the much-needed “push” into the world of hacking. This time round, we’ll be running four workshops:
1. Introduction to HTML5/CSS3
When: Saturday, 26 January 2013, 10am - 1pm
Where: Seminar Room 3, COM1, School of Computing, NUS
Who: Beginners
Fee: $5 (make payment at COM1-02-15 or at our next Friday Hacks)
Wanted to make a website, but found w3c's tutorials too boring? We'll teach you HTML5 and CSS3 from scratch. Come down to get a hands-on experience on designing beautiful webpages, and walk away with a basic personalised website.
2. Git for beginners
When: Saturday, 2 February 2013, 10am - 1pm
Where: Global Learning Room, Education Resource Centre, University Town
Who: Beginners
Fee: $5 (make payment at COM1-02-15 or at our next Friday Hacks)
Details TBA
3. Web Development first steps with Sinatra
When: Saturday, 16 February 2013, 10am - 1pm
Where: Global Learning Room, Education Resource Centre, University Town
Who: Beginners
Fee: $5 (make payment at COM1-02-15 or at our next Friday Hacks)
Details TBA
4. Unix and Shell Scripting Basics
When: Saturday, 23 February 2013, 10am - 1pm
Where: Global Learning Room, Education Resource Centre, University TownWho: Beginners
Fee: $5 (make payment at COM1-02-15 or at our next Friday Hacks)
Data Scientist Linus Lee will be speaking about tackling big data at one of the fastest growing companies in the world, Twitter. His talk will cover:
Analytics stack at Twitter
Problems faced by data scientists
How to be a data scientist
About the Speaker: Linus Lee is a Senior Data Scientist at Twitter, where his job is to derive insights from large amounts of data to help guide business and product decisions. Prior to that, he worked as an algorithmic trader, specializing in international exchange traded funds. He graduated with a B.Sc in Physics and M.Sc in Statistics from Stanford University, and is currently based in San Francisco, California. He hopes to return to Singapore one day to be a part of the upcoming technology startup scene there.
This event is co-organized by Plugin@Blk71, NUS Hackers and Infocomm Investments. We’ll be hosting!
Friday Hacks #37, Jan 18
Welcome back! Please note that we're shifting Friday Hacks to University Town's ERC, SR2 this semester. Also, we will start at 6:30pm, with pizza served first! :)
This week we have Benjamin Tan, a software engineer and SoC Alumni talking about his experiences building and releasing a Ruby gem, and Cedric Chin, an NUS student, speaking on software testing as a way of avoiding bugs.
Date/Time: Friday, January 16 at 6:30pm
Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3M
Free pizza is served before the talks.
Talk 1: Coderippa, or how I built my first Ruby gem (Benjamin Tan, NUS Alumni)
Talk Description:
Coderippa (//code-rippa.heroku.com/) is a gem that turns any file or code directory into a beautiful, readable PDF ebook. Why did I built it? Well, we don't take the time to study the code written by the masters. I have absolutely no idea how vim works, neither do I know all the magic that goes behind Rails, or how Coffeescript is written in Coffeescript and Rubinus is written in Ruby ... You get the idea.
CodeRippa is my attempt to make source code reading a more pleasurable experience, and help programmers get better at their craft. This talk covers the things I've learnt from building it.
Speaker Profile:
Benjamin Tan graduated from SoC last year, and is now living the life as a Software Engineer.
Talk 2: Testing: Never Fear Bugs Again (Cedric Chin, NUS Student)
Talk Description:
Ever had the experience where you push some changes to your app, and cause a set of bugs to appear in some other part of your program? Well, testing is supposed to prevent this sort of behaviour. In this talk I'll make the case for testing your software (and when not to) and walk you through some basic ideas using Rails and RSpec as an example. Talk directed at programmers who don't (yet) test.
Speaker Profile:
Cedric was formerly President of NUS Hackers, and considers himself a web developer. He likes green tea, Python, and cats.
Friday Hacks #36, Nov 16: On Impact - An Introduction to Palantir
This Friday, Palantir will be coming to NUS to give a recruiting talk. Food will be served after the talk, and a Nexus 7 giveaway will be held for one lucky registrant at the end of the event.
To sign up for this talk, and to apply for job opportunities at Palantir, please register at this link: //bit.ly/palantir-sg-2012
Talk title: "On Impact: An Introduction to Palantir
"
Please join Kevin Lee, Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir, who will discuss how Palantir is revolutionizing the analysis of hard and important problems that face our world today. We build the technology that allows people at the world’s most critical institutions to make sense of their data. We solve the technical problems, so they can solve the human ones. Combating terrorism. Tracking disease outbreaks. Finding missing and exploited children. We believe that with the right technology and enough data, people can still solve hard problems and change the world for the better.
View a live demo of our data fusion platforms, and learn how you can be a part of our mission.
About the speaker
Kevin Lee is a Forward Deployed Engineer who is starting up Palantir’s new Singapore office, which serves as the regional HQ for Asia. He attended Stanford University on a PSC scholarship, graduating in 2006 with a BS in Computer Science with Distinction. He subsequently worked on a wide array of public policy issues as an Administrative Officer in the Prime Minister’s Office and Ministry of Finance, before making a happy return to his technical roots at Palantir to help organizations in the public, private and non-profit sectors solve their hardest and most important problems.
Location: COM1 SR3 [COM1/212]
Time: 7pm - 9pm.
Talks start promptly at 7pm. You are welcome to stay and mingle (or hack!) after the talks.
Talk 1: Sound and Interaction in the browser using the WebAudio API
Preparation:
If you want to “code along” to make some noise of your own, bring your computer with the Chrome Canary Browser installed.
Talk Description:
The formative WebAudio API will make powerful real-time and interactive sound synthesis standard fare for browsers. Coupled with new networking technologies, and APIs for accessing device capabilities, this ain’t your grandmothers browser any more. The talk will present some recent explorations with WebAudio, discuss some of the open issues with the developing standard, and show you how you can add interactive sound to your web pages.
Speaker Profile:
Lonce is on the faculty of the Communications and New Media Department, and directs the Arts and Creativity Lab at the Interactive and Digital Media Institute (IDM). He’s been making noise with computers for about 30 years, and his current research focus is on technologies for communication between live networked performers.
Talk 2: An Introduction to LaTeX
Talk Description:
If you’re a Science or CS major, the reports you’ll be writing will have a fair amount of math. However, math input in Microsoft Word is not easy, and many features are missing. If you’ve been wondering how your professors typeset their teaching materials, and want the same type of quality for your reports, use LaTeX.
This talk will give you a broad introduction to LaTeX.
Speaker Profile:
Shawn Tan is a computer science undergraduate planning to pursue a career in research. His interests lie in machine learning and AI in general.
After an awesome holiday that saw brilliant hacks by many of our members, including MODIVLE, NUSMods, and NUS Next Bus, we are now looking to restart our activities in the coming academic year.
Just a couple of quick announcements. We will be kicking off with a welcome tea on Aug 17, and following up with our long awaited first Friday Hacks of AY2012/2013 the week after. We are currently looking out for potential speakers on technical topics, and of course pizza sponsors, so if you are interested in doing something with us, feel free to drop us an email over here.
Alright, and cya all next semester :D
Friday Hacks Talk 6th Apr -Big Data & Intro to Erlang
Greetings, fellow hackers.
Coming Good Friday (6th April), we have two talks by Abishek and Andy. Despite it being a public holiday, our Friday Hacks will go on unimpeded and because it is Good Friday, we are giving away a free ergonomic keyboard (worth $80), that will ensure you aren’t limited by your hands getting tired after long hours of coding :P (You need to register to be eligible to win the keyboard and of course you must also be present at the Friday Hacks to qualify for this).
Talk 1:
“Ruby for Soul of Data Nerds” by Abishek Parolkar
Talk Details:
The term BigData is associated to anything where scale of the data is part of the problem. Today’s internet companies (Youtube,Facebook,ViKi etc) face challenges surrounding analysis and management of this data.
In this talk Abhishek is going to show you how people solved these problems and built analytics systems all with Ruby and related technologies.
Talk 2:
“Erlang… and you thought Ericsson only made phones!” by Andy Marks
Talk Details:
Erlang is a programming language used to build massively scalable soft real-time systems with requirements on high availability. Some of its uses are in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging. Erlang’s runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. It was designed by Ericsson to support distributed, fault-tolerant, soft-real-time, non-stop applications. It supports hot swapping, so that code can be changed without stopping a system.
Hacking on projects commences after talk - you’re free to work on homework or personal projects, or ask for assistance from fellow programmers in attendance.
Hack & Roll coming up!
NUS Hackers is organising the “Hack n Roll’ 24-Hour Hackathon, the first-ever student organized hackathon in NUS.
If you want to have a fun, educational weekend at the Start of Recess Week, in which you get to build something cool and stand to win some prizes, then join us at the hackathon.
Date: 19th (Sun) to 20th (Mon) February 2012 (ie Start of Recess Week)
Time: 1pm (Sun) to 3pm (Mon)
Venue: Tentatively in NUS School of Computing (Soc) Basement 1 (B1)
Registration Period: 25 Jan to 12 Feb 2012 only. Registrations will be closed once we have reached 80 people or on 12 Feb.
Registration Fee: $10 (to contribute for food)
(Note that venue will be confirmed in February. Registrants will be informed of the confirmed venue.)
The 2 top team(s) will get prizes from Blackberry, Microsoft, and others (full list of prizes - tablets, phones and keyboards to be won, will be released in February)
Only a maximum of 80 people can be accommodated for the competition so get in on the action before it’s too late.
Lead-up Talks/Workshops
17 Feb 12 - “HTML5/CSS3 Workshop” (by Blackberry/RIM)
More details coming soon.
Stay tuned to //nushackers.org/hack-and-roll/ for the latest details!
Rules are found on //nushackers.org/hack-and-roll/ as well.
PS: This hackathon is only open to NUS students.
Building NUS CORS Instant
Rollen Gomes is a recently graduated NUS student. Here, he talks about the nuscors.com, an instant search for CORS built on top of the Unofficial CORS API.
A couple weeks ago NUS Hackers released the unofficial NUS CORS API. I decided to leverage on the API to build something, just for the heck of it. Long story short I ended up building nuscors.com. The site is a faster way to search for a module in the NUS CORS database: you could call it an ‘instant search’.
Now I’m gonna say this this a bluntly as possible, the initial design goals of the site were as follows. Cheap Free, Fast Search, Up before the CORS bidding period started. My other more sneaky goal was to have everyone in NUS use it and become a hero. Some of those goals were met and some are “in the pipeline”.
Anyway from this point on I speak some geek.
In the planning phase of the application and after some poking around I realised that the Unnoficial CORS API was written in Flask (Python). I immediately told myself to rewrite the API using some Ruby. Turns out the NUS CORS site was down on that day and life saved me from myself (phew). I ended up downloading the json file from the api site.
I used heroku as the hosting service for the application. This meant that the app was easy and free to deploy. Unfortunately, all free services come their limitations. In this case it was a 5 megabyte shared database. I didn’t want to have any connection with the database (pun intended) for a couple of reasons but most importantly it would add time to the page load.
In a nutshell the site works by downloading a static json file and then running a search on that downloaded file. Once the functionality was completed I designed the look and feel of the site to mimic Google instant search.
That, my friends, is how nuscors.com was born. Hope you enjoyed the read, if you have any questions join the NUS Hackers mailing list and mail me there.
linuxNUS Workshop series
linuxNUS is planning for the next semester!
linuxNUS is an organisation to promote the use of Free and Open Source Software in NUS and Singapore. We have been organising Hackfests which promote working in teams with an intense focus on the execution of an idea. These Hackfests are aimed at encouraging the JFDI - Just F**kin’ Do It attitude, while collaborating with the community.
So now, we’ve come up with the idea of a Hack Workshop series for NUS students. These workshops will be aimed at promoting “learning how to learn”. They will talk about hacking as an important part of entrepreneurship and boundless creative exploration. As we say, a great idea is nothing without excellent execution, so we’d really like help make excellent execution a reality.
Essentially the workshops will feature the following concepts -
simplicity in design
team synergy
scalable models / adaptability to change
power of opensource
collaboration
proper developmental practices
the importance of self-learning
The workshops are for those interested in learning to how develop a project while working in teams. We will be collaborating with local open source developer groups, entrepreneurs and startups for the workshops.
The workshops will come in two flavours, technical and non-technical -
The technical workshops will primarily cover topics such as web development and software development best practices, while the non-technical topics will cover the business viability aspects, presentation skills and will include talks by successful start-ups.
The workshops will be held either on a Saturday or Sunday morning - 10am till 1pm. All the workshops will be followed by a
Hackfest (yeah the same old one where you can sit around, talk to people and develop anything!).
Here is a list of Workshop topics (stay tuned for updates on the Workshop schedule!) -
Linux/Unix basics,
NUS Linux setup - configuring printers, network.
Basic system administration - package management, etc.
Revision control - GIT/SVN
Beginning Web development - HTML/CSS/Javascript.
PHP/MySQL - Making a simple Blog CMS (with CodeIgniter).
Software development best practices - Agile Development, TDD, Pair Programming
Presentation Skills
Start-up talks
Designing with GIMP/Photoshop
You can preregister with us for the workshops here and more news - //bit.ly/baD3dP
If you think you can contribute to the initiative you can contact us at coreteam(at)linuxNUS(dot)org with suggestions for topics or speakers.
Intro to Nokia Qt C++ Framework
Developing a portable application has never been an easy task, be it a browser-based service or a fanciful desktop application. With emergence of many frameworks for developing cross-platform applications, choosing the right one has become a challenge. One can name a bunch of frameworks for desktop development, such as GTK+, Gtkmm, FLTK, VCF C++, etc. Adobe fans would pronounce Adobe Air as the best choice. Well, so what do I have in my hat? Voilà! I’d like to present Nokia Qt C++ framework - one of the leading frameworks for desktop & mobile development.
GUI in a while
There are many reasons why I love Qt Designer and would like to share some with you:
If you love Delphi & M$.NET GUI designers, you will find a new romance with Qt Designer.
Dozens of widgets are available to serve you and what you need to do is just to drag & drop.
Adding menu, submenus, toolboxes & docked widgets can be done with a few clicks.
Qt Designer loves diversity and accepts your custom widgets.
Feel free to load and change GUI dynamically with UiLoader.
You can target different architectures such as x86, x86-64, ARM, … and run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, S60, Maemo, etc with no or little modification to your code. The broader audience you reach, the more popularity you gain.
Network boldly
Qt has a wealth of network libraries. The clients to the standard services such as HTTP(S) & FTP are already there for you. XML parsing, XQuery & XPath libraries will enable you to interface with web services. Writing own TCP/UDP-based protocols with Qt is easy. Feel free to read more on Qt Network.
Browser & scripting integration
Along with high quality modules for GUI, networking and XML, Nokia Qt C++ framework has other 2 killer modules: QtWebkit & QtScript. QtWebkit provides browser integration based on the Webkit engine used by Apple Safari & Google Chrome. Adding a browser to your application to render web pages or custom help/manual files in HTML has never been easier. QtScript exposes Qt objects to scripting with JS-like language. With QtScript you are empowered to do cross-platform scripting on your applications to increase productivity and encourage users to write their own extensions. Please refer to the official Qt Script and Qt Webkit documents and examples to explore more.
Installation
Please find suitable installation package for your OS & architecture from //qt.nokia.com/downloads/. Please pay close attention to whether your OS is 32-bit or 64-bit and make sure you download the version of Qt SDK that suits your OS.
Proceed to the installation with the default settings. It is recommended that you stick with the default installation settings. There are very few things to tweak.
Set up paths and links for the Qt library. If you are using Mac, you may skip this step. This step is only advisable for Windows and Linux developers.
Windows: You need to add paths to the Qt bin & MinGW bin folders. If you installed Qt 4.6.3 then the path of Qt is `C:\Qt\2010.3`. You need to add the following paths: `C:\Qt\2010.3\qt\bin` and `C:\Qt\2010.3\mingw\bin`.
Linux/Unix: You have 2 options: Either to create soft links or add to the environment variables `PATH` & `LD_LIBRARY_PATH`. To add soft links, you need to run the following commands:
For the changes to the environment variables to take effect, you need to log out and log in again. Soft links don’t need that extra step.
Now you are ready to run Qt demos & examples. Enjoy!
Conclusion
Nokia might not suit all your needs but it’s one of the best options to keep an eye on. Among large users of Nokia Qt C++ framework, there are companies such as Google, Adobe and Skype. Qt has found its application in a breadth of industries. Your next killer application may be written in Nokia C++ too! Stay tuned with our series of Qt tutorials!
* The screenshots are provided at the official Nokia Qt C++ documentation website.
We are 1 month old, and we're celebrating it by throwing ourselves a Christmas Party! This event is similar to our open house party!
We’ll be catering some halal food from around the area. If you can bring more food, that will be great! Just make sure it is halal, or if not, indicate it isn’t.
Drinks will be available, including Wine, and some alcohol. As usual, contributions to our pot of donations will be appreciated.
We’re also going to have a gift exchange in the form of a game. So bring some physical gift which cost no more than $15, wrap it up, hide it, and come up with clues! The smaller the gift, the easier to hide. evil laughter Oh and you don’t have to bring a gift to attend the party, but you won’t be able to play the game (I think??). :)
Join us for our party now!!!
A few of us will gather there for the party. If you want to join us, detail of the time and venue is as follow:
Thanks to tan_ce and Nixxy’s comments below, here are the lyrics!
When I find my code in tons of trouble,
Friends and colleagues come to me,
Speaking words of wisdom:
“Write in C.”
As the deadline fast approaches,
And the bugs are all that I can see,
Somewhere, someone whispers:
“Write in C.”
Write in C, write in C,
Wtite in C, yeah, write in C.
LISP is dead and buried,
Write in C.
I used to write a lot of FORTRAN,
For science it worked flawlessly.
Try using it for graphics!
Write in C.
If you’ve just spent nearly 30 hours
Debugging some assembly,
Soon you will be glad to
Write in C.
Write in C, write in C,
Write in C, yeah, write in C.
BASIC is for wimps.
Write in C.
Write in C, write in C,
Write in C, oh, write in C.
Pascal won’t quite cut it.
Write in C.
Write in C, write in C,
Write in C, yeah, write in C.
Don’t even mention COBOL.
Write in C.
And when the screen is fuzzy,
And the editor is bugging me.
I’m sick of ones and zeroes.
Write in C.
A thousand people people swear that T.P.
Seven is the one for me.
I hate the word PROCEDURE,
Write in C.
Write in C, write in C,
Write in C, yeah, write in C.
PL1 is 80’s,
Write in C.
Write in C, write in C,
Write in C, yeah, write in C.
The government loves ADA,
Write in C.
Write in C, write in C,
Write in C, yeah, write in C.
Java’s not quite there yet.
Write in C.
Poster poster posts post-post post!
(Sorry about the title.) With the linuxNUS LXDE talk coming up, the linuxNUS Team has gone on a poster posting spree. Do keep a look out for our pretty LXDE poster around NUS! And if you haven’t heard about the talk yet, check out the details . If you catch this in time and want to come down, do register !
We had fun putting these posters up, and we’ll hope you’ll find the talk exciting and inspiring!
And here are some photos of us chilling out after putting up the posters at the NUS Arts Canteen.
Sheez I forgot my password to write this post...
The Android Snow Show
I want android too.
jQuery on show
Non Sequitur
So … I am somewhat relieved that I managed to install OpenSUSE 11.0 on my laptop, in a separate partition, just the way Linux should be run. It wasn’t accepting any sort of Ubuntu CD before, though it did give me some excuse to tangle with Lilo… really long story that doesn’t belong here, hence the title.
But I’d like to remind you guys that even though lots of our events are based around Ubuntu, and more collaboration with Ubuntu-SG is in the works, there are plenty of other distros out there, and there has to be one that suits you.
… Yes, I heard you say Windows Vista. Nice try, go back to chroot jail; do not pass go, do not collect $200. If the rest of you are interested in checking out other distros, I’d recommend DistroWatch :) as I’d mentioned before at the recent Install Fest.
There, I’ve made a QuickPress not so quick, and managed to link a non sequitur back to the previous post. If only everything in my life was this successful ;)
P.S. It is purely coincidence that we might be inviting OpenSUSE, well the meetup group anyway, to NUS somewhere down the line. Really.
Sun Tech Days 2009
This comes a bit late.. but if anyone is going for Sun Tech Days 2009, please post in this thread Wink Nothing like hanging out with your linuxNUS buddies :)
Maybe the Tripartite Centre for Fair Employment should change their logo :x
Or maybe it is time for a Singapore flavour of Ubuntu ;)
The Desktop Flaunt (!)
Hi, this is Yuen Hoe here, and I’m supposed to be kicking off this new monthly desktop screeny thing. So the basic idea is simple, every month we’ll be having a Linux box over to powder up and pose for the printscreen. We’ll click a couple of shots, then upload and flash them here in what would hopefully be a showcase of glamour. Presumably this would serve on the one hand to give fellow Linux users tips and inspirations with regards to customizing your own box, and on the other to make you infidelic non-Linuxers drool in uncontrollable envy educate the masses that modern Linux can be as polished as any other graphical OS - because we all know that people only care about looks a pretty and refined GUI goes a long way :)
So without further ado…
It so happened that this period sees me in “let’s make things look Vista-ish!” mood, so purists will have to bear with me ;) I am pretty happy with the extent to which I was able to reproduce Aero-Vista’s glassy feel though, especially considering the fact that both my Compiz reflection and blur plugins refuse to work.
And since nobody told me that it’s supposed be a ONE screenshot post, I’m gonna flaunt a good deal moar - after all, you can never do a Linux desktop justice with only one screeny.
More screenies after the cut. Warning : they’re huge!
As a final note, while its cool to Vista-ify or Mac-ify your desktop every now and then, its usually more fun and rewarding to try for something more unique. For example, I once achieved a very satisfying result with trying for a Ubuntu-ish look by theming everything in black and shades of polished orange. The point is that if you are willing to spend some time experimenting with the theming mechanisms, it’s really not difficult to synthesize something that looks like no other familiar system, that looks impressive and awesome all the same. Your creativity is the limit.
Have fun!
UNIX Usage Tips
The IBM developerWorks articles are a great resource for anyone who’s into the world of development. We saw some recently that dealt with tips and tricks for working on the command line. For us Linux users, while we may like our fancy desktops and graphical effects, courtesy of the CompizFusion project, the command line is always available when we need that raw power and flexibility.
And yes, while the article does say "UNIX" instead of "Linux", most of the tips are usable on both platforms, since the utilities involved are common between the two. The articles also do take note when certain tips are shell specific, such as the file-name completion tip in the second article. The default shell in most Linux distributions is bash , so unless you’ve specifically changed your default shell, following the instructions for bash should keep you safe.
And if you haven’t already gotten your hands dirty with the command line (Konsole, for KDE users, and GNOME Terminal for, well, the GNOME people), here’s your chance to dive in with these handy tips.
Popularity of Linux Across the World...According to Google
Ever wondered about the geographical popularity of Linux in a Windows dominated world?
Data (by popular search terms) from Google collated by Royal Pingdom reveals that Linux is more popular in the East and developing countries (probably due to cost?). Surprisingly, the United States isn’t top 5 for any of the 8 distributions researched.
How about Singapore?
Well, according to Google statistics, search terms from Singapore involving Linux have sadly been declining since 2004 (which has also been true for many other countries).
"Web tripwires" reveal 1.3% of web pages altered in transit
When you visit a web page, you might expect that the code and images from the page will make their journey through the tubes unmolested and unaltered, but according to security researchers, you would also be wrong 1.3 percent of the time.
Quoting from a recent article on Ars.Technica, researchers have found that up to 1.3% of web pages are altered in transit between the server and the requesting client. Not all the modifications are malicious though, the article notes. Some ISPs modify the page either by removing extra white space in the page, or further compressing images, thereby reducing bandwidth used and decreasing wait times. Alternatively, some service providers take the opportunityto serve ads instead.
70% of the modifications where caused by client-side proxy software, such as ad blockers and popup blockers.
46 IP addresses reported changes that were caused by an ISP, such as injected advertisements and modifications to reduce network traffic.
125 IP addresses were using proxies that caused them to be vulnerable to cross site scripting attacks.
3 IP addresses were affected by adware or worms.
I'm curious as to how this test would fare in Singapore. Are our local providers editing the pages we request on the fly? So here's what, just for fun,
On 20 Mar, linuxNUS played host to a group of 12 students from the Multimedia University (MMU) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
The MMU students were mainly IT undergraduates, and had decided to pay a visit to NUS to learn more about the workings of our IT infrastructure, and at the same time to check out the facilities that we enjoy here at NUS.
We started the day first with a tour of the SoC Datacenter, paying special attention to the Tembusu Linux Cluster. This was quite an eye-opener, since even I as an SoC student, have not been in there. The MMU students (and us!) learnt how the data center was set up, taking in the sights, including the rack of connected car batteries which served as the Data Center’s Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS).
After a lunch at the Arts Canteen (Good, cheap food!, say the MMU students), our ragtag bunch proceeded across campus towards the main Data Center in NUS, the NUS Computer Center. Once again, at Computer Center, we toured the facilities and the server set ups, learning more about hot and cold lanes and their purposes.
Armed with enough knowledge about Data Centers to probably set one up on our own, we then made our way over to the Faculty of Engineering, where we paid a visit to Professor Adrian Cheok’s Mixed Reality Lab (MXR). Now this was a good break from servers and such, as the friendly staff from MXR demonstrated the various applications in mixed reality that they’ve been working on.
We checked out projects ranging from the interactive Age Invaders, to the outright cool Media Me.
Though that concluded the tour for the day, this was the first time linuxNUS has played host to visitors from outside NUS, and it gave us a networking (of the human kind) opportunity that we haven’t had the chance to be part of before.
To our MMU friends, it was a great pleasure showing you guys around our campus, and we really hope you enjoyed the tour.
Open Source Voices in Singapore
You know, you hear a lot about “open source” these days, and if you’ve ever wondered how the Open Source community in Singapore is doing, here’s a handy tip, check out Planet LUGS.
Planet LUGS is an aggregation of a number of blogs from members in Singapore’s Open Source scene. Ranging from professionals in certain large companies, to your average student on the street, Planet LUGS collects their voices and brings them to you in one nice, easy read.
It’s been a busy week with midterms and all, hope everybody’s been doing well?
We’re pleased to announce our first social meetup session next Tuesday, 9 Oct, at 6pm , at the linuxNUS Clubroom at SoC #03-19.
Do feel free to come by, after all, the Clubroom is where it all happens for linuxNUS! As members, you’ll also have access to the linuxNUS Library, a collection of technical manuals contributed by members of our community. There is also spare hardware on which you can use to test various software packages if you so wish.
Hope to see you there on Tuesday!
Cheers
linuxNUS Coreteam
Things you miss on #linuxNUS
We like strategy games..
ChanServ MODE +o rey
rey KICK elfgoh - rey
<rey> so fun
<ramkumar> lol
<rey> long time nv hijack irc channel liao
<tianyao> OMG ./KICKTOTHEMOON elfgoh
So do join us on #linuxNUS on irc.freenode.net if you want to be in on the action =)
Strange stats
Was just checking out our Google Analytics stats the other day and found a very interesting trend. Second to Singapore (of course), the highest number of incoming visitors to our Opensource Wiki are from…. USA!
The proof (darker areas show higher hits)
So anyway, just a big wave to our friends from the US! =D
Good Luck For the Exams!
It’s 2 more weeks to the exams, and everyone is furiously mugging (I hope…). Good luck everyone! May everyone pass with flying colours!
In other news, the room (SOC1-03-19) is still spewing coffee to keep late-night muggers and too-early larks awake. You can come join us too. =)
linuxNUS Talk on XAMPP on 1 Feb 2007 - Mark your calendars!!!
Dear Linux Enthusiasts
We hope that everyone had a fruitful December holiday.
linuxNUS will be holding our first meetup for 2007 on 1st Feb. This time, we will be having an introductory talk to XAMPP. No registration is necessary for this event, so just drop by and support us!
Date/Time: 1st Feb 2007, 6.15pm
Venue: S16 Level 8 Conference Room
Cost: $FREE
Agenda: Short Talk: Introduction to XAMPP (See synopsis below), followed by interaction time
Contact Person: KevinIntroduction to XAMPP
Ever heard of XAMPP by Apache Friends? It’s a pre-packaged [Linux/Windows]AMP stack to install in your own computer!! It is not for use in production environments, but for developers to have a web server immediately. That way, they can get on with the thing they want to do: develop software. And we can wait for the fruits of their efforts.
