Friday Hacks #4 Recap
Posted on by ejames
Last week’s Friday Hacks saw a visit from Ong Guan Sin from NUS ComCen, in addition to the usual hackathon. He had a proposal for us:
The first proposal he had was for NUS Hackers to maintain Download@NUS, a mirror for Linux distributions in Singapore. This is almost certainly going to happen, after the coreteam discusses and makes public an organization scheme. The next two proposals were slightly more interesting:
Proposal 2: setting up a site for the hosting and sharing of Scientific Data. Guan Sin said that ComCen could give us significant resources to implement this, as data sets from Science regularly reach into the terabytes (at minimum). He also suggested something more student-focused, but related: a file sharing site for NUS Students, sitting on the NUS network (sort-of like a ‘Rapidshare’@NUS). Of course, we immediately asked about managing copyright issues. Guan Sin said that would be an interesting problem for us to solve, and that we would need to figure out how to solve it before making the service available to students.
Proposal 3: an NUS Hackers private cloud. We’re putting that on hold while we work on organizational kinks, but it’s good to know that the option exists for the club to tap.
The rest of the Friday Hacks consisted of the Weekly Hackathon as well as a group discussion on the NUS Hackers cluster building project. I did a quick skeleton of the file-sharing app on GitHub, and others worked on a variety of projects (excluding homework): an open source card game, the Android SDK, and a program in Silverlight. Pics below:
Special thanks to Ong Guan Sin and Yung Shing Gene, both from NUS Computer Center, for coming down and spending some time with us.