30 January 2016
It’s the end of January and I haven’t posted anything -_-
Last time when I had time to write something, my website was down for few days due to misconfiguration.
School
So the school has started and I aspired to physically attend all classes and not skip due to laziness or due to uninteresting lecture unlike the previous semester.
In the previous semester,
- I never physically attended CZ3006 (Net-Centric Computing) lectures (lazy + uninteresting)
- I only attended CZ8003 (Human Resource Management and Entrepreneurship) and CZ3002 (Advanced Software Engineering) lectures once or twice (uninteresting)
- I frequently skipped BU8101 (Accounting: A User’s Perspective) and CZ3003 (Software System Architecture and Design) lectures due to laziness.
And this might be the cause of my grade drop.
By attending lectures and focus on the lesson, I’ve observed that I’ve asked questions directly to the lecturer and understood better.
Except one, CZ3007 Compiler Technique. So far, I can’t focus during the lecture even if I tried so hard. Maybe it’s due to the materials being just descriptive and not inviting us to think about it.
CZ4041 Machine Learning is interesting, content heavy, and so mathematical. Interesting due to the nature of inviting us to think and sometimes, interesting questions arise from the students.
CZ4046 Intelligent Agents is more theoretical, abstract, but still thought-provoking.
CZ4034 Information Retreival is also quite interesting though not always.
CE2004 Circuits and Signal Analysis is currently Secondary/High School-level Physics on electricity topic. The lecture is a interesting and interactive one.
I think, so far the patterns of those that is interesting is that, the lecture invited us to think together, i.e. the lecturer imposes a problem first, and then take us step-by-step in solving the problem.
HW0310 Professional Communication. The first lecture was damn super! The first lecture ended with a Star Wars-themed mini drama performed by the lecturer. The tutorial session is lively.
Summer 2016
Besides that, I’ve been searching for another summer internship, this time round I target more on the US companies. But one by one, rejection letter has came in.
The ones that moved me on to the next stage was Mozilla. They sent me a link to a HackerRank coding test. Since I applied for 2 positions, there were two tests. I’ve completed both of them and for one position, I’m scheduling a time for interview and for the other, I was waiting for their next move. Hopefully I can make it since working at Mozilla is one of my “dream job”
Freelance project
Back in December, I’ve agreed to signed up to a freelance project to make websites. Well this is my first time doing so, and since I felt that this can be done to fill my free time, I signed up for this.
In January, I’ve met several times already with client and I’m currently finalizing the requirements they needed. After that, I think I can start embark on implementation already.
Taking on this project, I realized that Software Engineering process is quite important. I did not do a super exhaustive Software Requirement Specification like what we did on the course. For the requirement document, I made a simple Functional Requirements and I’ve presented it to client.
Final year project
The title is “Web-based Argumentation”, under supervision of Assoc Prof Miao Chun Yan, who is also the director of LILY research center.
Back in December, I intended to meet her before I went back to my hometown, but since she never replied, time passed and I “nagged” her to have a meeting early on Week 1.
In the first meeting, there were two things: she persuaded me to take on PhD, and she vaguely describe what the project is about and tell me to read some papers on Google Scholars.
After I read some papers, I went back to meet her and this time the meeting was comparatively short. In this meeting, I described to her what I understand by the project and she re-explain the project. This time, after the meeting, she sent me the readings (and apparently one of them is a 200-page PhD thesis ._.)
LILY part-time
Under one of the researcher in the LILY research center, I went on to continue my project again. Briefly, this time my task to make the back-end interface more user friendly. Well, this project might be quite hard, but I think she had put high hope on me since I’m the only one left doing part-time website development on this project. Besides this, I think that the part-time pay was quite high, so I agreed to take on this project.
ntulearn-dl
Back in December, I saw on GitHub one of my friend starred a tool named “ntulearn-dl”. Curious, I went on to clone the project and tried it on (after some hassle since documentation is really minimal). Wow! The tool downloaded every materials on NTULearn and put the files on folders like structured in NTULearn itself. This is it!
In January, I observed that the original repository has been deleted, but since I made some modifications on the cloned repo, I published the repo under my username. My modifications is basically separating configuration to a separate file.
NTUBS
Dharma Camp
So in this January, I’ve had Dharma Camp which has more Dharma in it. Some drastic changes made last-minute. And Handoko became really famous throughout the camp. (3 out of 4 group skit mentioned Handoko) This too, is the first time I joined the Dharma Camp maincomm briefing at midnight. This is also the first time I had such an important role in the group skit: a cat that only meows.
Informal Dharma Discussion
At first, there were so few participants came that I think Marshall was sad about it. But throughout time, more and more people came and I think the topic discussed were really interesting. Marshall also did really well in leading the discussion.
Buddhism Awareness Week
Ah this again, one of the event that I never signed up for. Or maybe it was just me being afraid to face public. But basically it was a nice experience designing information board, though at first the design was damn bad. The design that I made is with attractiveness in mind, so what I did was: increase font size and reduce number of words. But turned out that apparent look is that it is too wordy due to big font size and hence need more lines to represent sentences. After revising and then printing, the board looks okay, except for one that the font size looks too big. But in the end, they seem very attractive. So, my conclusion is that if you want to show information to public, make it visible, make it big! :P Aside from design, I admit that I’m not that enthusiastic in this BAW or the previous editions. But overall, the event was really tiring and I hoped that the event achieved its objectives.
Meditation Class
Saw lots of new faces, and also did not see lots of old faces. This time, the meditation class is conducted by Ng Xin Zhao, in which this is his first time conducting a meditation class “for such a large group” he said. For me, sometimes his instructions were quite fast, but overall it was a nice experience.
NTUBS Night/Anniversary
There were technical errors, but aside from that, the program was really well executed: The drama was nice, the choir was nice, the food was nice, and the games were engaging. :)
Others
This January also saw my “departure” from competitive programming. I did not do Facebook Hacker Cup (because I missed the deadline :P ). I did not join the weekly ICPC session from NTU.
I also went to BF twice :) Once at the Sunday service, and once at the youth service. The Sunday service that I attended had generosity as its topic and it was quite interesting to explore the benefits and the drive of giving. The youth service was also very interesting, as I haven’t come to the regular youth service for at least a year already, some of them thought that I was a new member. The sutta that we discussed here is called Anana Sutta, about the bliss that a layperson can attain.