30 June 2015

Phew, end of June already. It’s time to update this blog before I got busy with another task and blogging just got postponed again.

Overview of June:

• Week starting on 8 June: Presented at company’s weekly meeting; new internship “project” started, end of Alyssa’s internship, meetings and trials of Awaken Challenge were conducted, Awaken Challenge was done [we got 2nd place]!
• Week starting on 15 June: Not really productive week; tried out Xamarin but turned out to be really hard to understand; started to work on URECA paper; IPSC on Saturday and BF on Sunday; started to sort out stuffs to be thrown away;
• Week starting on 22 June: Getting URECA paper first draft done and correspondence with supervisor on its revision; mid-week project review (turned out bad :( ) and end-of-week project review (quite okay) resulting in so much pressure every day; ended the week with getaway with my family
• Week starting on 29 June: getaway with my family has ended; continued with work

Awaken Challenge 2015

This year’s Awaken Challenge was held in Poh Ming Tse temple at 15 June 2015. Preparations were slightly late and initially I was just a regular coach until around end-May Andy met me and had me take over his role due to his unavailability during the day itself. After Vesak Day, I gathered the participants for a meeting and trials in which I think I was not really able to control as I was the guy who “goes with the flow” and hence the meetings got dragged; but since the others were there helping, the meetings were just right in time :) First meeting made me felt that it will be a hard time to finish preparing everything; 2nd one at the weekend made me felt that we will be very lucky if we passed the preliminary round. The next two meetings were staggering: the result of the trials were nice, everyone did very well; even with the last year’s Awaken Challenge finals question set, they can score quite well. Yeah that point I think that we can get into the finals for the debate. The final round this year was a debate on should a Buddhist youth group incorporates vegetarianism into its Dharma practice. We prepared the points for both sides and simulated the debate once while constructively perfecting the points.

Awaken Challenge 2015 started early at 9.30 am and we arrived there around 9 am. We mingled around for a while before going to the event hall. Awaken Challenge started with opening speeches and puja led by venerables. Then it proceed to preliminary round consisting of 9 teams, where NTUBS, represented by Pei Si, Wing Fei, HH, and Jeff, aced the round :) :) :) (we topped the round and in the end the gap between us and the 2nd place was significant). Out of 9, 6 teams proceed to the quarter finals. Next was the early lunch, here the BFY team celebrated Pei Si’s birthday and a conspiracy theory came out: “they celebrated Pei Si’s birthday so she can’t revise” — Jeff (well, nonsense :P ) After the lunch, we went to the quarter-finals where NTUBS were represented with Jeff and Pei Si. Here, NUSBS topped the round with NTUBS being tied with the 3rd place, SVY; phew, lucky we still pass this round. After a little break, the semi-final round commenced. The questions presented were really difficult! And we forget to brief them on strategy of using life-lines (and NTUBS had used all 3 lifelines but got all of them wasted cause they answer wrongly; if correct got +2 points). The race to the final were very tense, NUSBS had a lead in the beginning. In the middle, NTUBS caught up and had a tie with NUSBS. But later NUSBS went strong and have a lead till the end of the round. So, the semi-finals ended with NTUBS and NUSBS proceed to the final round which is a Buddhist debate in which NTUBS had the opposition side and NUSBS proposition side. We had a little time to have a final preparation, and we prepared with Freddy (who has experience in debates). The round started and it was really tense. In my opinion, NUSBS had a lot of great points but they kind of attacking subjectively and reversing the truth without supporting arguments. Also NTUBS had a relatively lower performance as all the points brainstormed during the preparation on the previous days were not iterated until the 3rd speaker. And we did not end strong, Jeff just being Jeff at the debate: talking lots of thing but actually had a little points to make. Besides that, NUSBS ended strong. Well, obviously, they won Awaken Challenge 2015 and we had the runner-up title. Congrats NUSBS :)

URECA

URECA is a year-long undergraduate research project started in August and ended in June of the next year. So my URECA started back in August (2014) and ended this June by submitting the final requirement, a paper. They provided a template and we are required to write a paper on what we’ve done in URECA. In my second semester, URECA is virtually stuck and no real progress is done, except doing the URECA poster. After that, nothing is done until the paper writing process. Of course I had a quite hard time writing it. Lack of motivation is the greatest challenge and with the proximity of deadline (end of June), the motivation of writing grew bigger and bigger and finally I wrote the 5-page paper. Sent to my supervisors and had some correspondence (via e-mail) before I submit to the URECA system and got approved by the supervisor. Finally my URECA is done. :P

plan* and STARS Wars

Last semester, me and my coursemate, Edwin, had this crazy idea during the exam period to create a course planner supplementing NTU’s STARS Planner. That night, I said that it was not hard since the course data can be accessed publicly and since HTML is XML, we just need to clean some parts and we can parse the data as XML data using PHP’s SimpleXML functions. Quickly, I implemented the “getter” and “parser”; and the project was born. Next, he did the “scheduler” which basically was just doing brute-force of the timetable. This project will return all the possible timetable of chosen courses. Meanwhile in STARS Planner, you have to manually select the index of the courses to check whether there is a possible timetable for you or not. There can be some human-intelligence involved if using STARS Planner, but until then, a tool to help brute-forcing is needed since the indices for our chosen course for our semester 4 is really hard to find. [wah, this is looking to be like a “Introduction” at a paper :P ] So this semester we planned to publicize the usage of this tool to our friends (to plan for the next semester; Sem 1 AY15-16), and well I don’t really publicize since if I’m not mistaken there has been a similar scenario at an American university where the university sue the student for accessing the university’s data without the rights to do so (since the data is copyrighted by the university). But I can’t find the case anymore as I don’t remember which university that case happened. And for the next semester, we had plenty of choices [I added keyboard shortcut so that I can navigate through the results quickly] and some bugfixes were done.

This semester my course registration schedule was waaay ahead of my friends, even earlier than those year 4 CS students: ABP FTW! I had to travel earlier to my office so I can set up my laptop and then be ready to this “STARS Wars”. Well, it was really smooth, I got all the indices that I want on my first click on 09:30:00 am. :P

Family “camp”

My family visited Singapore on 24-30 June. On 25th, we met at Pioneer MRT station and had dinner at the foodcourt downstairs, they came to my room at NTU Hall 4 and took some of my stuffs back. Well, this is essential so that I have minimum stuffs to store during my squatting period as the General Cutoff Weight has been increased to 16 for male applicants (I have 15 points :'( ). And this “camp” happened from Friday night till Monday morning: I slept at my family’s apartment (on loan from my uncle) during this period and we went out on Saturday and Sunday.

On Saturday, we started the day quite late and had an early lunch at Food Republic, Vivo City, before going to Sentosa Island. First we went to visit the Trick Eye Museum, where we took lots of photos though there are a lot of visitors and I think that the conditions of the attractions are a bit spoiled already as some of the paint has wore off. Next we visited SEA Aquarium. The entrance was quite strange, we did not know that it was entrance at all. After entering, there were some naval exhibition that we quickly gone through. The aquarium was nice though there were a lot of people, I managed to take almost all of the exhibits. And some fish were scarily large :P After long journey inside the aquarium, finally we visited Madame Tussauds located quite far away (Imbiah Lookout); we took the monorail from Waterfront to Imbiah Station and had a drink at 7-Eleven first.

At this Madame Tussauds, we were also given tickets to “Images of Singapore Live” and were told to go here before going to Madame Tussauds. Well, it was mood breaker, firstly, the queue to enter the “show” was really long and we did not know what will happen. Next, no one cares about the show! We bought tickets to MT and not this, which consumes lots of time (~40 minutes, excluding queue time) and worst of all: no pictures are allowed. I don’t get it, photos are meant to publicize the show, right? So we went through the “live show”, of how Singapore transformed from British colony till Japanese attack till independence. After that, we proceed to MT which was nice but there were lots of people around. There were many famous people, including Singaporeans. Some people’s height caught our attention: Soekarno was shorter than me; Tom Cruise was just around my height. :P After this, we rushed back to Vivo City and took bus to Caribean Residence nearby, attending my father’s reunion with his secondary schoolmates. One of them told that he hasn’t met my father since the O-level exams which was 37 years ago. Well, it was not our reunion, so I was bored here. We went back after the reunion finished and were sent back by the car of my father’s friend. Arrived around 11, we went to sleep around 12.

Waking up around 9, we washed up and bought tickets to River Safari later that day. We went down to swim for a while before going to NEX for lunch at Old Kim Guan, where some traditional food were served expressly and then went to UOB for some business. After that, it was 2 already and we rushed to River Safari. Arriving around 3, we headed directly to the boat rides as we’re afraid that it will close by the time we finished the suggested viewing directions. Amazon River Quest was nice, though my phone overheated and acted strange and hence no photos can be taken :( After that we went to the River Safari Cruise, which is a cruise ride around the Upper Seletar Reservoir seeing some animals from Singapore Zoo. After cruising, we went to view the attractions in River Safari, starting at the middle part, viewing pandas, and then went towards opposite direction to the entrance. After we arrived at the entrance, we went again to the opposite directions, viewing everything. After that, we went out and then to the shop to chill a bit. After that we were picked up by my dad’s friend to an open-restaurant nearby. We had our dinner there and we were driven back. I spent another night with my family.

Monday, I woke up quite early due to my work and I left around 8.30. After work, I met them to have dinner at Din Tai Fung, JP. Then they came to my room to bring back some of my stuffs. They went back on Tuesday morning.

29 May 2015 – 6 June 2015

It’s been a long time since I last wrote a post here. But in the past 3 weeks, I’ve gone through internship at a start-up company called Healint at Block 71 Ayer Rajah, at one-north. It was around 40-minute far away from NTU and hence I did not apply for concession card. Generally, the lunches were more expensive compared to those sold at NTU. Work experience has been not as good as expectation: the project described at the interview to be done in this internship has been done and now the interns are assigned other stuffs. Since describing every day of the working life may be a breach of confidentiality of the company, I will just summarize the events happening each week and describe more where appropriate. Usually after the work, I went back to NTU being hungry and tired. And during my first two weeks, there are still CNS (NTUBS Freshmen Orientation Camp) work to be done.

First week of my internship started with me coming to the company and they were quite surprised as I supposed to start doing internship on the following week though I requested to start earlier and they accepted it. After my supervisor came, I were introduced to the whole people of the company which is around 15 people. There was also an intern from NUS who started doing internship from December 2014 and took leave just for doing internship o.O

Many times in my first day I found myself idling. But that was just the first day, on subsequent days, I find myself quite busy doing the work. Basically I did the app prototype using Framer.js and some other stuff like analyzing the app statistics.

On this first week of internship, there were numerous CNS programmer meetings (on Monday for skit practice; Tuesday and Thursday for program meeting). I ended the week buying some groceries and dinner before going back. I reached my room just before 8pm and watched “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” while having my dinner and then ate some grapes. It was a nice superhero movie.

Saturday started quite late. I had this dream about being with Leonard in the last day of school. Well, I think that I missed him being my deskmate and my best friend. The last time I met him was on Chinese New Year of 2014. Later, after breakfast, I went to NYH to meet Wei Yang and Handoko, checking some stuffs before they going out to buy CNS Trial stuffs. After that, I went to North Spine and had lunch at McDonald’s before going to LWN to print some documents. I just remembered that there is this price hike on printing (new price was 0.045 per B/W page; up from 0.04 per B/W page). After that, I went back and had a nap. After the nap, I watched “Night at the Museum: The Secret of the Tomb”. It was a funny and nice movie. After that, at night Ivan and Andy + le wild Rizky came to my room to prepare gifts for NTUBS Senior Appreciation Party (SAP). We did cutting and decorating photo frames.

Sunday started late. I started the day downloading and activating Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan which I received 1-year for free from Adobe (probably due to my newsletter subscription). This plan includes Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC. Well, I’ve never used Lightroom, so might as well try it out. At noon, I went to Canteen 1 for lunch and then went to Ivan’s room and NYH for initial preparation of SAP: bringing up stuffs, arranging tables, and speaker & projector setup. Next, I and Teheri were called down (grounded? :P ) to Hall 2 for helping the cooking. After some time, I, Teheri, and Freddy went up to NYH to start decoration process. First we were told to color some stuffs. Quite fun, as I haven’t been doing this creative process for quite long time already. Time passed and it was time when participants coming and then the event started. It started with Prof Tan Hun Tong, NTUBS staff advisor, giving speech on making this celebration an event which is a good point to mark turning from childhood to real adulthood, because learning does not stop, but learning has changed form from being prepared by teachers to whatever form it may takes in real life. He then reads out a part from Mangala Sutta, which reminded us to support our parents even if our salary was small, just give them little allowance to show that we are supporting them. He reminded us also for timely listening to Dharma, as many of us may not have the time as much as student to be able to fulfill spiritual satisfaction (as stated in Maxlow’s hierarchy of needs that puts Self-transcendence at the top of the pyramid). Next was NTUBSA president, Bro Hong Seng sharing on what kind of person the current society needs as educated by the Ministry of Education: confident, able to communicate ideas, able to work in teams. (if I don’t remember wrongly :P) Next we had dinner and then mingled around playing games (on our own and a mass game). After that we had group photo and then they were given the gift and were dismissed. Well, I can say that this event cleaning part was the most messy one since I haven’t been doing this stuff for some time already, this is my first time supporting SAP, and there is lack of manpower.

Second week of internship starts with meeting new friends from NTU doing internship. The week has been also quite tiring since every time I ended my internship, I will arrive back in NTU tired and hungry. After that, I just wanted some entertainment since the whole day I’ve been starting at the monitor.

The Wednesday night were spent with ICPC mates to watch the live-stream of ACM ICPC World Finals 2015 in TR+1. We had a pizza, read some problems, and attempted to solve it. Besides that, the Indonesian National Olympiad in Informatics is ongoing and we also attempted to solve the problems.

On Friday night, I’ve had a CNS meeting to settle the logistic stuffs which ended quite late. And on this night, Dian squatted in my room since he has returned his room key to hall office.

The 2nd week ended with CNS mini-trial which was fun but the logistic part was chaotic, just like the CNS 2014 trial. Overall, I’ve gained a lot of constructive feedback from those who joined. After this tiring event, I joined BBQ organized by people of my hometown. We’ve had a great time catching up.

That Sunday I woke up late around 10:30 am and then slacked off lots of times. I also went to NYH and met Andy returning NTUBS stuffs to the cabinet. Now the cabinet is very packed with stuffs. Another thing is I chatted with Andy and he “passed” the Awaken Challenge PIC responsibility to me as I was considered to be the freest and will be available during the event itself.

Another thing I did accomplish is to publish my game c4 into Windows Store. How did I do it? Read this post, but basically very simple.

Third week of internship. I mostly did similar work as the previous week, though this week has been quite tough as there are numerous small projects that I was involved in and I was switching around works which lowered my productivity and increased my stress level. Most of the nights were spent relaxing from the hectic work.

That Wednesday night, I had my NTUBS Coordinator interview. I applied for Honorary General Secretary position. The interview lasted quite long: around 1.5 hours and I was so tired after that. I can say that it was quite okay though at some questions, my answer backfired but I can still defend my stand.

Friday night was movie night: when I went back from work, I stopped by Fairprice (to restock milk and snacks) and KFC (for dinner) and then watched Guardians of the Galaxy while eating my dinner and then continued with eating grapes. The movie was quite okay, I did not really get what the story is because I watched without subtitles and there are number of alien names used.

On Saturday, I did my laundry and then basically did nothing productive till suddenly around 2pm, Ivan texted me and called for meeting with other current coordinators to inform my result of the interview. Well, the result is still secret :P After that, I rushed to Serangoon to meet my aunt, who has been in Singapore for 1.5 months, treating her breast cancer. On this occasion, my uncle’s family also visited her. I think that she now looked less happy and less energetic. I asked what she do there when there are no medical appointment, she said that she just did nothing; in that apartment, there are no TV, so basically she can’t do anything. Well I can imagine how depressing it is to have nothing to do and just wait for the next treatment to occur. She is quite interested in going to temple that I pointed out: KMSPKS, located around Bishan area. Hopefully she can have something to do there on the days where she got nothing to do. I’ve watched The Fault in Our Stars and think that cancer did not make her disabled person, she is fully able person, just needed to have some medication at some points. I think what matter most is support from families and friends. Hope that she can get better.

On Sunday, I woke up late, again. This day, besides doing laundry, I scanned all of my cheatsheets, edited it to be better, and then publish it online. It took the whole day doing this. I also met Xin Wen and Ze Yong at NYH, borrowing NTUBS trolley to move stuffs. At night, I finally practiced with my ICPC team a Codeforces virtual contest with code.kenrick95.org and gained some valuable feedback like the unresponsive design and some other stuffs.

Note: Originally I thought I will write till my third week of internship, till I suddenly become so busy that this post has been left a draft for quite some times till the end of my 4th week, so why not just add the 4th week into it?

June the first was the Vesak Day public holiday in Singapore. I celebrated it with my NTUBS people by going to temple. We went to Buddha Dharma Mandala Society (BDMS) dharma talk which Bhante S. Dhammika launched a new free distribution book there. Hmm, there was another free-D book launch at PMT; probably some time in the future I should contact them to get those books for NTUBS. So the place was really crowded that we, who came late, has to be seated in the BDMS library room, only hearing what the venerable talked. After that, we had an opportunity to try rice-milk from the venerable and then went to lunch provided by them. After lunch, we went to the Burmese temple near there (yeah the name is “Burmese Buddhist Temple”) in which we pay respect to the Buddha there and then went off. The NTUBS MC (me, Ivan, Si Hui, Freddy, Andy, Teheri, Jeff) split from the rest (CW [though he got stuck with us and left afterwards], Diego, Benny, Agung) and went out for an outing. After spending some time discussing what to do, finally we decided to play bowling at SAFRA Mount Faber. It was quite a long journey there. Playing bowling was quite hard but beginners luck really happened, I hit all the pins on my first try! And I had the 2nd place after the round ended. Not bad for first time player huh? After that we had dinner at Eighteen Chef at Cathay building with Su Ann and Crystal joining for dinner. I had spaghetti with some Japanese curry, scrambled egg, and chicken sausage. The pasta was too hard, but overall was quite nice :) It was really tiring though, to hear Jeff talking all day long.

My 4th week of internship was quite okay since I’ve finished those multiple small projects and I can now embark on whatever small project that were listed. I also noticed that my consumption of green tea has increased and there was an occasion that my water bottle did not deplete because I kept drinking tea during my work.

Wednesday night, I had a meeting with the Awaken Challenge participants and coaches to settle the next meeting schedules, reading updates among others, and other matters. Later on Thursday and Friday night, I was so busy preparing for the Saturday trial: I modified my current “ac” webapp to support multiple people answering the question on their own phone, while seeing a question screen, and with me controlling the screen while there is another scoreboard screen. It’s quite complicated. The data is stored at Firebase, which makes life much easier without me worrying about the real-time syncing among them.

On Saturday, I had this Awaken Challenge trial starting at 10am. After each question is being asked, answered, and checked; we discussed the question to enrich the participants knowledge and not for the sake of just answering it. Overall the system works quite well. But then there is still some technical problems, especially when the question screen has some lag (that the update is seen first on the participants screen before I saw it); or when the sfx is out-of-sync with the rest; well I think this can’t be helped as the system tied its data updates to Firebase which makes communication between client and Firebase server important and out of my control.

After that, I had a little meeting with Andy discussing what’s next for AC and then I went back for having little rest (though I chatted with Lenny for quite some time, well, after our relationship ended, every now and then we still meet with our high school friends and our interaction there has been quite awkward) Then I went out to join NTUBS Alumni Vesak Day celebration at Little Bodhi Student Care Centre, owned by them, near Marsiling MRT Station. It started with dinner and we were entertained by a man wearing full Spider-man costume making balloons and sculpt them into cute shapes and give it to the kids.

On Sunday I actually woke up at 8, then decided not to got to BF as I was pretty tired and went back to sleep till 9, and then a little more sleep and it’s 10. In general, it was not a productive one, while struggling to complete this piece. Then an unproductive afternoon struck me, my world stuck around watching YouTube video, failing to take a nap because of too much thought, and Hacker News. Time was up, I went to Hall 2 Block 1 Pantry to help Ivan (+ Freddy) prepare food for dinner which is salad (after I took Ivan’s misplaced stuff at NYH). Later we had dinner with Su Ann, HH, and Teheri. The salad was nice, natural yet filling (maybe because of the potatoes). We also SEA Games 2015 Swimming finals took place and we watched it. The purpose of this dinner was actually a NTUBS support team meeting, but the meeting was like very minor part since we had very few things to talk about, mostly about the plan for Management Retreat 2. After that we cleaned up the utensils and then we went up to NYH placing back some stuffs. Oh ya, I was hit by a strange flying insect (more like I accidentally hit it) and then as a result there is a spot in my palm that is very itchy (but as time of writing, the itch has gone).