tzlee.com/blog

Month: January 2010

  • Aspiration 5: My Friends All Hate Me

    Just for laughs 😀

    http://apps.facebook.com/ajsdfasfj/aspiration5.php

    BTW, fb:wallpost tag is broken (it does not show up as it’s supposed to)

  • First Meetup for Facebook Assignment Costs $6! WT*!

    OK, so I went to NUS to meet with my FB Assignment group and parking my car outside COM1 costs me a whopping $6! This is serious daylight robbery. So where should I park? I’m not exactly familiar with NUS and am probably more suaku than the year 1s.

    I think my team has a good mix. We have a business guy, an electrical engineer, two partially geeky students (I didn’t make this up – they told me) and one kaypoh (busybody – that’s me). So “good” a mix maybe I’m getting a bit stressed out that we might be technically lacking. But don’t worry. I have faith in you guys. 😛

    As a consolation, let me say something. Ugly (probably) sells. Yes, the crappiest, ugliest of all things usually sells well. Don’t ask me why. Here’s my observations.

    • Google is ugly, but we use it over Yahoo or Bing.
    • Gmail is ugly as hell, but we rather use it over Hotmail. (Sidenote: I’ll give some credit to Yahoo mail here.)
    • Ebay ain’t the prettiest of all sites around, but heck it sells like mad.
    • Facebook is kinda ugly and doesn’t allow me to customize a hideous pink background like Friendster, but it is the most hit site on the Internet today (don’t ask me why I know, I’m not supposed to tell, but I am certain of this fact).
    • Most blogshops are ugly as hell. If you think they look nice, you need to see doctor. But the funny part? They sell too!

    So here’s my takeaway point. Ugly (probably) sells.

  • Teaming and Waving

    Looks like I’ve gotten my first team for the Facebook assignment and am still trying to figure out a team for the second Seminar assignment. Hopefully I can get that settled as well so I can get this off my back and concentrate on the actual work rather than kay-pohing about people’s lives.

    Meanwhile I’m poking around Google Wave. Actually not really very excited yet. I’m more confused than excited – I can’t seem to find a practical use for it at the moment. I will try to explore it more. It looks useful as an internal Wiki kind of thing. I won’t use it to replace my regular IM though. Problem here is, Wave is invite-only and I have limited invites so I cannot realize the full collaborative power of this tool yet. :S

    Short and sweet post. I need to get back to work. Sigh.

  • First Peek at Amazon EC2

    I just got my Amazon EC2 account today and poked around a bit. Technically, it’s just a super cluster of virtualized servers running a (very likely) hacked copy of the open source Xen with a AJAX-enabled web management interface. The servers are undoubtedly Intel Xeons.

    [root@domU-12-31-39-09-2E-31 ~]# uname -a
    Linux domU-12-31-39-09-2E-31 2.6.18-xenU-ec2-v1.2 #2 SMP Wed Aug 19 09:04:38 EDT 2009 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
    [root@domU-12-31-39-09-2E-31 ~]# cat /proc/cpuinfo
    processor    : 0
    vendor_id    : GenuineIntel
    cpu family    : 6
    model        : 23
    model name    : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           E5430  @ 2.66GHz
    stepping    : 10
    cpu MHz        : 2666.760
    cache size    : 6144 KB
    fdiv_bug    : no
    hlt_bug        : no
    f00f_bug    : no
    coma_bug    : no
    fpu        : yes
    fpu_exception    : yes
    cpuid level    : 13
    wp        : yes
    flags        : fpu tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc up pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
    bogomips    : 5335.77

    There’s nothing technically amazing here but it’s interesting how Amazon put it together into a pay-per-use revenue model. It seems like they got the billing portion right.

    Personally, I don’t quite like the management of it though. If you’ve used VMware ESX or Citrix XenServer you might agree with me.

    For example, I couldn’t alter my firewall configuration once my instance was deployed. I created my first instance with a default firewall rule that drops everything, so in desperation I created another one.

    Then I realized I couldn’t delete an instance either. It took me a while to figure out that there is actually a command line client tool written in Java that allows me to delete an instance. In fact, the client tool has way more capabilities than the funky AJAX web interface.

    Here’s the Getting Started Guide. You need to read this to learn how to set up the authentication mechanisms. I presume most of us here can set up the Java environment variables no problem.

    Here’s the EC2 Command Line Tools Reference.

    It took me quite a while to find these links so do bookmark them.

    ***

    Just a quick start for everyone here since the authentication part is a hassle. The documentation had a bunch of talk cock before they got to the point.

    1. You’ll need to login to AWS, then go under the Your Account > Security Credentials menu on the top right hand corner.
    2. Scroll down and look under the Access Credentials heading.
    3. Click the X.509 Certificates tab.
    4. Click Create a new Ceritificate.
    5. Download both the Private Key File and Certificate File.
    6. Get down to your command prompt.
    7. Change to the directory where you unzipped the EC2 API tools.
    8. Make sure JAVA_HOME and PATH are both set.
    9. Set EC2_HOME to the directory in step 7 above.
    10. Change to the bin directory within the EC2 API tools directory.

    You’re all ready to go run the .cmd files (for Windows) or the non .cmd files (for MacOS/Linux guys).

    ***

    Update: Here’s a freebie for the MacOS X users – paste these into ~/.bash_profile so you don’t have to specify your key and cert all the time. (Edit where necessary.)

    export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home
    export EC2_HOME=~/Downloads/ec2-api-tools-1.3-46266
    export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=~/Downloads/pk-XXXX.pem
    export EC2_CERT=~/Downloads/cert-XXXX.pem
    export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin

  • I Lost My Nipples Thanks to CS3216

    In my last introductory post on CS3216, I mentioned that I might get my nipples twisted off. Unfortunately, my wife read the blog entry and dutifully twisted them off with a full 360 degrees turn when I arrived home.

    Ouch.

    Hokay, just kidding.

    ***

    Anyway, it was a great evening at NUS. I haven’t felt so much energy in people around me for a long time. When I spoke about the energy I felt from the people around me, Prof. Ben assured me this wasn’t the regular NUS. I was with the best of the best.

    Since I only had a short 2 minute time slot and my nipples were at stake, I couldn’t talk too much. I hope some of you are reading this blog because I’m going to write a little bit more.

    I’ve always loved to share and (hopefully) teach, just that I never had the real opportunity to. My dislike for the way local education works meant I don’t have a qualification and thus nobody would hire me to teach. I’ve had some short teaching stints while in Polytechnic, but that wasn’t real teaching – I was actually getting leeched off most of the time by the desperate people who just wanted me to debug their code and pass their assignments.

    So I was silly to get leeched off, but such is the fact of life – there’s going to be people leeching people everywhere. You can choose to either be the one leeching others, or letting others leech on you.

    Making this decision is important, especially if you aren’t out working yet because once you get leeched off, you’ll get sucked into this deep, dark black hole that continues to leech you till the day you die. No, I’m serious! Look around you how many people are working into their 60s. This is the effect of globalization and inflation.

    Not many people get away from this black hole, I assure you, because I’m probably one of them. For those who do escape, I congratulate them. Because once you start working, you start having commitments, your expenses will balloon – peer pressure will make you buy that latest Gucci/LV bag. You’ll start having fears that you’ve got something to lose (your job/family/girlfriend/mistress/whatever).

    ***

    I was chatting with a friend and I came up with a theory – there’s 4 phases we go through being screwed. Each weighs 25%.

    • You’re 25% screwed if you gone out to work for a crappy company.
    • You’re 25% screwed once you get married.
    • You’re 25% screwed once you have kids.
    • You’re 25% screwed once you’re dead.

    So if you’re dead and not worked, not married, and have no kids, you died 25% screwed.

    If you’re working, married and with kids, but not dead, you’re 75% screwed. Technically, you’re worse than the dead man.

    Most people in this world die being 100% screwed.

    OK, I’m just kidding. Getting married is a good thing, and please try to get married early. You don’t want to be a father of a 2-year old at the age of 55. Very tiring.

    End of commercial break. Moving on…

    ***

    So I’ll reiterate my point that the best time to be foolish and hungry is really in school when you have nothing to lose but time and some grades. Hey, you don’t need to get an ‘A’ in everything really, ‘cos nobody really bothers unless you’re planning to be a civil servant.

    CS3216 is a really a great opportunity to share some of my experiences with so many talented people and I hope to learn something new from everyone as well.

    See you next Monday! KTHXBYE.

  • Welcome to CS3216, Cakes Not Included

    Simi si CS3216?

    Actually, I don’t really know (yet). I was invited to attend this class by Prof. Ben whom I meet the week before 2010. In fact, this is the first class I’m attending in 7 years, so it’s really time to relive some good old school days.

    Working full time and joining a class that’s supposed to be for full timers is chargeable as attempted suicide. One clear sign is that writing this blog entry has to be done over lunch. I still don’t know if my wife’s going to twist my ears and nipples off for not going home early tonight.

    Prof. Ben assured me homework is going to be hiong. I don’t know how hiong, but hopefully not as hiong as my driving during peak hours. Otherwise I’ll need to go next door to NUH for an occasional blood pressure test.

    So, I’m wrapping up my Hai World post so I can eat my lunch. I’m looking forward to some fun. Be forewarned – I haven’t been in school for so many years, I cannot guarantee that I will not wreck havoc in class. I have a short list of things I wanted to do as a student, such as using a typewriter in class. (Prof. Ben, I know you are reading this.)

    In case you were still wondering, CS3216 is a NUS module code. Don’t ask the part about the cakes – it’s a publicity stunt. 😛