tzlee.com/blog

  • Not Being a Good Student

    I’m not really graded, so this means I can be a bit pai kia and not blog on a specific app that was presented. Unfortunately, I’m not 14 years old.

    To be honest, I didn’t do anything for the Facebook Application Seminar project, that’s why I decided to do some community service and take photos instead. The project discussions were done over the weekend and I was packed with all the random things to do, like visiting the in-laws, visiting my parents, attending KHCO‘s 35th Anniversary dinner and of course spending time with my wife who’s almost about to twist my ears off for reaching home past midnight this morning. What’s with women and being alone at home? 😛

    Dr. Ben Leong wrapping up the class.

    I’m very impressed by all the presentations yesterday. To be honest, they are way better than about 90% of the business presentations I’ve seen. BTW, what’s that tool that some teams were using? It’s like a huge template that’s sliding around. It’s not PowerPoint – it looks web based. Somebody please enlighten me.

    Basically as many have observed, the most popular apps might not be the prettiest or the easiest. There’s many factors around which an app can be successful. It is important that CS3216 students see beyond their academic scope and realize that the world is not so simple. Jonathan’s presentation made this point even more obvious.

    Jonathan Low on scams.

    Unfortunately for the most of us who believe in doing good, doing business is not really the same. It’s quite a tough balance of being God and Satan. Why? I think because humans are selfish in one way or another – it’s our natural survival instinct!

    Just to cite an example. Google is well known for it’s motto “Don’t be Evil“. However AdWords survived quite a while with click fraud until they got sued. It’s not entirely their fault – they didn’t do it deliberately – but they knew it was happening and was making them money, so they didn’t really stop the fraudsters; not at least until they got their ass under fire.

    Cedric on prediction markets.

    The second part that got me thinking was the presentation on Prediction Markets. Facebook has over 300 million users. Although this is not larger than the population of China or India, it is certainly a substantial population where a good sampling of information can be obtained. If there’s a great app to build, it would be one that analyzes social behavior for market intelligence. Food for thought.

  • New glibc in CentOS 5.4 breaks VMware Server 2.x

    I’ve been puzzled for quite a while now why the web UI keeps crashing on one of my VMware servers here, and I finally decided to kick my lazy ass and get down to work.

    I found out that it was the vmware-hostd process that hosts the web UI ports (HTTP on TCP/8222 and HTTPS on TCP/8333). A quick search on Google gave me just what I was looking for.

    So it seems the new glibc version in CentOS 5.4 breaks VMware Server 2. If you’ve already upgraded your server, here’s how you can downgrade glibc:

    • Go to /etc/yum.repos.d
    • Make a copy of CentOS-Base.repo to CentOS-5.3-Base.repo
    • Edit CentOS-5.3-Base.repo and rename all the headings in the [brackets], e.g. [base] -> [base53]
    • Do a search and replace all $releasever with 5.3
    • Save the file
    • Run yum clean all then run yum downgrade glibc glibc-common
    • You’ll also need to re-run vmware-config.pl
    • After the downgrade is done, edit /etc/yum.conf and add exclude=glibc glibc-common glibc-devel glibc-headers glibc-utils nscd on a new line to avoid future update issues, at least until VMware decides to fix it.

  • Second Thoughts on the Apple iPad

    Before I slept last night, I thought, “Apple ain’t stupid.” They wouldn’t do something like not install OS X, so I went to bed, tossed and turned a bit, woke up this morning and saw some light.

    The iPad (urgh, I just feel wrong typing this name) is essentially a full screen touch device. Actually, they aren’t the first to build such devices. Tablets have been around for a while, and they weren’t very successful in selling. What was the problem?

    Windows. When Microsoft designed Vista, they had touch devices in mind, that’s why the sideways expanding Start Menu disappeared and was replaced with a scrolling design with larger icons. The user interface also had larger scrollbars and minimize/maximize/close buttons.

    But that was not the point. PC software was not built for touch devices in mind. Not that Microsoft designed Windows badly, but developers will naturally build apps for the larger majority – the regular PCs driven by a mouse and keyboard.

    So I think you get the idea now. Apple have had great success with the iPhone/iPod Touch’s software model and created the new multi-touch interface paradigm. They’re bringing this wisdom to the new iPad. If they had put OS X on this thing, people would go around installing regular OS X software and the user experience would be completely messed up – imagine hideous titlebars in the Aqua UI just so you can touch the minimize/maximize buttons.

    I’m going to bet my hard earned money on this one and buy an iPad when it’s launched.

    BTW if you read this post on Gizmodo, I’d agree no multitasking sucks, but the comment on the ugly bezel is irrelevant – you need a place to hold the iPad without interfering with the touch sensitive areas of the screen.

  • Apple’s new iPad

    While I really wished Apple didn’t name it iPad, it’s still too early to tell if this device would be any good. I was rather disappointed it didn’t run the regular MacOS X so I can have my favourite app – Terminal. Without Terminal, an Apple product is most likely useless to me.

    However the price point seems compelling starting at US$499, I’m estimating that to be SG$788 when it arrives.

    So what good is an oversized iPhone? It’s quite obvious Apple wanted the lock-in and screw developers around the App Store.

    I’m curious what Google has to offer as it seems I might be switching out of Apple to Android after the novelty of the iPhone wears off. I’d much prefer to develop in Java than having to pay for an ADC account just to write in a much more complicated Objective-C.

    On the books part, I’d gladly buy the Amazon Kindle. Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of time reading. I bought several books last year and about 80% of that is still sitting on my side table.

  • Little Code, But Still Complicated

    It seems like our app isn’t one that demands a lot of coding but is still quite complicated for a short development time span of two weeks.

    FYI, we are building an e-commerce app in Facebook with a different concept from Marketplace.

    Why do I say it’s complicated? Because it involves a lot of thinking and discussions to get the flow right. We have tiny bits of code here and there, each doing small little tasks. They don’t have much complicated code with maybe a few interesting SQL queries, but they are starting to add up to the overall complexity of the project.

    The other challenge is merging the 101 different technologies here. SQL, FQL, FBML, AJAX, PHP, REST, JSON… PIE, AYE, BKE, KPE, KJE, ECP… ayiah.

    Looks like we’re going to be spending more sleepless nights. Might have to forgo some features and the database tuning and indexing for now!

  • Curtains Up!

    Curtains and blinds are up! Actually was up about two weeks ago, but I didn’t have time to take photos, edit and upload. I finally found some time to do so. I didn’t take the blinds though, it’s pretty generic roller binds, though they are of much higher quality than Ikeas’. Photos can’t tell the difference in quality – you’ll have to see for yourself.

    The curtains are tailor made by Rosse Curtain and I would like to compliment them for their excellent service. The guy who installed our curtains and blinds was very detailed in his work and did his duty to keep the dust from drilling to a minimum. If you’re looking to get curtains for your new home, I’d highly recommend them.

    Living Room Curtains
    Dining Room Curtains
    Master Bedroom Curtains

    P.S. Choose your fabric wisely. They make a huge difference in price.