tzlee.com/blog

  • Ayiah, Another $6 for Parking at NUS

    Ayiah, what to do. I was already one hour late for a meeting with my teammates, but as the saying goes better late than never so I decided to park nearer to COM1 so I have a lesser chance of being knocked over by the NUS shuttle bus or errant drivers while walking up from Yusoff Hall.

    OK, you know I’m lying. Truth is that I’m just fat, lazy and wanted to save 5 minutes of my time walking up a dreaded slope. So for that, I’ve paid my “fine” of $6.85.

    Prof. Ben told me learning is never easy. I didn’t know he meant my wallet!

    So meeting teammates was done over my “official lunchtime” and somehow every time I meet these folks, something interesting comes up. We ended up talking super enthusiastically about a potential gambling app but later found out that it was against Facebook’s policy.

    Damn, otherwise we’ll be the next millionaires by the end of this course. Another fat hope dream busted.

  • Taking it Easy

    Prof. Ben commented that I’m having fun in my previous post. Well, in fact, I really am! I enjoy chatting with my team mates and messing around with my assignment.

    Actually if I put myself into the shoes of a student, I might not have done all these. Reflecting on myself seven years ago as a Poly student, I was too snobbish and competitive. I guess most students are like this, especially when they/their parents paid a fortune for the fees. Of course there are some others who couldn’t care less since they felt they were “forced to study”.

    But I’ve learnt to lighten up a little. Let me share a short story.

    I spoke to a friend A of mine who told me about this guy B whom he met many years ago. B was a very popular figure at many events and A always wondered why. He started to observe B’s actions – B would dress in jeans and tees when others were all dressed up, he’d talk cock at seminars and chat about irrelevant topics at business/networking events. At first, A thought B was an idiot and didn’t take things seriously, but yet he was so popular. A later made friends with B and found out that B didn’t really care what people thought of him and just wanted take it easy and have fun. A saw some light and started to take things easy as well.

    Fast forward, A and B are currently successful businessmen.

    Unfortunately, I’m not like any of them yet, but I’m starting to take things a little easier. I realize that doing so gives me a broader view of things. When I was a student, behaving the way I did only narrowed my vision as I was all out to impress… god knows who, but back then I was hoping it would be girls.

    (Unfortunately, I got my equation all wrong and I found out that girls aren’t exactly attracted to snobbish geekguys.)

  • 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