What do I learn from CS3216

Now it is the end of the semester.

It is the time to review what I have done in the past 13 weeks.

It is also the time to check whether I achieved my goals.

What I want to learn from this module?

1. Business idea. What is the best way to promote an application? What is the business opinion towards an application? How to evaluate an application? Not sure whether I will learn all about this. But I think I will at least find some clues.

(difficulty level: possible to hit part of the goal, very unlikely to make all the questions clear.

overall difficulty level: 90/100)

My own Feedback: I did not quite learn too much about it. However, I indeed try to think about these questions for some time. In order to really achieve my goal, I need to have tried out these things, talked more with the users, other entrepreneurs.

2. Challenge again~~~ Without any doubt, CS3216 is a huge challenge to me, to my time management skill. Not sure whether I could survive and how I finally survive.

(difficulty level: I will survive almost for sure. But not sure whether I will be happy with the way I survived from this module.

overall difficulty level: 99/100)

My own Feedback: This is really a challenge. The result is that I failed the challenge. It was the worst semester in terms of time management. However, for the bright side, I could see my potential in my own time management. The experience of this semester told me how free I am and I really have a lot of free time that I did not manage well in the past. I need to improve more on consistency and self-disciplinary training. 

3. Be a good coder that at least I could satisfy with myself. 

(difficulty level:I could hardly satisfy with my coding skill in future

overall difficulty level: 200/100)

My own Feedback: Now I am a better coder than i was in previous semester. I am better in writing a better drained modular codes. However, I still need to improve error handling as well as exception handling. 

4.  Hope that I could write a blog everyday, no need to be so long,  even a word will work. Test for myself .....

(difficulty level: self-control is always the problem......overall difficulty level: 0/0 )

My own Feedback: Sorry did not make this goal at all. If everyone could restart the game of "life", most of them will be the winner. The reason is simple, self-discipline....

5. I do not like facebook because it is kind of wasting time. However, it is useful in the sense of information passing. Hence maybe after this module, I hope that I could like facebook a bit....

(difficulty level: should be easy to achieve. anyway I need to use facebook more often in future. 

overall difficulty level: 0/1 )

My own Feedback: Facebook is never my choice. I still do not like it. After the presentation day, I delete the facebook bookmark from my browser.

What do I learn from the module which I did not expect at the beginning of the semester?

1. Perspiration is more important than IQ.

I learned from one of my classmates in this module. He grew a lot and learned a lot during the past 13 weeks. He is not so smart comparing to others. But he is the guy who paid more effort than others. At the end of this module, he has become very good at the website codings. Although I knew the fact long time ago, it is my first time to notice it from my friends.

Final Project

Now finally, we come to the last part of this module.

1. What application are we going to build in our final project?

Basically, we are going to build a online Ebook reader. Our application will be different from others because we will provide cross platform support and history synchronizing. Like other normal Ebooks reader on iOS device or android phones, this application will provide a similar UI to help the users to read the books. What's more, we will synchronize the reading history and bookmarks to the server. Hence, even the users restore their system or changing devices, they could still continue with their readings.

2. Problems we are going to solve.
1) How to make it easy for user to find their interesting books?
I am not sure whether it is my biased opinion or not. I did not like iBook because I need to download the books to my laptop and then transfer to iBook. It is a two-step procedure. It is a bit troublesome to me. What I prefer is providing me a list of books and letting me pick the one I am interested in. Admittedly for some of books, we can not provide in the server. Hence the user can not user our application and they need to transfer to iBook instead. However, it is not quite my concern. Once the user could upload their txt file to our server, the problem will be solved. Currently, we will only support for txt and epub files.

2) Data synchronization
Our application is different from most of other similar apps because we have the feature of data synchronization. We could ensure that the data will not be lost and you could easily transfer to other devices.

3. Challenges
1) How to fit in different screen sizes?

It is a quite nasty problem. It causes many problems to our UI designers. We intend to have different CSSs to solve this issue. But we still could foresee that there are many small details we need to handle in future.

2) How to pick the content to display?

We want to make our UI similar to native Ebook readers. It leads some problems to us. Because of the screen size could be different, for each page, the content going to be displayed will be different. And how to remember the history is also a problem. (We could not use the page number to record, because page number will vary from different screen sizes) Hence we did some string manipulation and try to get the suitable content to the given screen size. However, up to now, the result was not so appealing. We may need to do more manual adjustment in order to achieve a better display

That's basically what we are going to do in the final project. Hope everything will go well.

Make Up: Review of Assignment 2

For Assignment 2, to be honest, I did not do a lot of coding. I work more on the css and some of the UI designs.

From the feedback, it is quite clear that it was not a good UI design. Many bugs are found and many details are ignored.

How to improve the UI design in future?
1. Choose the most suitable design, not the most attractive design.

While designing for the UI, we try to find the most nice-looking pictures to be the background image as well as the button images. However, it seems that these nice images have nothing to do with our application. Before reading the feedback, I think that a good UI design should try to attract the attention of the users. It was not a wrong idea, but I ignored one basic and fundamental fact. The design should be at least relevant to the application. It should provide some information for the users to know more about the the application. It is not just a simple picture. Hence, I should not choose the picture which looks nice but irrelevant. Even the looking of the website was very normal, as long as it could help the user to understand the application, it is a good design already. Hence next time, I will pay more attention on the relevance than the looking.

2. Details ignored

Admittedly, after reading the feedback, I realized that some of our UI designs may not be so suitable for the users. However, it is quite difficult for us to detect these small points when we are coding for the project. After coding for several days, most of the coders will be quite familiar with the UI design. Hence, even when I try out the application, I did not realize that we missed some details. Even though some of the details we have considered several times, it turns out that the users still do not like it. For me, in order to solve this problem, we could improve on 2 parts. First, we need to pay more attention on the details. Secondly, we really need to have test users (who has no previous knowledge about our applications) to try out and give us suggestions.

To conclude, next time, I will try to have a better design. But luckily, I will not be a UI designer for our final project.

Make Up: Case Study

How to design a better UI?
It is always the question I asked myself since last semester.
However, even after the seminar today, I still can not have a good and clear ideas. What I learn, I will say that these are some clues for you to get a better UI design.

How to design a better UI?
Before I really could design a better UI, the key subject is that I need to understand what people like and what is convenience and what is beauty.

1) What people like?
It seems to be an easy question. However, everyone will give a different result. It is unlikely to make everyone happy in the end. Hence we need to give up some of the users. From my perspective, we need to more focused on the general users. The best method is to have a statistical survey and get the general result from the survey. However, the problem is that sometimes people do not know what they like at all. It seems that everything is good to them, equivalent to say that every design is bad. Hence sometimes, the survey result may not be accurate and correct.  That's why we need to learn more from general people. I remember that a lecturer mentioned that a general person is the most random person you will pick on the street during one of my law lectures. Equivalent to say that, the general user for our application is the most random user we pick from all our users. Then apply our common sense to analyze what he/she likes....

2) what is convenience?
In fact, this is also a trouble question to solve. From the high sales of apple products, we know that apple products will have a good design and most of the users said that i-series is convenient, which means the UX is good. How did apple product achieve such goal? I believe that they really have a very deep study on what people like and then try to come up with the most convenient design. They pay attention to every details of the product. That is the only way to come up with the most convenient design.

3) What is beauty?
In order to come up with the best looking UI design, of course we need to understand what is beauty. On the flight to Singapore several months ago, I met a professor from Architecture Department, Tongji University. I asked him what is beauty and how to understand beauty. He told me that it will be a long learning journey. I need to learn from the history and try to have more chances to view masterpieces. What's more, I need to pay more attention on daily life. For example, during the seminar, it is very clear that the lady dress up very nicely. In fact she tried to dress up with her own style. When she came to give the presentation, from what she wears, we already know that she is a good designer. If she can not make herself look beautiful, how could she come up with a nice UI design? Hence in order to learn beauty, start from now and start from self... (For girls, just try to make yourself have your own style. Starting form yourself does not mean to do a lot of makeups and wear expensive dresses. Starting from yourself means finding out the best clothes that will show your personalities. Be yourself. That is beautiful)

To conclude, up to now, I am still not a good designer. Need more time to learn and practice. After a long time, maybe I will be a good designer...

Make up blog: Vsee talk

Finally I come back to my blogs...

Miss many blogs, needs to catch up a bit~~~

Vsee Talk

In fact, this is my second time to hear the talk from CEO of VSee. To be honest, this time it was not as impressive to me as my first time to hear during CS3217.

1. Surprise

In fact, when the first time we met the speaker, I thought he may be someone from the technical side of the company and not in a high leading role. However, after introducing about him, it was totally unexpected. He was the CEO of VSee and what's more, he is in charge of sales and marketing. During his presentation, you can not get the feeling of high enthusiasm. However, when it reached the middle part of the presentation, I realize that how passionate he is and how much he enjoyed his work. Unlike others, his passion is more like water in the river, which is quite but with consistent power and will not stop or change dramatically by the small stones. I also believe that his success highly depends on such personalities.

2. Why him?

In fact, I asked myself why Prof Ben will ask him to give a presentation again. Maybe there are several reasons. But for me, I believe that Prof. Ben indeed wants to show him to us and learn from him.

What we could learn from him?
1) Insist on his dream
For most of the new entrepreneurs, they have passion, they have skills but they just can not wait. As what he has said, it took him 5 years (hope i did not remember wrong) before he really got success. Not many people could wait for such a long time. Most of them will drop in the middle. In fact, it is generally true. For example, I could not continue to write blogs even for one semester...

2) Personalities
He is really a special person. It seems that there is nothing in the world could make him hurry a bit or get furious. I believe that that's why he will have a very good working relation with his employees, teammates. An easy-going person,  with dreams and willing to wait, is more likely to succeed. Not every CEO is like Steve Jobs. In fact, most of CEOs are not the Steve types. They are more like our speaker. We could learn from him and make changes. But still need to keep in mind that success can not be copied. We need to figure out our own way to success.

As the conclusion of the reivew, I would like to pick a chinese saying. In fact, after the whole speech, his personalities remind me of this sentence "有容乃大，无欲则刚“. It is really a sentence with deep meaning. Every time, I will get new understanding from reading it. Hence it is pretty hard for me to translate....

What I learn today

Today we heard many ideas from different people. Among all the presentations, three presentations, AED, Gary Ong's and Cliquefund were quite "interesting".

AED

I have to say that the idea is good and it is really an application that will create value for the whole community. However, I think that not it may not be able to attract too many users and achieve its purpose. This application is still like a one-time application. Users will try once and they may not try the second time in future. Hence the difficulty to achieve the purpose of this application is how to ensure that users will re-play the game in a certain period. Although I am not sure how to really make this app successful in future, I did hope that we could come up with a really good design and game flow for AED. It will save lives and it will be the way we could contribute to the community as a computer science student.

Financial application

In fact, when I heard the idea of implementing candle stick, I felt a bit sad. I could fully understand what he want and how much he believed that his idea is correct. In fact, when I was young, I also believe that candle stick, wave theory will make a lot of profit for me. However, it was not true. Let me tell you why. There is a financial company in the world. About 80% of its employees are Phds. The aim of the company is to make money in the stock market.How did they make profit in the stock market?  All the Phds in finance and mathematics, they hired,  will come up with the best prediction model which not known to the public. All the computer science Phds will try to implement them with the most efficient algorithm. However, it was not the end of the story. They will also hire engineers. They will study how to make the data transfer faster. If possible, they will build new hardware and direct implement all the algorithm in assembly code. What's more, in order to compete with time, they try to build a direct connection to the main sever of exchange, which will reduce the physical transaction time. Now let's compare. They have one of the best algorithm and they are almost the fastest one to make "best" decision, and they have enough money support. Even if a single investor could discover a good strategy, with only thousands dollars on hand, each transaction could hardly bring 1% profit. However, for them, even if they could only arbitrage for 0.01% profit, they will invest a billion and the profit will be a lot. Hence now I think that for most of the individual investors, financial market is the place for fun not the place for profit.

Just recall one interesting question read before.

As an investor, do you think that you are better than other 50% of all the investors?
Among 90% people will answer YES.

If you answer NO, then why do you still want to be an investor? Because it will obviously a lose to you.

If you are among the 90% people, who will be the 40% wrong guesses?

If only 10% of investors could make profit in the market, the rest will lose. Are you among the 80% of the wrong guess investors?


Cliquefund

Admittedly, the idea was quite attractive for me. However, later I realized that the idea could hardly be realized the future because they did not have a huge potential market.

1. Are there more VCs or more ideas in the world?
Everyone will have many different ideas and hope to make them true. Without money, some of them could be hardly realized. For all the entrepreneurs, they all have ideas but no money. VCs get many many proposals every year and many of them has almost tried out for months. They are not lack of projects. They really did not need this website to build connection with entrepreneurs.

2. For individual investors, you want to invest in a small company or stock market?
The idea of Cliquefund is try to build a "social" investment website. However, the problem is whether an individual investors would like to invest in this manner.

What is the characteristics of individual investors?
1. they do not have a lot of money comparing to VCs.
2. they did not have enough resource for them to verify which company will grow better in future.
3. they hope to make profit not lose money.

Then what is the characteristics of entrepreneurs?
1. they need money.
2. they could not guarantee the return.
3. fact: most of these start up company will die in years.

Now If you were the investor, will you join the website and make investment? Comparing to invest in the stock market, which more will be less risky?

It is true that some people like risk and would like to take challenge. But compare to self-build investment with small companies, I believe that they will choose to give money to VCs and let them to help you make decision. It will be less risky and more profit, isn't it? 

Facebook Seminar Critique on Square

Summary of the presentation

Square is a mobile payment service application built on iOS and Android. It aims to bring immediacy, transparency, and approachability to daily life. With the hardware support, Square enables iOS and Android mobile phones to use the credit card or other cards at any time and any places. It will benefit the user who will have a relatively low monthly transaction cost. Overall, Square is a relatively nice-designed application both on the user interface and user experience. The only concern for Square is the security issue on both hardware and software.

The three points I felt important are:

1. Target Customer and relative competency
During the presentation, it was very impressive to see their analysis on the target customer. They compare the cost between POS and Square based on monthly transaction volume. From the graph they presented, it shows a clear result of benefits for the low transaction user. I believe this analysis is very important because it indicates the target customer of this app and its competency. Without knowing its customer and its relative competency, it is hard to market and advertise an application. In addition, by comparing with POS, we also could see their potential market size in future.

2. Security Concern
In fact,  I did not realize that hardware will bring security concern before they mentioned about the hardware concern. For most of the applications, as they are built without installing new hardware to the device, it will hardly have hardware security concern. Hence, this application is a bit special. Meanwhile, as it is a financial related application, the security concern should always come first. Any possible security issue will possibly bring huge damage or lose to the application developers and company. For this application, both hardware and software should try to ensure the safety of all the transactions. In fact,  up to now, Square did quite well in software but not hardware. It still gets room for the improvement on the security of hardware.

3. E-payment
What I learn from this application is their idea on E-payment. In fact, E-transaction is a relatively common idea nowadays. But all the E-transactions will be done via E-bank account. They seldom consider to use the card physically. Many small vendors will like this application. An iPad + Square will be a moveable all-on E-payment machine. Comparing to the heavy and expensive POS machine, it is more convenient and lower cost.


My ideas about this application

1. What is the future of Financial Related Application?
In future, most of the financial related application will be dominated by large banks or financial institutions. It will be very hard for small company to come up with Financial related application especially involving payments. There are two reasons. First, financial institution or banks have a nice network and could easily attract and "force" customer to use its application because of its "monopoly" market position. Secondly, comparing to these large institutions, small company did not have enough money to support the application development or possible loss in future. It is quite obvious that any errors occurred in financial related application will result in a huge lose to the company. Normal software company could hardly bear with such lose.

2. How to make a successful application?
No one could guarantee that one application could be successful in future. However, as long as it makes the important ideas correct, the chance to be successful will increase.
1) Good Target Customer: whole world or rich people or adults?
2) From the perspective of target customer, what is their fundamental requirement?
3) Design a very goood UI to solve their problem.
4) Market your product to your target customer.

It seems that all the four steps are clear. But it is very difficult to achieve all of them, especially for the 2nd and 3rd item. What is the fundamental requirement of your target customers? Sometimes, even the customers do not know what they want, it will be difficult for us to figure out. Also what is a good UI? It really depends on different perspective.

water {n,{n},{{n}},{{{n}}}}

The title looks even more weird today.

But I did have a reason to put it in this manner~~~

I felt now I really do not have so many things to write in the water post.

As most of them may not be interesting and not related to CS3216, I will not publish them.

But as I have promised that I will write a blog everyday, I will save all of them and publish them at the end of this semester. 

For the weekly blog about CS3216, I will still publish it ~~~

This will be the Last Water post to be published before the end of this semester~~~

You are more than welcome to read my water post after this semester~~~

Water {n,{n},{{n}}}

===================About CS3216====================
More coding needs to be done in the next two or three days.

If it is too much, maybe we need to give up some features...

Facebook seminar deadline is near... We need to have a meeting and start to prepare for it.

==================Other things===================
One module is quite good now, everything can be done well.

One module is quite confusing, get an idea what they are talking about but it is just too conceptual.

Another one, I could fully understand but just can not do the tutorial, is it really a math module?


For another module, which got a very handsome German lecturer, I skipped all the lectures in the last week. Is it a waster?

Water {n,{n}}

Anyway I forgot to write blog for yesterday... Just too busy...

Just got too many things to do~~~ One day one blog, can I really make it?

P.S. I like today's title. If possible, I hope it will be a transitive set~~~

P.S.Fire drill is quite nice today~~~ Fire looks nice during night~~~ It is even more interesting to put them off.

Reflection after Lecture

Is this title too formal?

==========================CS3216===========================
1.monopoly

While during the lecture time, I suddenly realized that why I have so many problems or questions about web programming and why most people will have bugs. The reason is simple and perhaps sounds a bit stupid. I think it happened because all the products are from different organization or companies. Just suppose, if the companies or organization develop the whole set of php, js, html and all the things as a whole. I do not think we will have so many troubles. Just recall, 20 years ago, once, there was only one browser IE in the world, web programming is just like normal coding, easy coding and debugging.  (Of course, the word web programming did not exist at that time.) After years of development, we have various tools for web programming. Although people try to make them work fine with each other, it still not good. After thinking about this, I feel that if there is a monopoly company in the world, which will control all the php, js, css and related web programming language development, maybe the world will be easier for programmer.

Suppose that really happened in the past, then how will today look like? Maybe no progress at all. Maybe no facebook, no html5, no CS3216~~~

Monopoly in a field is good because the whole industry will share the same rules and standards. Hence it will be easy for people to cooperate. However, monopoly will damage the creativity and will slow down the potential improvement. Hence, maybe duopoly is better, just like today, we get Google, Microsoft and Apple~~~ The world will be progress in the dynamic equilibrium~~~ (Just like what we learn in chemistry)


2. changes
After showing the demo of HTML5 and Windows8, I suddenly felt a bit down. There are too many technologies in the world, we learn them today and maybe 5 years later no one will use them any more. The changes happen so fast that I am really worried whether I could follow the changes. During vocation, I bring an ipad2 back to my grandpa. I hope that he could at least try out the new stuff. But he only tried once and refused later. He did not know why ipad is useful. It will take him quite a long time to learn how to use ipad. Then I remember that Prof Ben has said that when he first tried Office 2007, he just felt not right and can not understand it. Now I am still young and smart, I will be curious about everything and keen to learn how to use them. But what if in 10 years later, I may not be as smart as now. And the technology advances in a even faster pace. At that moment, how could I adapt to these fast changes? How do I feel about myself? If at that time, what will be my core competency comparing to the smart and young and curious undergraduate? Suddenly I really have no idea about these questions.  However, I still would like to end this topic by this famous sentence

"Youth is not  a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips, or supple knees. It is a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life."

Hope I will be young all the time~~~ (Does this lecture make me too emo...)


P.S. Although this lecture it about technologies, I really did not attract by them too much. Anyway new technology will occur everyday, just like meals per day. But it is my great pleasure to hear from people to see their insightful prediction about futures. It may be the best thing I could get from this lecture...

P.S. Around 30 years ago, programmer decided the world. That's why people can not understand why Steven Jobs insisted on his small rounded design. Now, the world is decided by the designer and marketing people. Everything is possible to be coded...

P.S. 我不管以后是苹果还是芒果，反正果子总会有的，不会饿到。。。很冷啊。。。



=========================Other things==========================

for this week, linear algebra is boring...

for all the weeks, I will try to understand set theory. Although during today's lecture, lecturer keeps using N(the natural number set notation), I keep lost...:-(

If anyone wants to challenge his/her IQ, take group theory or set theory...

TMR, fix the bug, it is a must...

Water n

Watering~~~

===========================About CS3216==========================

Suddenly realize a big bug in my code but can not figure out a way to solve it.

It seems that JS global variable is not so global... I could not change its values inside the FB calls.

Hope I could find a way to fix it... Hope I am wrong and such a bug is caused by my carelessness.

Finally I found out why it happens. Sometimes the bug could be so cute.
Sometimes it will display correct result and sometimes it could not.
Ajax is asynchronous, it is the advantage of Ajax but it is also the reason why such a bug occurs....
The problem is how to fix it... Or just use php instead...


===========================About Others==========================
It may not take too long to solve a math tutorial...

But it will definitely take a long time to figure out how to solve a bug in CS...

Water #

Don't remember how many water post I have written...

=======================CS3216==========================
 appStore / iTunes the most successful app

Although Prof Ben mentioned that appStore is not an app in the email, I still want to say a bit more about it.
In my perspective, they are indeed the most successful apps. Admittedly Angry Bird (just take it as example) is quite successful and makes a lot of value. However comparing to appStore  and iTunes, the value it made is really small. I believe that most of people think appStore or itunes is not "app" because they are the product of Apple Company and it is kind of system default ... People may argue the success of appStore and itunes highly depend on the success of ipod and iphone. Hence it was not fair to compare them with other apps. However, it is clear that the success of Angry bird also depends on the widely usage of i-products. If all of their success depend on the same i-product, we should be able to compare them.

In addition, the most successful app should and must have a very sharp idea. Just think about Windows System. They never try to come up with a software store... It is very challenging to come up with your own software store because it may kill the company's profit under the high pressure from open source softwares. Apple is brave enough to open its own app store and have a creative idea to sell music online without violating copyright. I have to say that such a great idea and great courage make these 2 apps so successful today.

Although these two applications may not be apps, they indeed changed the world. And they are one of the most successful products in the world.


========================Other things========================

After mid submission, finally we could have a sunday free to finish all the tutorials.

Water

Continue Watering~~~

=================CS3216=======================
Today is another coding day~~~ I did not hate it~~~ in fact sometimes it is pretty interesting.
Using 2 hours to discover a very very stupid bug... js is not always so great... it can not tell me some very simple syntax error...

xiangyun, so so so great, fast learner and good ui designer...
Now i think that it is possible for us to finish the assignment...


Today's lunch and dinner are very special and unexpected...
Thanks mingzhe and shaohuan...

================Other things===================
1. try to make someone sleep before 2am at least once in next 2 weeks...
2. have a free sunday to do my tutorials...
3. convince myself about the 3 door problem...

P.S. it is really lucky today that i suddenly remember to write the blog at 11:50~~~

watering 6

Continue watering......

==========================CS3216========================


Too busy today, got almost whole day lecture and whole night event.

Really sorry that did not do anything about 3216 today.

Anyway I will catch up later tonight....

=========================RVR Dance Party========================

Tonight I was so happy to be one of the organizers of RVR dance Party.
During the party time, I did dance with my friends. It seems my first time to join such party. Everyone enjoyed the party.

While dancing, I suddenly realize that my life should not be all about coding and maths. Although they are interesting, I should try out the other world. Try to know and experience all the different things and cultures. Now I regretted that I did not join the exchange program. I really should go out and experience different cultures. If I get such a chance in future, I think I would like to go to Germany or French.

It is already 10:30pm. I need to go back and clean the event venue.

Then I will be back and start coding ... A busy day~~~

Water 5

Watering~~~

==========================About CS3216============================
It seems that Prof Ben will really read every post.
If such a busy person could read every post, why can't I write a post every day to record my life of CS3216? In fact, everyone should try that as the best feedback to Prof Ben, isn't it~~~

Anyway, I almost coded for over 8 hours today same as my teammates...
Sad Story....
In the past 2 days, I tried to learn and use PHP. Luckily it could work. However it always has the auth error. I did hate that... Then the solution is to post signed_request every time when I change to a new php file.

As long as it works, I don't care about whether it is nice code or not at this moment.
But today, after discussion, we realize that js could provide really nice html design and animations.
Hence the whole php should integrate into js. During the integration, many errors occurred. Errors from facebook, errors from php and errors from js. Everywhere there could be an error.... Lucky we did not integrate with database now...

Finally, we gave up php and rewrite the code in js...
It seems that js is really better than php....
It also means that I need to spend another 2 days to learn js and the fql which does not look good.


==========================Other things===========================
printer fixed... I did not use my printer for about half year because of paper jam.  today i have to call the service. How stupid i am ... really a "machine" idiot... (not according to the machine definition in three idiots)

three door problem is still confused me... hope that someone could finally give me a convincible explanation.

P.S. just realize that I can not code too much a day. It is better to code for 2 hours and do something else. otherwise, I will really get phd (permanent head damage... no offense to really PhD. )

Water 4

Still Watering~~~

========================About CS3216======================

Today one of the team member has almost settled the database schema and relative php function call. Although not sure whether these functions will perform well or not, still happy for the progress.

On my side, I used JQuery today without no knowledge about it...
Copy some code from other places and make adjustment in my php files.
Although it may not be efficient, it functions well.
Not sure whether I have time to learn JQuery or not, but I will try to use it anyway.
Now the front end almost 30% done~~~ Cheers~~~ Try to connect with database as soon as possible~~~

========================Other things=======================
Today I got my first lecture in uTown....
It indeed looked nice and had a really natural environment. We are very happy to see a mouse, Real Mouse, moving around the lecture theater. And the lecturer from German also looked very happy and took a video. Many of my classmates took photos of the cute mouse during the break~~~ What's more the cure little mouse slept on one of the students' shoe during the lecture time... It means that even a mouse does not like lecture :-P

Three door problem... Got confused again...
Sometimes probability is really evil...

Potentials

Although it is the second time to learn about the "Ben Potential Theory", I was still impressed.

To certain degree, I believe that it is a quite good theory and has a deep meaning. I am not sure where my potential is on the potential bar. Maybe up to now, I was always driven by the external forces (peer pressure, parents' hope and some of self pride). In fact, it seems that I never decided to do something from my heart even for learning maths. During spare time, I will read novels comics, watch movies, sleep and perhaps doing some sports. Maybe it is quite difficult for me to reach the intrinsic potential. However, it does not mean that I could not reach a full potential. It is still possible because sometimes external force will be enough for me. Unlike other guys who is so lucky to find their loving hobbies, I do not know what my hobbies are. However, if I keep learning and doing challenge topics, I will finally turn these topics into what I like, even hobbies, for example maths. I did not like maths when I was very young. However, after over 10 years' study, it has already become what I enjoyed.

In addition, I hope that I could remember "start easy, finish strong". It should be one of my goals for this module. I did not take CS3217 very seriously. Hence the result is "start easy and finish weak". I did not want the history to repeat... I hope after this semester, I will dare to say "start easy and finish strong".

P.S. Now I believe that Prof Ben will read every post. You really do not need to comment on every post.
P.S. We will try to come up with a good application...

===================Other things==========================

Set theory is really really deep..........
Everything is a set, function, relation, field, ring, group, vector spaces.....
All the important concepts are based on set. Now I know that set is important and really fundamental.
Cantor's diagonal argument is one of the most excellent designs of contradiction proof.
What if I took CS3231 and MA3205 together? Now my world has a clear separation between computer science and maths. When can I make this separation disappear? ai......

Water 3

Today is a really very very busy day.


===================About CS3216======================

We spent the whole afternoon to further discuss about the ideas and try to come up the UI design frame as well as the data schema~~~

Maybe most of my teammates have less experience in web programming (same as me). It is happy to discuss with them and come up with the application. Freshness, sometimes is the best thing you could have. I learned many things from them and understood the logic more clearly.

It is really happy to see that our team is fast enough to start our project~~~ I really look forward to checking our final application~~~

===================About other things=====================

RA is really a heavy "job". We had meeting from 730 to 1130.....
But it is fun to work with other people and talk about the residential life. I am also happy to help organize the welcome fest for the new residents~~~



P.S. If I did not challenge myself to write a blog everyday, I will stay with other RAs and continue chatting with each other~~~

Water 2

Nothing to much and special to emphasize today.

====================About CS3216======================
Today we finished setting up the AWS account and getting an idea for Facebook application.

It is really happy to discuss the ideas with my teammates. Although the discussion continued until 6pm, it is really fun and makes me know about my teammates.

Tomorrow we need to come up with the draft of proposal and  schema. Hopefully we could start as early as possible. We are not the best web programmers, learning will take a long time.

====================Other things=======================
Don't know why today I was so tired. After coming back from SoC, I just went to sleep. Almost forgot about watering the blogs~~~

Water 1

Explanation

All the posts named with water # will be a "free post", which means there are not too many things to say for that day, just write some random material.... Leave a record for that day...

===============About CS3216=================
Just start to read the FB notes... It is really a lot to read and more than a lot to do...

Start to be busy from tomorrow...


===============Other things===================
Fourier Transform is difficult, could hardly fully appreciate it...
Countability is a nice idea and it seems closed related with state machines...
Most memorable proof : R is uncountable set...

First day of Year 4

CS3216 show and tell

It is amazing to see the CS3216 show and tell. I really have to say that everyone is talented. Computer science major does not imply that I am a good coder. After today's show and tell, I realized that everyone can be a very very good coder and come up with fantastic videos, apps and all the possible things.

I believe that it is no good to play computer games... Girls do not like games anyway. However, it was totally surprise to see the Warcraft presentation today. I am not sure how many coding evolved in order to come up with that video. However, I like the idea. At least, it attracted almost all the audiences when it was first shown (if this class has more girls, I do not believe it will have such good feedback). Anyway, their group picked the correct manner to attract audience~~~ really a brilliant idea~~~

In addition, the bank video is really professional. I tried some of the video editing before. It is really hard to come up such a nice video from scratches.

Should not forget the balanced cars. In fact, the presentation does not show the whole design as we all knew. However, as I was around SoC during the vacation, I know that he stayed in the lab for all most the whole month..... That is Passion!!!

P.S. Strongly recommend to use Aldrian's chatbox. It is very nice but also be noted that he could check all the messages~~~


After today's show, I feel a bit sad for myself. I really need to develop some random things to do when I was free or sad.... Most of the time, I will watch videos...






=======================other story of today========================

Today I wrote that I am passionate about maths. Prof Ben said that I need to take another semester to reform...

I am not sure how to check whether I was really passionate about maths. But I knew that among all the lectures, only the math lecture could make me smile from heart or the things related to maths. The reason is not that math lecturer is funny and interesting. It is the maths concept made me happy without reasons.


Today I had the first lecture in set theory. Sad to say that I did not expect too much from this course. Set, it is just too common to learn. It is a collection of similar objects --- definition from high school... However, surprisingly, the lecturer told us that "set does not have a definition, it is undefined, like you never define what is a number". I was totally surprised. Although all the other stuff he taught later were more or less known, I was still shocked by that sentence. I think he was right because set is the most basic concept of the whole mathematics. In that sense, there must be something undefined and can not be defined. Set is the fundamental concept of mathematics and logic, I guess. After learning some axioms about sets, I suddenly realized that some of the programming languages is kind of replicating the whole mathematics. NSObject, defined in iOS, it is the root object of all the objects. It just like the basic set concept and based on which recursion applied to create more objects. All the logic calculation is replicated by defining built in functions. Sets + Logic, they seem to form mathematics. Then all languages defined in this manner will be kind of replication of mathematics. Wow~~~ It is a huge work~~~ But anyway, I know that it could hardly be a complete replication because there are too many beautiful results could hardly be understood by 0s and 1s only.

Today I was really tired~~~ A whole day lecture. But it really fruitful and at least I did learn something~~~


P.S. I do not believe Prof Ben will read every post...

... new semester...

Today I suddenly realized that new semester is really really coming.

After checking IVLE, I wanted to cry already, there are several assignments due in next 2 weeks.  ......... Really got too many things to do now.... Bye my dear summer vacations~~~

=========================side note====================
From AAA to AA+

Several days ago, S&P downgraded US government rating from AAA to AA+. The stock markets followed the bad news moving down. Later, after US government made some announcement and promised to take actions in future, all the stock indexes went up.

Is this the beginning of the new financial crisis? What will happen in the next 12 months?
2012 may not be the real last day of human beings. But it is possible to be the nightmare of the financial world.....

what I hope to learn in CS3216

It is quite a typical "Ben" type of question to be answered at the beginning of each semester. Although I do not like it at all, it makes me clear that vacation is over and before taking any module, I have to make my goal clear.

Why do I take CS3216 should be the question answered before what I hope to learn in this module. Anyway in case the blog goes to long, I will list what I hope to learn in this module first and followed by the reasons.

What I want to learn from this module?

1. Business idea. What is the best way to promote an application? What is the business opinion towards an application? How to evaluate an application? Not sure whether I will learn all about this. But I think I will at least find some clues.
(difficulty level: possible to hit part of the goal, very unlikely to make all the questions clear.
overall difficulty level: 90/100)

2. Challenge again~~~ Without any doubt, CS3216 is a huge challenge to me, to my time management skill. Not sure whether I could survive and how I finally survive.
(difficulty level: I will survive almost for sure. But not sure whether I will be happy with the way I survived from this module.
overall difficulty level: 99/100)


3. Be a good coder that at least I could satisfy with myself. 
(difficulty level:I could hardly satisfy with my coding skill in future
overall difficulty level: 200/100)

4.  Hope that I could write a blog everyday, no need to be so long,  even a word will work. Test for myself .....
(difficulty level: self-control is always the problem......

overall difficulty level: 0/0 )

5. I do not like facebook because it is kind of wasting time. However, it is useful in the sense of information passing. Hence maybe after this module, I hope that I could like facebook a bit....

(difficulty level: should be easy to achieve. anyway I need to use facebook more often in future. 
overall difficulty level: 0/1 )

Why do I take CS3216?

1. Honestly speaking, satisfy my major requirement, no other choice.

2. To be a better coder. (Maybe I should have already achieved that goal when I finished CS3217. However, up to now, it is still hard to convince myself that I am a good coder. Hence it will still be one of important reasons)

3. To be different. Use the knowledge from different fields and integrate them.

4. To learn business. Sad story that my team did not get the prize for iCreate Competition. There are several reasons. Two outstanding reasons are
            1). I am not a good coder.  I did not try my best to product a user-friendly and bug-free application.

            2). I have no idea about marketing. Sometimes, appearance (UI) says louder than functionality.

Hence I have to take this module, to learn from the industry people to see their ideas and options toward one application product.