What a Place to Live!

When I first learn about this No U-Turn concept, I wasn’t quite believing it. I thought why would people “not turn just because it didn’t say you could turn?!”. But now as I get to see more people, I began to find such syndrome floating around.

Early this week on Monday, my computer at the office(I am working as a temp staff in my school) broke down. A report was made to the Technical support admin but because it was a Dell machine, they had to call up Dell and wait for their technicians to come to repair.

A Dell technician came the next day(Tuesday) and together with the Technical support admin from the school, they came down to my desk at the office. The admin unlocked the latch on the CPU casing for the technician to start his repair job and the technician began to strike up a conversation with the us(as he repairs the computer) telling his stories which he had been to some places where people couldn’t get their keys to open up the latch and often had to wait for very long.

I can’t exactly typing the conversation word for word here but the content were more or less this way.

There is no rights or wrongs in this scenario and it depends on how you see things. I can understand from the support admin’s point of view that is she wants to make sure she keeps her job. I could also understand why the technician is doing that as he wants to make his job more efficient and productive rather than waiting his time away.

While the support admin’s job performance may show that she makes no mistakes, I believe her job productivity could turn out to be lower than people who makes their own decision to get things done.
On the other hand, while the computer technician may have higher job productivity level as he tries whatever he could before he gives up, people who makes too much decision on their own may create new problems. And it also depends on whether if he has a understanding and supportive boss.

What a science, isn’t it?

I finally managed to get myself compiling the videos I got for the Interactive Charity Engine after more than a week of procrastination since the entry I posted about the Project Show. Here’s the video…

Just an overview about what the project is all about, the Interactive Charity Engine is a project that I have developed for my graduation project. It has a projected public display, which could be interacted through a multi-touch screen booth. The display takes inputs from public contributions into a donation box. The screen allows loading of other “themes” or displays to receive the inputs.

The aim of this project is to improve the traditional way of soliciting donation funds and encourage contributions through visual incentives and interesting human computer interactions.

Actually, not exactly mine since the intention of buying the MacBook was to replace my dad’s faulty laptop. But because he isn’t very used to it, I get to use it most of the time. haha!

We ordered the MacBook last Thursday online in the afternoon and it was delivered to our house at around 11pm on the same day! That’s very amazing because the local Apple website claims to deliver within 24 hours and it really did!

The MacBook just came in at the right time because I started reading (very very slowly) a book on Cocoa/Obj-C a few weeks ago and then now I got a Mac to play with. But the real intention to learn Cocoa wasn’t really to programme on a Mac computer but to see what I could do on my iPhone.

By the way, the picture is just for show because I am still very much a Windows user. Look at the Dell laptop in the background! hahaha!

A few days ago, I got an email that has audio attachments and since I checked the mail on my iPhone, I downloaded the files and see them playing on the iPhone’s Quicktime player. It works very well but the only thing is that the time bar at the top for the Mail application gets missing after quitting the Quicktime player. The time bar continues to not show even restarting the Mail application.

For a moment I thought I have to restart the phone to see the time bar coming back but then surprisingly, when I go to Safari, return to the home screen and go back to the mail application, the time bar at the top comes back again. I tried it once more and it really works by just going to Safari and then go back to the Mail application to get the time bar at the top appearing again.

I am using the 1.1.2 firmware version. Since the version I am using has already been around for quite some time, maybe the newer versions have this problem fixed already… I am not sure either.

I have this problem occasionally when I submit a HTML form to a PHP form processor and then when I hit the back button on my browser, the values in the form fields are cleared or appeared to be empty. So recently I met with this problem again while working on a project. This is kind of annoying because sometimes the users may just give up signing up on your site for re-filling in all the information again.

For all the time, I use a workaround to this by adding a cache header to the form file.

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<?php
header("cache-control: private");     //Put this header at the very top of the page before any output
 
//Form HTML....
?>

This will kind of make the values of the form fields stay even after hitting the browser’s back button. However, I only realise recently that it only seems to work on IE but not Firefox.

Finally after all these days, Tuesday (18th March) had come and is now officially over(not really in some bit though, in some ways but we will see how).

Tuesday was the Project Show in school. That’s kind of like a graduation project exhibition but only selected ones were shown there. I don’t really like the idea that only the selected ones to be shown since I believe every student had put in a lot of efforts in their graduation projects and should have the chance to enjoy showing their work off to the public. But anyways, my project was one of the selected ones.

My project was an Interactive Charity Engine that will respond to every coin that the people contribute into a coin box. The idea is to have it as a public installation with a large public projected display. So essentially, what the audience would see could probably an apple appearing on the screen when he puts in his coin. And the other person may see a leaf coming into the screen when another coin is put in.

I consider myself “lucky” to get selected since my project was really simple. Not many would be able to link the concept behind whatever that we have and would probably find the idea of sheer crap. I get this problem whenever I tell friends about it. Honestly, not even myself could at first until some time when I had developed to a stage where I had no choice but to continue developing.

The other thing is that I wish to implement all the research (so much thanks to this bunch of ppl) I had done in designing a multi-touch interface. I mean that’s what I had proposed for the graduation project way before even the semester started but we turned out to be doing something else and I ended up doing it as a pet project on my own. This is really something I am very very keen to do and was quite disappointed when I know I will have to do something else.

Long story short, I took the 2 weeks of preparation period that was intended for us to get our project ready to build and integrate a multi-touch booth that controls the large public display. I decided to have this idea because this is the only way I could have my multi-touch project shown together. I mean the posters, brochures and other stuff for the Interactive Charity has already been printed and it make no sense if I do a seperate project there. Those were really 2 weeks of tiring, busy, lack of sleep, torture, taxi spree, cash leakage, slow-motion suicide but yet self-fullfilling days. I am happy that my lecturer was very helpful in many ways to help getting the equipments from the school to make my this little last minute idea possible. Many other things turned out to be so much more amazing than I had thought.

Coming back to the show on Tuesday, I must say it was really out of my expectation (in a good way, of course!). My project wasn’t the best one to get the honour to present in the hall to all the guests, but it was surprisingly voted as the most favourite project during the show by the visitors and guests. I also got many responses from the crowd during the show asking questions regarding the installation, especially on the multi-touch screen, on both technical and non-technical aspects. People also find it interesting to interact on the multi-touch screen booth especially the collaborative experience where many people could interact together.

Looks like that 2 weeks of hard work and money (on materials and the outrageous taxi fares) were really worthwhile. I enjoyed the whole process from developing the project to having the crazy idea getting the multi-touch booth to preparing the installation and all the way to the last minute on Tuesday even though it was very tiring. I really feel like a wish came true or something close to that. I mean it’s the multi-touch screen! That’s what I wanted to do, isn’t it?! Ha!The only thing that could have been better was my throat. I had a bad throat on Monday and my voice is almost lost before Tuesday came. I needed my voice badly to talk on that day.

Another thing that could possibly be better is the show should last for more than a day. I mean we (the organisers and other students and people who are involved) took so many weeks to prepare but everything were torn down after less than 8 hours of exhibition in less than an hour.

Nevertheless, it has been awesome and really great!

Update: I have compiled the video of the Interactive Charity Engine.

My Dell Dimension 9200 has been performing very well and today is its first anniversary (counting from the day it was sent to my home last year).

I could still remember I had to go to school in the afternoon on the same day last year and it was said to deliver by early evening. I was very excited that time and rushed back home at around 5pm. But it wasn’t delivered until like 7pm plus. I replaced my old computer with this new Dell desktop on my table and I was very happy with it. It was very quiet and was quite fast too, except that the Windows Vista has been consuming a lot of memory and screwing it up sometimes. I added another 2 gigs of ram a few weeks later and it kind of resolve the problems a little.

Today, my Dell Dimension 9200 is still kicking hard and alive. It has served me well for the past one year although it has began to produce funny noises along the way and recently, the absorb fan blows like the turbine of an aeroplane. This could be really annoying when I am working in the middle of the night. Speed-wise is still good. May appear to lag a lot compared to the first day but that’s probably the things I installed on it.

Having said that, I am going to throw a party to celebrate its anniversary by…..I don’t know what I should do to it either. Probably buy a good birthday cake and smash it on the fucking fan. I suppose that’s how it eats, right?

I won’t bare to do that of course. I still like my computer. It is still cool.

Nice day. Good weather today. Once every 4 years. Pretty cool.

I am making this entry just to make sure that there is an entry on the 29th of February. Usually entries on this day is like 1 to 2% of all the entries on most blogs. But I don’t want it to be 0% on mine, especially when I just started it.

Anyway, I finally got the time to ate THE chocolate today. Taste good. I will most the pictures here when I have the time.

PS: I am actually posting this entry on the first second of the second hour of the first of March. I missed the 29th . But since I haven’t slept yet, I think it is ok to post this as an entry on the 29th. hehe!

I was arranging the files that I had to send to the guys I worked for on some games today. As I was packing the files, I saw a Flash game that I did earlier last year during my internship. I almost forgotten about this game! That was like so long ago.

I could remember that I was asked to do a maze game in Flash during the internship for one of their clients. At first, I thought the maze could look very complex and I should prepare something for that. I had the idea to make this process a more simplified one.

I started writting a set of classes that allows me to design the map and place game items on the maps. The set of classes(or rather the main thing) will calculate and handle the collision detections and renders the map. Each individual items should be an object of itself so that I could make the different items in the game to have its own properties and magical capabilities. And I can easily add the items as children of the main game by calling addChild().

Since the client did not send us the information for the game yet that time, I used the Bomberman sprites as a demonstration for them. I later was busy with some other things and didn’t have any time for this. The eventual maze game(for the client) also turned out to be a lot simpler and didn’t require any major enhancement, which was also another reason I didn’t go on to make improvements. The main reason was of course I am very very very lazy.
Click here to see the Flash file

What really beats me is how could I have forgotten about this…Bomberman was one of my favourite childhood superheroes…I even collected many sets of their models! haha!

So this is going to be the first entry of my first blog! Great!

I installed and started the blog two days ago. That was the last day of the Lunar New Year, which I consider it was still an auspicious day to start my blog. That night when I started this blog, it was also the time when I was studying for the last examination throughout my Poly education! Actually, I didn’t enjoy memorising the notes and was just merely starring at my computer screen and somehow, I decided to start a blog.

Anyways, yesterday was the exam for Marketing. I have no idea how I had done in the paper but since this is going to be the last paper of all, I hope I will get a reasonable grade for it at least.

The three years were really fast. I could still recall the first lesson I had in the school and then yesterday was already the last exam I took. Yesterday was also the last official school day, the last day my Creative web cam pivot could turn (I broke it while it was in my bag), the last day I entered a tutorial room in the school and probably the last time I revised for my exam in the library. But yesterday was also the first day of freedom (not really freed until I finished all the backlog) and the first day I don’t have to think of attending school for at least the next few months until NS enlistment.

Still, I have enjoyed the days. I am thinking of posting some of the things I had gone through in the blog even though I only started like two days ago. I thought those might be good for memorial purposes. But I will still see if I have the time to do so.