Moved to new blog

http://blog.geeksphere.net

Bush version 3?

“Countries like Europe”? Really?

Wow… and we thought he was way better than Bush, at least intellectually.

Getting more done

Rather interesting video.

Avoid group decision making. The process takes way too long, and usually decisions made by a group are all about compromise and doing the safe thing.

Buy1Give1

Very interesting and very powerful.

Lessons I realised I’ve learnt after reading the blogs of others.

To those who are reading for grading purposes, the post for that purpose was actually done here.

I made the most amount of realizations from Adhiraj’s post.

I have a new-found belief (or so I think) in the importance of a right attitude to life.

Agreed, I believe that we have to have the right mindset to first stand a chance of succeeding in life. I firmly believe that to be successful, one has to play to win, and not play to not lose. One must have the winning mentality in them to even stand a chance of winning.

Quoting from Paul Dunn of Buy1Give1,

Watch your thoughts,
they become your words.

Watch your words,
they become your actions.

Watch your actions,
they become your habits.

Watch your habits,
they become your character.

Watch your character,
it becomes your destiny.

Our attitude, our character, our mentality results in our destiny. It is thus safe to say the future is in our hands.

Decisiveness: Absolutely essential. Our world is orders of magnitude more dynamic than a few years back. Which means a lot more decisions, some very critical. Just a few years to go and we'll be working men dealing with the systematic randomness of the world. It's necessary to get into the "habit" of making good decisions quickly.

Again, this reminds me of something someone else said. Forgot who tho. I think it was Mr John Yip from Awfully Chocolate, but I can’t exactly remember. Basically, it went like that.

Entrepreneurs make decisions with the belief that at least 70% of the decisions will turn out right. If you want 100% of your decisions to be right, you are better off in the civil service.

Over the course of the module, I’ve also seen some disagreements between members of other groups, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from watching these disagreements, as well as from listening to Hoong An, it’s that washing your dirty linens in public will only increase the problems.

And going for the World Entrepreneurship Day and listening veterans like Alvin Lee share their views, I discovered other things about myself that I was never able to put into words before. I liked Mr Lee’s concept of silent defiance, and when Paul Dunn shared the quote

“If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”  
-Albert Einstein

Alright then, off to sleep. Intensive mugging week ahead.

5 things I learnt

It’s been a mindblowing semester. And I think I learnt more in this short 3 months, than any other 3 months of my life. 20 years young this year, and the future looks exciting, I can’t wait for the next day =)

Reflecting back on the start of the semester, and the first homework post, it’s seems that alot have pass since then, but yet, it has only been 3.5 short months. When I first entered CS3216, I had no idea what I wanted to learn, and the only reason why wanted to join the class(the REAL reason) was that it wasn’t the normal route =P. Really, I don’t like doing things normally.

At the start I mentioned that I wanted to learn what I did not know I did not know. And now, i believe I can say I’ve learnt alot especially related to business and networking(YES, in a computing module).

 

So as most of you know, I’ve been moving around, talking to outside people, and we plan to push Codename Penguin all the way. And I realised one very important thing that in hindsight that I did that was the right thing to do, that many people had ask me why the heck I did that when I don’t need the points, to join CCA’s, namely NUS Entrepreneurship Society(NES). I joined in out of passion, and I love doing what I did in there, and dots did connect.  One thing led to another, and now I’m currently the Vice Director of Technology in there. And I thoroughly abuse this position. And because of this position that I received in NES, people seemed more willing to correspond and exchange contacts at networking sessions. I remember a biz undergrad at one of these networking sessions, and he was complaining to me that he couldn’t find anyone who was willing to exchange contacts with him. And that kindof started me thinking, I didn’t have that problem, so what was I doing right? Turns out that in hindsight, I’ve made a lot right choices, but I made most of those choices because of other reasons, because I followed my heart, and dots did connect. Sometimes, we just have to believe, and do what we want to do. Because of this project, I’ve been given the opportunity to network with more people than any other time in my life, and I found something else I like doing, talking to people. So I did learn one more thing about myself because of this module.

 

Second thing that I learnt, and Prof has been teaching this as well, but I couldn’t find a way to effectively put in in words, until I met Fredrick Haren, founder of Interesting.org and author of bestselling book The Idea Book. Basically it’s this idea of taking existing ideas and improving on it. Previously, I was very against copying other businesses, and I always thought I should be able to do better than that. In all honesty, Prof didn’t manage to convince that it was ok to copy others’ ideas. But after speaking to Fredrick, I managed to see things in a new light. And it was actually something that he learnt from talking to a HR person in China. It’s not so much of copyright, but rather, copying right. Most inventions in the world were because people existing technology, copied them and merge with other technologies to create new technologies. And that woke me up, if I could copy what other people have, repackage it, and add my own stuff on top of it, wouldn’t that make it mine?

 

Third thing that I learnt, people are amazing. You never know what you can learn from others, no matter who they are. Just because we are undergrads, does not mean that we are smarter than people who do not have degrees. A very thought provoking video(in cantonese) that prof shared on facebook a while and it left a very deep impression on me.

A rough translation of the final part of the video, which made me think alot.

Everyone is unique. We shouldn’t use our own standards to measure others, and we also should use what we believe is the best or right standards and force it upon others. And we also should look down on others because of our status and abilities.
Others may not have my strengths, but we cannot forget, do we have their strengths?

Thx prof, for sharing.

 

Fourth thing I learnt, connections are damn important. To do something big, we need to have the connections to the right people, and leverage on that. Don’t be afraid to ask, especially while we are still students. I remember Howie Lau, VP and GM of Lenovo ASEAN telling me this.

Meet as many highflyers and establish as much contacts while you are a student. Meet for meals and most of the time they will oblige. That opportunity disappears once you have graduated.

 

Fifth thing I learnt, life is not just about school. There is this saying in chinese, which is quite popular in China,

毕业等于失业

Many a times, the moment someone graduates in the moment he/she loses direction in life, Especially for those who cannot find jobs. School does not prepare them for this. But CS3216 does. Because we are not given a direction. The only thing that is told to us is to GO DO SOMETHING. The feeling of being lost and not knowing what to do can be quite thrilling at times. Sick, I know, but it’s fun =).

I’m quite sure that I’ve learnt alot more, but I guess every post has it’s end, and it’s time to turn my attention to the final report. Till next time.

Go screw yourself Apple.

Had been planning to do this post for quite some time already, after they changed the new iPhone SDK. Brimelow, an Adobe Platform Evangelist, has written an excellent response to Apple’s move here.

Interesting quote from that post.

The trouble is that we will never hear their discontent because Apple employees are forbidden from blogging, posting to social networks, or other things that we at companies with an open culture take for granted.

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The fact that Apple would make such a hostile and despicable move like this clearly shows the difference between our two companies. All we want is to provide creative professionals an avenue to deploy their work to as many devices as possible. We are not looking to kill anything or anyone.

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Many of Adobe’s supporters have mentioned that we should discontinue the Creative Suite products on OS X as a form of retaliation. Again, this is something that Adobe would never consider in a million years. We are not looking to abuse our loyal users and make them pawns for the sake of trying to hurt another company.

And the best line in that blog.

Comments disabled as I’m not interested in hearing from the Cupertino Comment SPAM bots.

As if their move to piss off developers is not bad enough, they have dropped to new lows(or should I say rise to new heights) in the art of pissing off developers.

Apple is now rejecting apps with the word Pad in it’s name. It is Apple's latest attempt to prevent people from using its trademarks in applications in the App Store in order to avoid any confusion over whether an app is created or endorsed by Apple.

ContactPad, has been around for quite some time and is currently on the App Store. However, when the developer tried to update his software,  he wasn’t allowed to do so because of the word Pad. Email can be found here. Guess we won’t be seeing NotePAD or Star Wars PADawan =P.

Best comment on neowin.net I found so far that sums up the mood of techies and geeks on Apple’s new stance.

if (name.ToLower().Contains("pad")) developer.screw();

Greg from Tao Effect actually emailed Steve Jobs for his response to the mood in the tech world now from Apple’s move so far. The email train can be found here.

John Gruber actually did a damn long post here defending Apple. And he kind of shows the standard attitude that Apple fanboys have when their cult is criticised.

Cross-platform software toolkits have never — ever — produced top-notch native apps for Apple platforms. Not for the classic Mac OS, not for Mac OS X, and not for iPhone OS. Such apps generally have been downright crummy.

Really? The last I checked, Firefox which was created from the Mozilla app framework was quite top-notch =)

Guess that’s it for now =) Ciao.

What an eventful week.

I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of old ones.
-John Cage

First there was the 3216 presentation. Then there was the dinner with notable NUS Alumni. And the morning after the dinner was CS2100 mid terms 2. Thankfully, the crazy week is about to draw to a close, although next week seems to be just as crazy.

Going for the dinner was, in hindsight, the right choice. I was in a dilemma before, not knowing if I should sign up for the dinner. After all, CS2100 mid terms was the morning after that, and having totally flunked the first mid term for CS2100, I guess I had to do damn well for the 2nd mid term to get a decent grade for this module. And my friends were all asking me the same question, “You know that CS2100 mid terms is tmr morning right?” on Friday. At that point, I started to have doubts on whether I should go for the dinner, even if I didn’t show it. After all, if I didn’t score well enough for CS2100 and ended up failing it, I would not be able to do what I wanted to do next sem, which is kind of irritating. When I got there, it was still with a heavy heart, of not knowing if I had made the right choice, but I thought to myself, “Heck, I’m here already. Let’s make the most out of it.”

Turned out to be a good decision. Got to know Fredrik Haren, founder of Interesting.org, and author of The Idea Book. Bought a copy of The Idea Book, and he gave me another for free after having a chat for some time, and it’s kindof a cool book. 50% content, 50% notebook. And it’s not the kind of book you’ll lend to your friend cos it’s a notebook. I’ll do a review of The Idea Book once my schedule slacks a little. Finished reading it already, and boy it is inspiring. If anyone is interested in getting one, drop me an email.

Another person I exchanged contacts with was Mr Howie Lau, NUS Alumnus, now Vice President of Lenovo ASEAN, and council member on the SiTF. It’s kind of interesting how I starting meeting with SiTF council members after I first met with Mr Wong Loke Yeow, an SiTF council member himself and Regional Director & JAPAC Evangelist for ArcSight. After that I got to know Mr Frank Koo, Managing Director of Oracle Singapore, who is also sitting on the council of SiTF. All of them are pretty successful people in their own rights, and it was very interesting to hear their views on the IT industry today. And so the dinner ended, and I exchanged cards with a couple of other interesting people that I met and called it a day. After all, I had a huge sleep debt with a critical exam the next day, one that would make or break my semester.

With that optimism that I always have, I went into the exam, and I thought I did pretty well. Somehow, I realised I wasn’t optimistic enough when I checked IVLE for the grades =P

Guess things are starting to get back on track now. Time to push for a strong finish to the semester.

Apple bans Adobe's Flash-to-iPhone compiler, plus related applications

Section 3.3.1 of the updated developer agreements reads as follows: "3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited)."Source

What the heck? If there’s ever a time for a company to adopt Opera’s crybaby tactics, I think this is it.

Adobe shld just pull Photoshop support from OSX and let Jobs suck on it =P. Maybe that’ll wake Apple up.

Pixels by Patrick Jean