Posts

Friday Hacks #129, March 3

Welcome back folks! We will be exploring cool hardware at our next Friday Hacks! Ever wondered what goes into building a laser cutter machine? Machine builder Kiwi will be doing a reverse teardown of a CO2 laser cutter! A team from Ionic3DP will also be sharing about their experiences in building their own 3D printers! You can look forward to live demos (:

Date/Time: Friday, March 3rd at 6:30pm Venue: The Hangar by NUS Enterprise Free pizza is served before the talks!

Facebook event here

Date/Time: Friday, March 3 at 7:00pm
Venue: The Hangar by NUS Enterprise

An Introduction to DIY Laser Cutters

Talk Description:

Laser cutting is a technology that uses a laser to cut materials, and is typically used for industrial manufacturing applications, but is also starting to be used by schools, small businesses, and hobbyists. Laser cutting works by directing the output of a high-power laser through optics and CNC (computer numerical control).

Common uses are cutting and engraving patterns onto materials such as wood, leather and acrylic, and is considered one of the faster processes in rapid prototyping. Join us for this sharing session to demystify the laser cutter machine!

Speaker Profile

Kee Wee Teng is an innovative machine designer and builder, and has worked on a multitude of fabrication machines, including CNCs, 3D Printers, vacuum formers and laser cutters. Dismayed by the slow decline of manufacturing capabilities in Singapore, he set out to set an example by building a machine in 6 months with limited resources and knowledge, able to do additive, subtractive, forming and cutting manufacturing, and showcased it at Makerfaire 2016. He hopes to inspire and encourage others in Singapore to adopt the same innovative Maker spirit that built early Singapore! Kee Wee was also recently featured in Challenge Magazine: https://www.challenge.gov.sg/print/feature/taking-things-into-their-own-hands

The Kappa 3D Printer

Talk Description:

Ionic3DP will be presenting their new 3D printer design which is based on Scott Russell Kinematics. Briefly talking about the existing products in the market and their limitations. An overview of the technology used in our design, it’s features and advantages. Finishing with how we began the project and our goal towards the future.

Speaker Profile

Francis Regan graduated from School of Computing NUS and has been working in the 3D printer industry for more than 7 years. Xinxin Du finished his PhD from ECE NUS recently and he is heavily involved in the projects related to automation and control. Shabbir received his MBA from Cardiff Business School, United Kingdom. His experience is more towards business and was with Techgrand to provide mentor supports to startups.

Friday Hacks #63, Feb 14

This Valentine’s evening, we have a exciting talk by Hongyi Li about his past work on Google Spanner & Image Search. See you!

Date/Time: Friday, February 14th at 6:30pm Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town; Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3M Signup: Do sign up for this week's talk so that we can prepare enough pizzas accordingly

Free pizza is served before the talks.

Talk: Spanner: Google's Globally Distributed Database

Talk Description:

Spanner is Google's scalable, multi-version, globally-distributed, and synchronously-replicated database. It is the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions. This talk describes how Spanner works, how it's deployed, and what it's main advantages are.
Speaker Profile:
Hongyi worked as a product manager at Google from 2011 to 2013. During that time he worked on Spanner with the infrastructure team and the UI redesign of Image Search. He's currently back in Singapore working at IDA on a new team trying to make the government more data driven.

Friday Hacks #60, Jan 17

For our first talk of the semester, we have a talk by Cedric Chin. Do note the change in venue this time round, it’s going to be at the spanking new NUS Hackerspace! See you there

Date/Time: Friday, January 17th at 6:30pm Venue: Hackerspace, #02-09, AS6, 13 Computing Drive, NUS Free pizza is served before the talks.

Talk: Product Analytics: Building Something People Want

Talk Description:

Say you’ve built a digital product, and usage is bad. How do you know what to build next? How do you know how well your product is doing? The answer is to use analytics. But many metrics (number of downloads per day) are useless, and the useful ones are non-obvious. This talk details the minimum set of metrics every digital product needs to keep track of, with some implementation details, and lays out some of the principles I’ve found useful to come up with other metrics specific to your product. Equally important to keeping track of product analytics is the need to create culture - at the organisational level - to use these metrics. I’ll talk about how two companies I’ve worked at have succeeded or failed at using metrics in their product development, and outline a process I’ve seen work well for a small product development team. Come if you’re interested in building stuff people want to use.

Speaker Profile:

Cedric Chin (aka Eli James) interned at Viki in Summer ‘12, and Kicksend in Summer ‘13. He ran the NUS Hackers from 2011 to 2012.

Friday Hacks #52, Sept 20

This week we have a talk by Microsoft. Do note that we’ll be in Seminar Room 1, COM1 (NUS School of Computing) instead of at University Town for this session!

Date/Time: Friday, Sept 20 at 6:30pm Venue: Seminar Room 1, COM1, School of Computing Free pizza is served before the talk.

Talk: Acing the Technical Interview - Resume & Interview Tips Friday Hacks 52 Microsoft Ad

In addition, Microsoft will also be raffling off a Surface at the talk! Register here to be entered into the draw.

Friday Hacks #50, Aug 30

This week we have a talk by Fazli Sapuan followed by a series of ad-hoc lightning talks by members of the community.

Date/Time: Friday, Aug 30 at 6:30pm Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3M Free pizza is served before the talks.

Talk: How I am stalking you – the NUS LDAP directory (Fazli Sapuan – Student)

Talk Description: Fazli will talk about the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), a technology from 1993 still in popular use by enterprises and other organizations like NUS. He will be showcasing his web app which has the ability to perform a student lookup search and list information about the student such as the course and year, the modules being read and the location of his residence in campus. The source code of the app will be published for the NUS hacking community.

Speaker Profile: Fazli likes to hack random projects for fun and without any apparent reason. He doesn’t like to talk about security hacking, but if he has to then he is a self-proclaimed grey hat. Fazli believes that what he did here does not constitute as security “hacking”, and that the app was not unethical in any form. Fazli is awesome. He totally did not write this blog post, Wordpress is lying.

About Lightning Talks

NUS Hackers is currently transitioning from weekly tech talks to a more community-involved format. As such, we are currently experimenting with new ideas. The new ideas may or may not work but the plan is we will always have something familiar to fall back on even if they fail.

More information about the lighting talks will be available later.

Friday Hacks #39, Feb 1

This week we have Michael Yong and Gaurav Chandrashekar, two NUS students who have or will be interning at interesting tech companies. Michael will be sharing about lessons he learnt from passing the Quora and Google interviews, and Gaurav will be talking about his experiencing working on localization at Spotify.

Date/Time: Friday, February 1 at 6:30pm Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3M Sign up here: //bit.ly/fridayhacks2013 Free pizza is served before the talks.

Talk 1: Getting that internship: what I learnt. (Michael Yong, NUS Student)

Talk Description: I'll be sharing my experience and the lessons learnt throughout the entire internship application process.

I’ll also be talking about what I did to prepare for the technical interviews, and what I think made the difference in my application.

Speaker Profile: Michael is a second year Computer Science undergraduate at NUS. He’ll be interning at Google and Quora in the coming summer and is extremely excited. He is also the current President of NUS Hackers.

Talk 2: An Internship Experience: Localization at Spotify (Gaurav Chandrashekar, NUS Student)

Talk Description: As services online expand to new countries, its critical that they are offered in new languages. However, there are challenges that needs to be addressed when you are translating your service to a new language. We'll touch on these and I'll also go into my brief experiences.

Speaker Profile: Gaurav Chandrashekar, currently a senior at NUS, spent 4 months at Spotify, Stockholm, in knowing more about localization and setting up translation platform for them.

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Please sign up at //bit.ly/fridayhacks2013

For a map, more details, as well as guidelines on giving a talk on Friday Hacks, see //nushackers.org/fridayhacks/ For more info on NUS Hackers, See: //nushackers.org/about For more Friday Hacks talks: //nushackers.org/

Friday Hacks #38, Jan 25

This week, we have Michael Cheng, convener of the Singapore PHP user group talking about rapid prototyping in PHP, and Omer Iqbal, an NUS Student who will be talking about Clojure.

Date/Time: Friday, January 25 at 6:30pm Venue: SR2, Education Resource Centre, University Town. Map: //goo.gl/maps/2Zy3M Sign up here: //bit.ly/fridayhacks2013 Free pizza is served before the talks.

Talk 1: Rapid Prototyping with PHP - The world of TDD, BDD and frameworks in PHP-land (Michael Cheng, Senior Software Engineer at mig33)

Talk Description: A quick overview of the state of modern day PHP development in the real world. An introduction of frameworks available and some nifty tricks and best practices you need to make it in a rapidly changing startup environment.

Speaker Profile: Michael Cheng has more than 10 years of experience using PHP to build dynamic websites. He is the convener of the Singapore PHP User Group and a Zend Certified Engineer/Trainer in PHP development.

Michael is currently a Senior Software Engineer with a local mid-sized startup called mig33 - a social entertainment platform - that’s popular in emerging economies like Indonesia and Nepal.

Talk 2: Clojure - The Return of The Lisp (Omer Iqbal, NUS Student)

Talk Description: Clojure combines the elegance of lisp with strong pragmatism. Its one of the few functional programming languages, along with Haskell, Erlang and Scala that have managed to crawl to the industry, and that's primarily because of its brilliant concurrency primitives, seamless interop with Java and very friendly community.

I’ll be giving a whirlwind tour of the language, covering the basic syntax (which is minimal, by virtue of being a lisp!), java interop, a few concurrency primitives, macros, writing a simple web server using Ring, and making some live noise with Overtone.

Prep: No need to prepare, but I’ll be doing some live coding and it would help to install leiningen 2.x(https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen) if you want to join in the action. Lein is a dependency manager, a build tool, and an awesome fire exhaust when your hair ignites after classpath errors.

Speaker Profile: Omer loves Koolaid, and the effects last for a while on him. His interests include web dev, embedded systems, cheap coffee (from the Koufu drinks stall!) and flamewars.

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Please sign up at //bit.ly/fridayhacks2013

For a map, more details, as well as guidelines on giving a talk on Friday Hacks, see //nushackers.org/fridayhacks/ For more info on NUS Hackers, See: //nushackers.org/about For more Friday Hacks talks: //nushackers.org/

Friday Hacks This Week Moved to LT19

Due to incredible demand, this week’s Friday Hacks (9th November) with Quora recruiting and Winston Teo has been moved to LT19, next to the Business Canteen. Here’s a map to the new location: //bit.ly/nus-lt19

The easiest way to get to LT19 is to drop off at the School of Computing bus stop, enter COM2, and then walk through the business canteen. The lecture theatre is located directly opposite the COM2 entrance.

Over 100 people have registered. This event is open to the public.

As a reminder, the talk starts promptly at 7pm. Food will be served after the two talks have concluded.

Friday Hacks #35, Nov 9

This week we have Quora, a Silicon Valley startup, coming to NUS for recruitment purposes, and Winston Teo from {new context} on Software Engineering as a career choice.

To sign up for this talk, and to apply for job opportunities at Quora, please register at this link: //bit.ly/quora-tech-talk Seats are limited!

Date/Time: Friday, November 9 at 7.00pm Venue: SR3 (Level 2), School of Computing, National University of Singapore. Map: //goo.gl/maps/KgzPT Venue changed to LT19, COM2, National University of Singapore. Map: //bit.ly/nus-lt19 Food is served after the talks.

Job opportunities Quora is hiring for full-time and internship positions in the US, especially for software engineering and product design roles. If you’re interested in opportunities at Quora, do submit your application at //www.quora.com/jobs and definitely drop by for the talk! You can also direct any questions to sg@quora.com.

Talk 1: Engineering at Quora: Building a Real-Time Platform with LiveNode and Webnode (Hongping Lim, Kah Hong Tay, Quora)

Hongping Lim, Software Engineer and Kah Hong Tay, Product Designer-- will be talking about Quora's technology stack and engineering challenges.

About Quora Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited and organized by everyone who uses it. The company’s mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge, and was founded in 2009. Adam D’Angelo, the former CTO of Facebook, is founder and CEO.

Talk 2: Software Engineering 6501 (Winston Teo, New Context)

Talk Description: Do you want to be a Software engineer? Software Engineering is not only about programming languages, algorithms, networks and databases. It's about creating value, getting things done, and constant communication. I'll be talking about why someone should become a software engineer and what I think it takes to be a good software engineer. Nothing technical, but you'll not learn this from lectures and tutorials.

Speaker Profile: Winston is an Alumni of NUS School of Computing, class of 2006. He started his career in IBM as a database administrator but soon realized that he loves web development a little bit more. He made the switch to become a Web Ninja at Wego.com in 2008 and has not looked back since. Currently a software engineer with New Context, he has helped build applications such as Friendster.com and Viki.com. To him, software engineering is more Art than Science, and he derives immense pleasure from building products that people need.

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Please sign up at //bit.ly/quora-tech-talk Seats are limited!

For a map, more details, as well as guidelines on giving a talk on Friday Hacks, see //nushackers.org/fridayhacks/ For more info on NUS Hackers, See: //nushackers.org/about For more Friday Hacks talks: //nushackers.org/

Friday Hacks #34, Nov 2

This week we have two NUS alumni speaking at Friday Hacks. The first talk will be held by Joshua Koo from Zopim, and three.js contributor. The second talk, held by Sivamani Varun, founder of Semantics3, will be speaking about distributed web crawlers.

Location: COM1 SR3 [COM1/212] Time: 7pm - 9pm. Talks start promptly at 7pm. You are welcome to stay and mingle (or hack!) after the talks.

Talk 1: Jump Start in three.js

Talk Description: three.js is a really (if it hasn’t been the most) popular javascript library 3d. Its applications ranges from a just a simple graphic library, to games, visualizations, product enhancements, to even medical field.

Learn to get started, and explore some of the capabilities of this library. Hears tips on common pitfalls and tricks developing with three.js. Get your hands dirty experimenting with examples and exploring a new world of three.js on your web browser..

Preparation: To have an idea of three.js, one can checkout https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/ You would probably only need an updated modern browser (Chrome or Firefox), preferably with a decent graphics unit. Having your favorite text editor, git and your usual development tools would be a plus.

Speaker Profile: Among his many interests, he loves creative coding, photography, sports and classical music. He graduated from the school of computing, majored in information systems, and is also an alumni of the NUS Overseas College (SV) and the NUS Symphony Orchestra. After graduating, he joined the teaching staff for the CS3217 (software engineering with iPad). After which he started worked for a silicon valley startup before joining an award winning local startup Zopim (//zopim.com) to help engineer their live chat product towards perfection. In his spare time, he explores realtime browser based experiments, as well as contributing to the open source community, including three.js.

Talk 2: Building a Distributed Web Crawler

Talk Description: In this talk, I will be talking about doing large scale web crawling and the challenges involved. I will then talk about building your own distributed web crawler.

Preparation: Previous experiences with cloud computing services like AWS would be great. Prior knowledge in distributed computing, messaging mechanisms would be beneficial, though not required.

Speaker Profile: Sivamani Varun is the founder of Semantics3. While not dabbling in technical things or talking to customers, he is an aspiring mariner and is a big movie buff. He is a proud NUS alum and holds a bachelors in Computer Engineering.

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Please sign up at //bit.ly/friday-hacks

For a map, more details, as well as guidelines on giving a talk on Friday Hacks, see //nushackers.org/fridayhacks/ For more info on NUS Hackers, See: //nushackers.org/about For more Friday Hacks talks: //nushackers.org/

Friday Hacks #32, Oct 12

This week we have Melvin Zhang from Hoiio on improving AI, and Shan and Rahul on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays.

Please sign up at //bit.ly/friday-hacks

Location: COM1 SR3 [COM1/212] Time: 7pm - 9pm. Talks start promptly at 7pm. You are welcome to stay and mingle (or hack!) after the talks.

Talk 1: Playing Games by Throwing Dice: Improving AI through Randomness (by Melvin Zhang of Hoiio)

Talk Description: How do programs play games at the level of the best human players? Can the use of random moves create stronger AI opponents? This talk is an introduction to the basics of game playing AIs. In additional to classic methods, such as retrograde analysis and minimax, we’ll also describe an exciting new method that exploits random moves.

This talk is based on Melvin’s experience developing an AI to play the collectible card game, Magic: the Gathering, as part of the Magarena project.

Speaker Profile: Melvin is a programmer at Hoiio, where he is building APIs that allows developers to easily add telephony capability to their apps. In his spare time, Melvin maintains an open source card game named Magarena.

Melvin received his B.Comp (Hons) and Ph.D. degrees from NUS School of Computing.

Talk 2: FPGAs: Why Write Code When You Can "Write" Hardware! (Shan and Rahul, NUS Students)

Talk Description: This talk will be a brief introduction to the world of user-configurable hardware, specifically Field-Programmable Gate Arrays. These devices can be configured by the end user to perform any function, from a simple set of logic gates to a full-blown microprocessor. We will also talk about hardware acceleration of algorithms. Many commonly-used processing algorithms (such as AES, PRESENT and those in the h.264 codec) are fairly expensive to do in software, and can benefit greatly from hardware acceleration. Just how much of a speedup does hardware acceleration provide? Attend the talk and find out :D

Preparation: Attendees unfamiliar with the concept of a logic gate are encouraged to read up before the talk.

Speaker Profile: Shan and Rahul are final year Electrical Engineering students at NUS. Both are open-source advocates, and waste their recess weeks trying to find a Linux distro that isn’t terrible.

Shan can almost always be spotted engulfed in either his Android or his laptop. If not currently engaged by a gadget that is powered up, he would either be tearing it apart to figure out how it works, or to hack it to make it harder, better, faster, stronger!

Rahul prefers to spend his time filling his storage devices with code, some useful and some utterly useless. He has a penchant for dropping down to assembly… because C is too high-level, though his latest escapades involve GPGPU programming and image processing.

Please sign up at //bit.ly/friday-hacks

For a map, more details, as well as guidelines on giving a talk on Friday Hacks, see //nushackers.org/fridayhacks/ For more info on NUS Hackers, See: //nushackers.org/about For more Friday Hacks talks: //nushackers.org/

Fridiay Hacks #31, Oct 5

This week we have Andy Marks from ThoughtWorks on Continuous Delivery, and Calvin Cheng, from the robotics startup CtrlWorks on building a telepresence robot.

Please sign up at //bit.ly/friday-hacks

Location: COM1 SR3 [COM1/212] Time: 7pm - 9pm. Talks start promptly at 7pm. You are welcome to stay and mingle (or hack!) after the talks.

Talk 1: Andy Marks (of software consulting firm ThoughtWorks)

Talk Description: Continuous Delivery is a 100% buzzword-compliant term used to describe the natural extension of Agile/Lean thinking into deployment of software. DevOps is a movement attempting to break down functional silos in organisations that need to deploy software. They are often used synonymously but the differences are far more subtle and subjective.

Speaker Profile: Andy Marks is a 13-year veteran of ThoughtWorks and Technical Principal for the Singapore office, having previously been Market Technical Lead for the Melbourne and Perth offices in Australia. Andy has significant experience leading, coaching and working in Agile software development teams. In his various roles within ThoughtWorks, he has been involved in solution delivery, DevOps, continuous deployment on AWS platforms, coaching and mentoring team.

Andy is also the organiser for DevOps Singapore - a local meetup group that meets monthly to talk all things DevOps.

Talk 2: Building a telepresence robot (Sim Kai and Calvin Cheng,CtrlWorks)

Talk Description: We will talk about the telepresence robot that we are working on, where we think the future is, and the technical challenges that we have encountered along the way.

Speaker Profile: Kai used to work in the robotics team at ST Kinetics and has a keen interest to see how personal robotics can make a positive difference in everyday lives.

Calvin has more than 15 years experience working on large scale software systems at Yahoo, Sun, and Oracle. He is very interested in robotics because it bridges between our physical and virtual worlds.

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Please sign up at //bit.ly/friday-hacks

For a map, more details, as well as guidelines on giving a talk on Friday Hacks, see //nushackers.org/fridayhacks/ For more info on NUS Hackers, See: //nushackers.org/about For more Friday Hacks talks: //nushackers.org/

Friday Hacks #30, Sep 21

This week we have Andy Croll, CTO at impulseflyer.com and the organiser of RedDotRubyConf, and Kwok Pan, a product designer who dabbles in programming.

Please sign up at //bit.ly/friday-hacks

Location: COM1 SR3 [COM1/212] Time: 7pm - 9pm. Talks start promptly at 7pm. You are welcome to stay and mingle (or hack!) after the talks.

Talk 1: Sweat the Details (Andy Croll, CTO of impulseflyer.com)

Talk Description: Design is communication, empathy and human understanding. The tiny things make all the difference in the tools and technologies you will be creating for the rest of your lives. Learn to take pride in the little things.

Speaker Profile: One of Singapore’s most sought after designers & developers. User-experience-focussed, web-designing, ruby programming, startup-ing, Singapore-based Brit.

Talk 2: From Art to App

Talk Description: Synthesizing Design and Code in Installations, Mobile Apps and 3D Printing increased accessibility between different fields of knowledge have resulted in exciting innovations in recent years. This talk will cover the emerging field of creative coding, the synthesis between design and programming as related to my work. I will talk about some of the processes I used to program a light installation for W Hotel, to create a system of 3D printed vases and to make a camera filter app for the iPhone. It will include insights and learnings from both a high level perspective as well as actual details with hands-on demonstrations. Throughout the talk, I will also touch on how I approach and learn programming as someone whose background is primarily in design.

Preparation: There is no required preparation but it will be helpful to look at a Java-based programming framework called Processing (//www.processing.org/) and some of the works in the exhibition section of the website. That was how I got started and I will use it for some demonstrations as well. Creative Applications (//www.creativeapplications.net/) is a good website to look at too.

Speaker Profile: Kwok Pan graduated two years ago from the School of Art, Design and Media, NTU, with First Class Honours in Product Design. Since then, he has been working to explore his vision of design and code working hand in hand to create original works in both physical products and interactive applications. His works in 3D Printing have been featured in magazines such as Casa Vogue Brasil, Surface Asia, and The American Scholar, as well as major design websites such as designboom, Fast Company (Co.Design) and NOTCOT. More recently, his venture into the world of iPhone applications, a camera app called Meta (www.app-meta.com), were picked up by The Guardian, Cult of Mac and Life in LoFi.

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Please sign up at //bit.ly/friday-hacks

For a map, more details, as well as guidelines on giving a talk on Friday Hacks, see //nushackers.org/fridayhacks/ For more info on NUS Hackers, See: //nushackers.org/about For more Friday Hacks talks: //nushackers.org/

Friday Hacks #29, Sep 14

This week we have Sourabh Rao, an NUS student who programs for fun (and has done some impressive things outside of school!), and Michael Li, a Research Officer from the Data Analytics Department, National Business Analytics Center.

Please sign up at //bit.ly/friday-hacks

Location: COM1 SR3 [COM1/212] Time: 7pm - 9pm. Talks start promptly at 7pm. You are welcome to stay and mingle (or hack!) after the talks.
Pizza is served after the talks. Attendees are encouraged to have a light dinner before the event.

Talk 1: Crawling and sentiment analysis: practical hacks with Python (Sourabh Rao, NUS Student)

Talk Description: I'll be talking on sentiment analysis, the theoretical nitty gritty of it and how it can be used in practical projects. I'll also be introducing a project I am working on to build a pandora like music player which uses the concept of sentiment analysis to build music libraries.

Prep: I’ll be starting from scratch. I assume a basic understanding of programming.

Speaker Profile: I am a freshman at NUS. I was a SRP researcher at NUS during Junior College and worked on genetic algorithms. I founded a profitable question answering portal called sqare. I was also fortunate to have spent a quarter at MIT during which I was exposed to ideas of sentiment analysis. Currently, I am an engineering intern at semantics3.

Talk 2: Making Sense: Introduction to working with ontologies (Michael Li, Research Officer, Data Analytics Dept, NBAC)

Talk Description: Ontologies are a different way to store data and knowledge as compared to the conventional model of using databases. This talk and hands-on session will be an introduction to using ontologies and demonstration of why we use it (and like it!)

Speaker profile: Michael Li is a research engineer in Institute for Infocomm Research whose work is in semantic technology and focused towards the healthcare industry.

He graduated from University of Melbourne with a Biomedical Engineering Degree specializing in Bioinformatics.

Please sign up at //bit.ly/friday-hacks

 

Friday Hacks #28, Sep 7

This week we have Thomas Gorissen, web developer and organiser behind JSCamp, and Tan Liling, an NTU graduate student working on word sense disambiguation.
We are making one change this week:
  • We are going to serve pizza after the talks, not before, to encourage more relaxed mixing with speakers. Attendees are encouraged to eat a light dinner before the event.
So the updated event details:
Location: COM1 SR3 [COM1/212] Time: 7pm - 9pm. Talks start promptly at 7pm. You are welcome to stay and mingle (or hack!) after the talks.
Please sign up at //bit.ly/friday-hacks
Talk 1: The technology behind the online advertisement machine (Thomas Gorissen, JSCamp organizer)
Talk Description:
You're visiting websites that show display advertisements many times a day and every time, millions of times a day, a complex real-time process involving hundreds of requests to different servers of different companies is triggered. In an effort to show you the most valuable message at the time of your visit, your ad-impression opportunity is literally traded in the background in a way that closely mimics a financial stock market. It is a massive, for the consumer invisible machine, involving the biggest internet companies, you've never heard of.
Prep:
A basic understanding of the way the internet works (web programming, servers, clients, requests, cookies) is required.
Speaker profile:
Thomas is a web developer 14 years in the making. He has lived and helped startups in Germany, Panama, Singapore and the US with his experience in technology, architecture and design. Currently he is working for ADZ, the online audience marketplace for Asia (//www.adzcentral.com) as Technologist. As the first employee he helped design and build ADZ advertisement technology stack from the ground up.
Talk 2: Do computers REALLY understand the human language? (Tan Liling, NTU Graduate Student)
Talk Description:
A brief introduction on Natural Language Processing, giving an overview of the science behind the technology that uses NLP. The talk is meant to be introductory and giving a brief overview of the different small parts that makes an NLP application like Siri works. Nothing in-depth will be discussed and if necessary more can be explained off- the presentation or during the QnA.
Speaker Profile:
I am a graduate student from NTU working on my thesis on word sense disambiguation. I deal with mostly the "knowledge" side of NLP rather than the "speech" side, so I do know a little from the courses I've taken on speech technology ( voice recognition, synthesizers, speech corpora, and processing) but I know just enough to talk about it generally. What I do is mostly on letting the computer understand grammar and meaning of human language, sometimes it involves applying some machine-learning techniques and statistics but most times, it is to think of novel ways to impart knowledge to computers.
Please sign up at //bit.ly/friday-hacks
For a map, more details, as well as guidelines on giving a talk on Friday Hacks, see //nushackers.org/fridayhacks/ For more info on NUS Hackers, See: //nushackers.org/about For more Friday Hacks talks: //nushackers.org/

Friday Hacks #27, Aug 31

This week we have Angad Singh, here to talk about the research he did while at Stanford for NOC, and Michael Caronna, a professional photographer who built an automated motion-tracking camera stand.

Talk 1: Mininet: a network in your laptop (Angad Singh, NUS Student)

Talk Description: Multiple network paths are available today on one computer or mobile device - such as WiFi, 3G and LTE. The idea is to use all of them simultaneously to provide bandwidth aggregation (a fat pipe).

Also, I will be demonstrating this with the help of an open-source network emulator called MiniNet currently being developed at Stanford.

Speaker profile: I am an Year-4 Computer Engineering Undergraduate and I just got back from NUS Overseas College at Silicon Valley. I was the ex-president of NUSHackers.

I took classes at Stanford and interned at Skype. Apart from that I also worked for peanuts in a Stanford Networking lab for 2 months where I did this research after taking the course on Advanced Computer Networks.

Talk 2: From zero to motion tracking camera stand (Michael Caronna, Professional Photographer)

Talk Description: As a photographer covering sports and other subjects I have often used remotely triggered still cameras to allow me take pictures from angles impossible for a person to be in or to shoot from multiple angles simultaneously. About a year ago I began to wish for a cheap “smart” remote camera that would follow the action as it moved around the field. Not having any background in programming or electronics, I began looking around to web and found a bunch of paintball fanatics who had made autonomous turrets that would shoot opponents. Using that as my inspiration and proof that it was possible, I kept googling and eventually decided to do my project on a PC running Ubuntu using OpenCV, Python, the PlayStation Eye camera and the Arduino. Over the course of a year I studied Python and Arduino (attending Arduino classes at Hackerspace Singapore) and stealing heavily from online sources I cobbled together a pan-tilt head that will track specific colors and point an SLR at the target.

Prep: No prerequisites, but I’m happy to distribute the Python source for the hue tracking and servo movements (such as it is – it’s amateurish code) to anyone who wants it. Dependencies are Python 2.7, and OpenCV. To make it work as-is you need a webcam and either an Arduino or comment out the servo movement portion of the code. Being hackers I suppose everyone will be wearing black T-shirts, but if you want to have a little fun and be tracked by the camera wear a bright, solid-color shirt.

Speaker Profile:
Mike is a news photographer and photo editor from the U.S. based in Singapore. He has previously worked in Hong Kong, Australia and Japan shooting all kinds of news including sport, politics, business, and entertainment. Mike discovered Python and the Arduino a year ago and since then has been making a nuisance of himself at the Hackerspace Singapore.

Remember to sign up at: //bit.ly/friday-hacks

Location: COM1 SR3 [COM1/212] Time: 6pm - 9pm Free pizza and mingling @ 6pm, talks start at 7pm. You are welcome to stay and mingle (or hack!) after the talks.Please sign up at //bit.ly/friday-hacks

For a map, more details, as well as guidelines on giving a talk on Friday Hacks, see //nushackers.org/fridayhacks/ For more info on NUS Hackers? See: //nushackers.org/about For more Friday Hacks talks: //nushackers.org/

Friday Hacks #26, Aug 24

This week we have Shaw Chian, co-founder of Flocations, and Ruiwen Chua from Hackerspace.sg with us.

Remember to sign up at //bit.ly/friday-hacks

Talk 1: Javascript Without Frameworks: Why we did it, and how painful it was (Shaw Chian, Flocations)

Talk Description: While there are many javascript frameworks to choose from for building web applications these days, the technical team at Flocations.com is not using any of those for their travel discovery site. For the talk at NUS Hackers, I’d like to share the rational behind our choice, the problems we faced in the absence of a javascript framework, and how we worked around those problems.

Speaker Profile: Shaw Chian is one of the founders of Flocations, a travel startup based in Singapore. Prior to Flocations, Shaw Chian has been providing software solutions for VoIP providers that was used by ISPs and ITSPs.

Talk 2: Hacking hackers for fun and profit (Ruiwen Chua, Hackerspace.sg)

Talk Description: I intend to give a quick and dirty intro to AngularJS with examples (hopefully!) from the HSG HackDo management system. AngularJS is a Javascript/HTML framework from Google that massively simplifies the creation of dynamic and interactive web applications. In their own words, it’s a superheroic framework! It’s all in the naming, see? v1.0.1 — thorium-shielding, v1.0.0rc9 — eggplant-teleportation, v0.9.19 — canine-psychokinesis

Speaker Profile: I’ve always been interested in hacking little bits of tech together and when I discovered AngularJS, frontend web development suddenly became a lot cleaner to me. No more mucking about the DOM with Javascript and jQuery, or attempting to create HTML pages with Javascript; Angular was clean, simple and straightforward.

We first used AngularJS in an HTML5 iPad web app for schools, and I would now like to use it as part of of HackerspaceSG’s membership management system — and I need a few good hackers to help me.

Location: COM1 SR3 [COM1/212] Time: 6pm - 9pm Free pizza and mingling @ 6pm, talks start at 7pm. People may leave any time after the talks.

Please sign up at //bit.ly/friday-hacks

For a map, more details, as well as guidelines on giving a talk on Friday Hacks, see //nushackers.org/fridayhacks/ Who is NUS Hackers? See: //nushackers.org/about For more Friday Hacks talks: //nushackers.org/

Update: slides for Ruiwen’s talk available here: //thoughtmonkeys.com/slides/AngularJS/#/

Friday Hacks Talk April 13th - Introduction to an Agile Python!

We have talks by Owen Jones (from Google) and Andras Kristof on the 13th of April 2012. Feel free to spread the word—and the email—to hackers, coders, and anyone who might be interested but isn’t in the mailing list. Please note that registration is required.

Googol

Talk 1 : The Python Programming Language

Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to combine “remarkable power with very clear syntax”, and its standard library is large and comprehensive. Fans of Python use the phrase “batteries included” to describe the standard library, which covers everything from asynchronous processing to zip files. The language itself is a flexible powerhouse that can handle practically any problem domain. Build your own web server in three lines of code. Build flexible data-driven code using Python’s powerful and dynamic introspection capabilities and advanced language features such as meta-classes, duck typing and decorators.

Talk 2 : Resource Management Games — Starcraft II vs. Agile Development

Agile software development is a group of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, a time-boxed iterative approach, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. It is a conceptual framework that promotes foreseen interactions throughout the development cycle.

Speaker Profiles

Owen Jones, Customer Solutions Engineer, Google Singapore Owen works with various Google technologies and APIs, such as Google Maps, YouTube brand channels and AdWords API. Prior to joining Google in 2010, Owen worked in the UK and Australia as a software developer, building websites and web applications using technologies such as Python, JavaScript and HTML/CSS.

Andras Kristof is the VP of Engineering at Viki More: //sg.linkedin.com/in/andraskristof

Date: 13th April 2012 Time: 6pm Venue: Seminar room 2 @ University Town. map: //bit.ly/HoKFBW

Our regular Friday Hacks will commence after the talks. During the hacking session, you are free to work on your personal projects — or even homework — with fellow programmers around to help if you need an extra pair of eyes

Registration

Registration link : //bit.ly/HoKRBa

Registration is required so that we may tailor the talk to the expected audience, as well as prepare the necessary logistics. Refreshments will be served at 6pm to all registered attendees.

Get Yourself A UNIX Today!

In conjunction with our self-styled ‘Linux week’, Professor Brown gave a cool talk on the Unix philosophy at Friday Hacks earlier tonight (slides available here). We at NUS Hackers would like to take this opportunity to encourage everyone to install a *nix flavour, for experience, fun, and indoctrination in programming kung-fu.

If you were around tonight, you’d have heard Professor Brown say two things:

  1. "The industry expects Unix experience. You'd be surprised how many places use Unix and expect you to know Unix. If you don't know it, well ... <pause> ... then it's our fault for not teaching you while you're at school, but then also you should learn it!"
  2. "Every student should have command line experience. I'm always very surprised by students who don't: 'oh you don't compile in the shell? ... errrgghh.'" <makes a face>
The easiest way to give a *nix system a shot (other than buying a Mac, that is) [1] is to download and use Virtual Box. Virtual Box is virtualization software, which means it allows you to install and run another operating system on your current machine. Alternatively, get VMWare Player, also free, though not Open Source.

After you’ve done that, download and use one of the following *nix distributions:

  • Ubuntu - Ubuntu is a newbie-friendly Linux distribution that believes in pretty visuals and graphical ease-of-use above all else. (I say this slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it is certainly a good distro to start with.)
  • Linux Mint - Another newbie friendly Linux distribution. It is in fact probably the best Linux system for newbies. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu.
  • Fedora - Fedora is the general-purpose Linux distribution provided by Red Hat software. It's the operating system Red Hat uses to experiment with cutting-edge packages and operating system approaches, before folding the good ideas into Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
  • Arch Linux - Arch is the distribution of choice for many coreteam members here at NUS Hackers. It is a highly customizable, barebones Linux distro, with a focus of giving the user complete control over what he or she wants in his/her operating system. This distro is not for the new user; expect spending months customizing Arch to your liking.
  • OpenBSD - is interesting: it is a BSD-descended flavour of Unix with a focus on security above all. It has had very few known security holes or exploits, and is exported with cryptography. This allows it to take cryptographic approaches towards fixing security problems.
Download a flavour of *nix today and give it a try!

[1] OSX is based on BSD, and has many of the same command line tools that *nix distros enjoy. Open terminal.app and you’ll see bash. OSX is not, however, open source.

Friday Hacks Talk 30th Mar - Philosophy of Unix

In conjunction with Linux Week, we have Professor Michael Brown with us!

Talk details:

While Unix is best known as an operating system, the founding fathers of Unix developed it around an entire philosophy on how software should be developed. In this talk, Dr Brown will discuss the history leading up to the development of Unix as well as some of the underlying principles and practices that make up the Unix Philosophy.

Speaker Profile:

Michael S. Brown obtained his BS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky in 1995 and 2001 respectively.  He was a visiting PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1998-2000. Dr. Brown has held previous positions at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (2001-2004), California State University – Monterey Bay (2004-2005), and Nanyang Technological University (2005-2007). He is currently an Associate Professor and Assistant Dean (External Relations) in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore.
Dr. Brown regularly serves on the program committees for the major Computer Vision conferences (ICCV, CVPR, ECCV and ACCV) and is currently an Associate Editor for IEEE TPAMI. Dr. Brown received the HKUST Faculty Teaching Award (2002), the NUS Young Investigator Award (2008), the NUS Faculty Teaching Award (for AY08/09, AY09/10, AY10/11), and the NUS Annual Teaching Excellence Award (ATEA) for AY09/10.  His research interests include Computer Vision, Image Processing and Computer Graphics.

.....

- Location: Seminar Room 2, UTown Education Resource Centre (ERC) Level 2 - Free pizza and mingling @ 6pm - General hacking commences after talk - you're free to work on homework or personal projects, or ask for assistance from fellow programmers in attendance.

Do let us know if you are coming so that we can prepare enough food and space for everyone: //bit.ly/wEaPZn

Friday Hacks Talk 23rd Mar – Agile Dev + GSoC Information Session

Talk #1 - "Agile Software Development Practices" (by Benjamin Scherrey, Proteus Tech)
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If you're interested in doing software or app development for business or pleasure, then this talk by Benjamin Scherrey will be useful to you :)

Talk details:

Benjamin Scherrey will demonstrate how you can do exploratory development and receive real-time feedback using python. This is made possible by a radical set of tools that performs automated test driven development (an Agile technique) in a web interface. Benjamin will also provide some pointers on how you can re-create the environment as well.
Speaker Profile:
Benjamin Scherrey (@proteusguy) is founder & Chief Systems Architect of Proteus Technologies (//proteus-tech.com/), a company founded to demonstrate how one can create innovative software in Asia by Asians. By providing true technical career paths (which are practically non-existent in Asia) and implementing Agile concepts throughout every aspect of the company he did just that and now works diligently to help foster the technical startup scene in SEAsia. (Read more...)

.....

Talk #2 - "Google Summer of Code Information Session" (by Tay Ray Chuan & GSoC Seniors)
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If you're interested in applying for Google Summer of Code this year, the first-hand advice from the past participants will come in handy :)

Talk details:

For people who want to do the Google Summer of Code this year, help is arriving. During the info session, seniors who have done the GSoC will share their experiences and tips in a series of very short presentations to help you with your application.

Speaker Profile:

Tay Ray Chuan is a software enthusiast and student, with interests as disparate as history and philosophy. In between ploughing through his tutorials, he hacks randomly, mainly in Python and JavaScript. In addition to working on open-source, he hopes to give back to the community through his involvement in NUS Hackers. (https://github.com/rctay)

.....

- Location: Seminar Room 2, UTown Education Resource Centre (ERC) Level 2 - Free pizza and mingling @ 6pm - General hacking commences after talk - you're free to work on homework or personal projects, or ask for assistance from fellow programmers in attendance.
Do let us know if you are coming so that we can prepare enough food and space for everyone: //bit.ly/wEaPZn

Friday Hacks Talk 16th Mar – The Mathematics of Luxury

Talk #1 - “The Mathematics of Luxury” (by Dr Shaun Martin, Applied Cognitive Science CEO)

 

This week, we've got the CEO of Applied Cognitive Science here with an interesting topic.
Talk details:
What exactly are people buying, when they buy a Lamborghini, Rolex, or Louis Vuitton? This is a nontrivial question: US$1.3 trillion was spent on luxury goods and services in 2010, or 3.7% of global consumer spending.
In this talk Shaun will start by showing that the standard economics assumption of rational behaviour doesn't apply to luxury goods. However, by replacing the economists' assumption with discoveries from cognitive science, and formulating in appropriate mathematical terms, it is possible replicate and predict the structure of luxury goods markets. He will show how he and his colleagues do this, using a combination of cognitive science, mathematics, and computational modeling.
Speaker Profile:
Dr Shaun Martin is CEO and Chief Scientist of Applied Cognitive Science: a strategy and innovation research firm he co-founded in 2000. Prior to founding Applied Cognitive Science, Shaun worked in academia: holding positions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Shaun holds Master's and Bachelor's degrees from University of Warwick, and a Doctorate in Mathematics from University of Oxford. He has delivered invited lectures on his research at Stanford, Berkeley, Geneva, ETH Zurich, Oxford, MIT, NYU, Columbia, and Cambridge.
Applied Cognitive Science was founded to apply new discoveries in the cognitive and behavioural sciences to questions of strategy, innovation, and public policy. It achieves this by combining these discoveries with proprietary research in complex systems mathematics and computational modeling.
- Location: Seminar Room 2, UTown Education Resource Centre (ERC) Level 2 - Free pizza and mingling @ 6pm - General hacking commences after talk - you're free to work on homework or personal projects, or ask for assistance from fellow programmers in attendance.
Do let us know if you are coming so that we can prepare enough food and space for everyone: //bit.ly/wEaPZn
Talk #2 - "Adding GNU Screen to your Workflow" (by Sivamani Varun, Semantics3 Founder)
This week, we've also got a founder of Semantics3 here with us :)
Talk details: Do you do a lot of work on the command-line through SSH? Are you looking at ways to increase your productivity while working through SSH? Varun will be talking about a really cool tool called GNU Screen which makes working on the command line on remote terminals a real pleasure. It will be a hands-on introduction, where Varun will demonstrate some of its major features.
Pre-talk Prep Tips:
It would be great if you have GNU Screen installed on your laptop or remote server before the talk.
Speaker Profile:
Sivamani Varun is the co-founder of Semantics3. He is a self-confessed command-line junkie who spends most of his time hacking away on Vim within a GNU Screen session. Some of his quirks include a passion for prime numbers (all his contact numbers are prime) and an interest in art films. He holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering from the National University of Singapore.
 

Friday Hacks Talk 9th Mar - FREE Nokia Lumia 710 Giveaway + 2 Talks

“A Technical Introduction to the Windows Phone Platform” by Mani Krishnamurthy, Nokia EDX Technical Manager

“Sync, Sink, Sync” by Mohit Singh Kanwal, NUS Student

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This week we have a Nokia Lumia 710 giveaway, courtesy of Nokia Singapore :D It will be given out via lucky draw during the talk itself.

. . . . .

"A Technical Introduction to the Windows Phone Platform"
Talk Details: Mani Krishnamurthy: "My talk will be an introduction to development on the Windows Phone platform, as well as about the ecosystem and the current opportunities in it for local developers."
Speaker Profile:
Mani Krishnamurthy: "Currently working as a Technical Evangelist at Nokia Singapore, I work in the team that is responsible for growing the ecosystem of developers and applications in whole of Southeast Asia. I have been doing mobile development right from my college days in 2006; and since then created and published several games and mobile apps. I passed out from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and I am pretty active on twitter @manikantan_k."

. . . . .

"Sync, Sink, Sync"

Talk details:
Mohit shall be talking about his contribution to the Mozilla Open Source project, specifically towards Thunderbird, the email client which happens to be now the default email client on Ubuntu Unity :) and the mozilla calendar project. He will discuss about issues related to syncing which was the functionality added to Lightning 1.0  official release of the Mozilla Calendar extension. He will be covering issues to look out for when writing for client server syncing services. Also he will consider the syncing issues encountered during a project to port dropbox like syncing service for IVLE.

Pre-talk Prep Tips:
More details here https://github.com/creativepsyco/unofficial-dropbox/ and //wiki.nus.edu.sg/display/ivlefilesync/

Speaker Profile:
Mohit is an open source enthusiast who loves building applications and getting things done. He participated in GSoC 2011 and is now a core team member of the Mozilla Calendar Project. He has worked on varied technologies and is highly interested in learning new stuff and discovering something new everyday.

. . . . .

- Location: Seminar Room 2, UTown Education Resource Centre (ERC) Level 2 - Free pizza and mingling @ 6pm - General hacking commences after talk - you're free to work on homework or personal projects, or ask for assistance from fellow programmers in attendance.

Do let us know if you are coming so that we can prepare enough food and space for everyone: //bit.ly/wEaPZn
 

 

Friday Hacks Talk 2nd Mar - Building responsive frontends with Backbone.js

We're back from the Semester Break with 2 talks this Friday Hacks :)
- Location: Seminar Room 2, UTown ERC Level 2 - Free pizza and mingling @ 6pm - General hacking commences after talk - you're free to work on homework or personal projects, or ask for assistance from fellow programmers in attendance.

Do let us know if you are coming so that we can prepare enough food and space for everyone: //bit.ly/wEaPZn For map, more details, as well as guidelines on giving a talk on Friday Hacks, see //nushackers.org/fridayhacks/
Talk details: It's very easy and tempting, when working on javascript web apps, to come up with a 10000 lines worth of spaghetti jQuery callbacks and DOM manipulations that seem to just scrape by & work. That is, until you make that one small, tiny little change that couldn't possibly affect anything, and BOOM!-everything breaks.

Restore your sanity by giving your webapp a backbone to rest on with backbone.js (ohhh the puns, if you see them), a small 600-loc library that provides a basic model/view/router foundation to build upon. I'll be giving a quick walk-through of most of these features.

Take a look at some amazing real world use cases like LinkedIn mobile, DocumentCloud, Flow and more at //backbonejs.org/#examples.
Pre-talk Prep:
You should be able to understand basic Javascript. Recommended resource-'Javascript: The Good Parts' by Douglas Crockford. Bonus points if you understand Coffeescript

Speaker Profile:

Divyanshu Arora is a CS undergrad at NUS. He likes to wast-AHEM-spend his time working on random projects. He recently returned from NOC Israel, and is also one of the organizers for this year's Startup Roots Singapore fellowship programme.
Please register so that we can guarantee enough food and space for everyone: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dF9MenBRdE8wZ2pJN2M3TnpkNGFZenc6MA

Friday Hacks #8

Hi guys,

This week’s Friday Hacks is at UTown Seminar Room 2.

I apologize for the late announcement — I got back from an overseas trip earlier this week, was jetlagged, and there was some communication breakdown in that the coreteam didn’t book a room or secure a speaker until it was too late in the week.

So we’ll have to make-do, I suppose.

In summary: Time: 7-10pm as usual, 4th November Location: Seminar Room 2 ERC @ UTown Agenda: An informal presentation on ebook formats and technical challenges in digital publishing by Cedric (yours truly)

A concise summary of the talk: A Tour Of Digital Publishing Concerns. This talk will give a brief overview of the various ebook formats (EPUB2, EPUB3, .mobi, KF8, MPub) and then proceed to cover the various technical problems in digital publishing. Such problems include ebook distribution (in particular ebook distribution in poor countries, i.e. how do you distribute 100,000 ebooks to a whole region with OLPCs, some solar power or car batteries, but no Internet?), the problem of marginalia (is it possible to have format-agnostic notes in the margins of ebooks? Why is that effort important?), and the challenge of achieving the ’networked book'.

And … that’s about it. See you there!

Yours, Cedric, NUS Hackers President

Friday Hacks #7

Notice: the NUS Hackers site continues to be black for this week. Last week, just as we were about to change it back, we received news of another passing - John McCarthy.
Time: 7.30-10.00
Location: University Town, ERC, Seminar Room 3
Agenda:
In memory of John McCarthy, father of Lisp and AI pioneer, we'll be having a short introduction to Scheme, a dialect of Lisp. Anyone who's well-versed with Lisp stuff (Common Lisp, Clojure, S-expressions, continuations) are welcome to share.

Friday Hacks #6

For this week’s Friday Hacks, Steven Goh, a 4th year CompSci student will be coming down to share with us “Rapid Web Development the right (Pythonic) way”

(I realize NUS Hackers has been rather Python-biased lately, so in the future, if any of you know other languages (Ruby, Haskell, etc) and want to come share your knowledge with us, by all means just email me :)
Time: 7.00-10.00
Location: University Town, ERC Seminar Room 2
Agenda: Steven will be sharing on Pythonic rapid web development for an hour, and then we'll be going on with our hackathon.
I'll also post an update here on Download@NUS if I get something concrete ready by tomorrow.
Notice: the NUS Hackers site will be black till Thursday (a full week) to mourn the passing of Dennis Ritchie, a giant in computing.

Friday Hacks #4 Recap

Last week’s Friday Hacks saw a visit from Ong Guan Sin from NUS ComCen, in addition to the usual hackathon. He had a proposal for us:

Friday Hacks #4

The first proposal he had was for NUS Hackers to maintain Download@NUS, a mirror for Linux distributions in Singapore. This is almost certainly going to happen, after the coreteam discusses and makes public an organization scheme. The next two proposals were slightly more interesting:

Proposal 2: setting up a site for the hosting and sharing of Scientific Data. Guan Sin said that ComCen could give us significant resources to implement this, as data sets from Science regularly reach into the terabytes (at minimum). He also suggested something more student-focused, but related: a file sharing site for NUS Students, sitting on the NUS network (sort-of like a ‘Rapidshare’@NUS). Of course, we immediately asked about managing copyright issues. Guan Sin said that would be an interesting problem for us to solve, and that we would need to figure out how to solve it before making the service available to students.

Proposal 3: an NUS Hackers private cloud. We’re putting that on hold while we work on organizational kinks, but it’s good to know that the option exists for the club to tap.

Friday Hacks #4

The rest of the Friday Hacks consisted of the Weekly Hackathon as well as a group discussion on the NUS Hackers cluster building project. I did a quick skeleton of the file-sharing app on GitHub, and others worked on a variety of projects (excluding homework): an open source card game, the Android SDK, and a program in Silverlight. Pics below:

Friday Hacks #4 Friday Hacks #4 Friday Hacks #4 Friday Hacks #4

Special thanks to Ong Guan Sin and Yung Shing Gene, both from NUS Computer Center, for coming down and spending some time with us.

Friday Hacks #5

This week’s Friday Hacks would be held at Seminar Room 3, at UTown Education Resource Centre. We don’t have a speaker booked, so if you’d like to give an informal talk please leave us a note at the mailing list.

Full Details:

Location: UTown, Education Resource Center, 2nd floor, Seminar Room 2 Time: 7pm-10pm Agenda: Weekly Hackathon, as usual. :)

As a reminder: LadyPy would be held in the room next to ours. So if you have Python kungfu and you’d like to help, just drop by. See you there!

Friday Hacks #4

I’m really sorry for the late shoutout on this - tomorrow’s Friday Hacks would be held at Seminar Rooms 1 and 2 at the Tembusu Learning Lobe. (We were late with this because there was some difficulty securing the rooms).

The Tembusu Learning Lobe is the building next to Starbucks/the ERC, if you don’t already know. Quick details:

Time: 7pm-10pm Location: Seminar Rooms 1 and 2 at the Tembusu Learning Lobe Agenda: 1 hour informal talk by Ong Guan Sin, Associate Director of Innovation Development at NUS ComCen on a proposal for Download@NUS (more on that in a bit), and our usual hacking.

I know this is the mid-term week, but I really think you should come and hear Guan Sin out for the first hour. He’s proposing to give NUS Hackers members (meaning: you) terabytes and terabytes of server space, and lots of bandwidth, in order to set up and maintain a download hub in NUS (download here means maintaining a mirror to all the linux distros, as well as perhaps making available large data-sets from Science). In exchange, he wants us to maintain the service, as well as possibly have one or two people to train as sysadmins.

This is a huge opportunity for those of you who are interested in messing around with servers, especially ones with lots of space, and on big pipes. And you may be part of a community of people helping out.

Please come, hang out, listen to his proposal, and hack.

Friday Hacks #3

This week’s Friday Hacks will be held at the Global Learning Room at the Education Resource Centre in UTown. Details are as follows:

Location: UTown, Education Resource Center, 2nd floor, Global Learning Room Time: 7pm-10pm Agenda: Informal talk by Vinnie Lauria (he says he'd love it if it were mostly QnA), and informal hacking.

We’ll be having Vinnie Lauria (@vlauria) from SV (Silicon Valley) speaking on the upcoming SuperHappyDevHouse that he’s helped to bring from SV, as well as on hacking and entrepreneurship. Vinnie sold his startup Lefora.com not too long ago, and is now touring Asia (as well as checking Singapore’s startup scene).

Like James’ talk on PCB fab last week, it’ll be an informal session, so people who want to hack may do so at the back of the room.

We will also be doing a round of quick intros and what you’re planning on working on at the start of the session. See you there!

Friday Hacks #2 Recap

Yesterday’s Friday Hacks was huge. We had a turnout that stuffed Seminar Room 9, and when we had both the hacking and the speaking going on, people had barely any tables to sit at.

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This week we had James Yong over to give an informal talk on PCB etching for the first hour. The way we did it was that we had people who wanted to hack sit at the back (with earphones, and laptops, and so on), and people who wanted to listen-in sit in the front. A number of electrical engineering students came by just for the talk.

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Later on in the session, we had Junhao, a linuxNUS alumni, come down to brief some members on building the cluster (more information here)

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Information about the PCB Talk

The slides are available for download here, and James says that the following two items are available for purchase from him:
  • A general purpose microcontroller / NXT expansion (customizable to desired use like the Arduino)
  • IR sensor array

Anyone who’s interested in buying the above may contact James at and Tay Wenbin at

(Note: the above two email addresses are obfuscated by Javascript, so you’ll need to turn your JS on to see it).

The rest of the Friday Hacks went smoothly, though with several bugs:

  • There weren't enough tables at the peak of the event.
  • People seem to like having food around - the free bread we got disappeared in under a minute
  • Informal tech talks are good, though we're still not sure how to reconcile the hacking and the speaking in the same room. Perhaps, with better table and chair placement, things would be better.
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Lastly, while it was good that we could get people passionate about programming together in the same room, what wasn’t so cool was the fact that we barely knew the names of the other people, and what each person was working on. For instance, I sat down late in the event only to find myself next to a first year student who was writing a Lisp interpreter. For fun. That’s the kind of cool thing we should all share about.

So maybe the next Friday Hacks would have us distribute name

Friday Hacks #2

Update! Venue is now changed to Seminar Room 9, on the second floor of the Education Resource Centre, UTown

Will be held at the Collaborative Commons at UTown. That’s on the first floor of the Education Resource Center (above Starbucks), next to the PC Commons. We’ll be having James Yong over to give an informal, one hour talk about PCB etching, and have gotten the word out to a couple of members to come and listen in.

The rest of us may choose to listen in, or otherwise would be perfectly alright with working on your own stuff, with earphones. We’ve also set up a wiki to get new beginners started on Friday Hacks - be it for their homework, new projects, or other stuff.

Details:

Location: Collaborative Commons edit: venue is now changed to Seminar Room 9, Education Resource Centre at University Town. Time: 7.00 - 10.00pm (you may leave at any time, of course). Agenda: As usual, bring what you'd like to work on. And listen in to James's presentation for the first hour if you're interested.

See you there!

PS: The slides from last week’s Welcome Tea may be found here.

Friday Hacks #1

So we had our first Friday Hacks on the 26th of August, at the UTown Mac Common’s largest meeting room. We had 2 people doing their CS2103 assignment, 2 people learning Android, 1 person reading up on the iOS SDK, one person doing “random shit” (e.g.: piping his webcam input to mplayer, and output as ASCII Unicode [thanks, Vikram], on Arch), one guy learning Haskell, and one guy working on his FYP - which was building an underwater modem (using sound to transmit signals, of all things).

There were some bugs, as expected. The room’s display unit didn’t work properly, and the place turned out to be too small for all the people that eventually turned out. We’ll be looking for another place on campus where we can bring our own food and drinks.

That said, it was great fun. And there were a couple of things that went right: we had a whiteboard, so anyone could give an impromptu presentation in the middle of the session (I did one on Django, as a response to a question). Plus the round table format made it really easy to talk and share with everyone in attendance. Last, but not least - we had another whiteboard displaying ‘NUS HACKERS, FRIDAY HACKS’, which we pointed outwards from the all-glass meeting room, and waved at random passer-bys (although, I’ll admit, the majority of which were girls).

Things to work on: locate an alternative venue, one that:

  • Allows food and drinks
  • Has a whiteboard
  • Has a projector or wall-unit of some sort
  • Is still fairly accessible to students living outside

There’s no Friday Hacks next week, as we instead have the Welcome Tea. Details are as follows:

Date: 2nd September 2011 Time: 6.30pm to 8.30-ish pm. Venue: COM1 SR3 [COM1/212]. Agenda: We want to keep this to about an hour. Alumni will be speaking, the current president will explain some administrative stuff, and then we'll all break for talking, free pizza and drinks.

See you there!