Hi everyone!

You’ve probably realized by now that we’ve got a 24 hour hackathon going on at COM1 Basement, on the 19th to 20th February (that’s this Sunday to Monday).

We know that some of you can’t join for a number of reasons – either you’re too busy, or you’re not sure you can build an app in 24 hours, or you have other things you need to do.

Well, we don’t mind!

We’d like to invite you to come drop by at any time during the hackathon! Come work on your own programming projects, come see how people build apps from scratch, enjoy the environment, the intensity, the free food, and the free coffee! [2]

Time: 19 Feb (Sunday) 1pm – 20th Feb (Monday) 1pm
Venue: COM1 Basement 1
Agenda: Bring your laptop, a programming project and some headphones!

And if you’d like, do come down to meet the judges and watch the conclusion of the Hackathon on Monday, at 12pm. We will have Erwan Macé from Google, Sarim Aziz from RIM, Professor Lee Wee Sun from SoC, plus a two other judges we’re awaiting confirmation from.

We hope to see you there!

(If you’d like to participate, you will have to pay the $10 registration fee to get a chance to compete for prizes.[1] We have raised enough money for food now, thanks to the kindness of our supporting organizations: IDA and NOC Odyssey Fund; so we’ll be using the money from registrations to fund future Friday Hacks, for the benefit of the NUS developer community).

[1] Currently prizes are:

• Blackberry Playbook
• Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000
• Samsung Galaxy Ace
• AWS Credits
• Private Github Accounts
• Free tickets to NUS Startup Weekend (worth $45 each)
• Nokia Goodie Bags

[2] We’re doing this because we want to have as many students as possible exposed to the idea that hacking is fun, is doable, and is beneficial for their future careers! So come join us!

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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:

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

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.

Can men attend? Yes, but you should be accompanied by an interested lady. Also, women are given priority.

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!

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.

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

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.

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 nametags, and do a short show-and-tell at the start or end of the session. And I realize we should also collect names — in a Google form, or something — before the event to see how large a room we would have to book. What do you guys think?