So as some people know, I built Instasyncer a while ago, partially for fun, but mainly because I needed it. Long story short, Instasyncer is this awesome (Note: I’m extremely biased about this) site that lets you sync your Instagram photos to Dropbox in real time. Really. You upload onto Instagram, within minutes, it is in your Dropbox folder. You have to sign up for Instasyncer though (Yes, I had a guy who asked me why his photos weren’t syncing when he didn’t have an account). Does mainly one other thing, which explains the title, but that’s for the later part of this post.

I built the whole thing on PHP/Codeigniter, and used MongoDB for the database. The MVP was hacked together in about 26 hours, although the better part of the 26 hours was spent on doing other stuff (like sleeping, talking to friends). Did all the OAuth stuff myself, just for kicks, and basically did every part of the website myself, for kicks of course. Instasyncer uses the Bootstrap framework for the front end, and I didn’t really dabble much in Javascript. Used a bit of jquery here and there to achieve the dashboard loading, and the lightbox gallery, and lastly the feedback system. Tech stack covered.

So, nothing too fanciful, it’s a really simple app, and I have absolutely no fucking clue why the boss wanted me to write a blog post on this. But since he insisted, I thought I might add something that all geeks might want to know. Building stuff is cool. But we don’t think so. But I’m here to tell you right now that others think it’s cool. And it does help when you are trying to impress a girl (guy, if you are a girl. it actually does work. story here) ;)

That last sentence caught your attention right? =P

Ok awesome. Now that I have your attention, this was what happened. My girlfriend was quite impressed with the fact I had actually wrote a web app to solve a personal pain point (I think), and when she mentioned that she would like an easy way to view her Instagram photos on her computer screen, well, I guess didn’t she expected me to roll that feature out in a few hours. She was impressed, and touched that I actually coded a feature that she only said she would like to have, and I had no intention of doing in the first place.

So, see, coding does have it’s perks. Now, I can’t wait to see what apps you guys create over the next few weeks :) And let us know what you have done so that we can share the love.

(Disclaimer: This worked for me. May not work for you or the target you have in mind.)

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: http://sg.linkedin.com/in/andraskristof

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

Coming Good Friday (6th April), we have two talks by Abishek and Andy. Despite it being a public holiday, our Friday Hacks will go on unimpeded and because it is Good Friday, we are giving away a free ergonomic keyboard (worth $80), that will ensure you aren’t limited by your hands getting tired after long hours of coding :P (You need to register to be eligible to win the keyboard and of course you must also be present at the Friday Hacks to qualify for this).

Talk 1:
“Ruby for Soul of Data Nerds” by Abishek Parolkar

Talk Details:
The term BigData is associated to anything where scale of the data is part of the problem. Today’s internet companies (Youtube,Facebook,ViKi etc) face challenges surrounding analysis and management of this data.
In this talk Abhishek is going to show you how people solved these problems and built analytics systems all with Ruby and related technologies.

Talk 2:
“Erlang… and you thought Ericsson only made phones!” by Andy Marks

Talk Details:
Erlang is a programming language used to build massively scalable soft real-time systems with requirements on high availability. Some of its uses are in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging. Erlang’s runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. It was designed by Ericsson to support distributed, fault-tolerant, soft-real-time, non-stop applications. It supports hot swapping, so that code can be changed without stopping a system.

Speaker Profiles

Abishek Parolkar is responsible for Data & Analytics products at viki.com. He is Founder/Evangelist of BigData.SG.
More : http://sg.linkedin.com/in/parolkar

Andy Marks is the Technical Principal at ThoughtWorks Singapore.
More : http://www.linkedin.com/in/andymarks

Register here so that we can prepare enough food and space for everyone, not to mention to pick the lucky winner of the keyboard
http://bit.ly/wEaPZn

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

The NUS Hackers are proud to present a premier quiz competition that’s targeted at computing students!

Simply solve 3 questions to win an iPad 3.

They are guaranteed fun brainteasers, so give them a try. You might be able to solve them and win an iPad 3!

http://nushackers.org/hackywin

We gave three programming questions to people, all of which required solutions that worked under a minute and dealt with all cases to be correct. Here are the questions:

Problem 1: Dr. Black has been murdered. Detective Jill must determine the murderer, crime scene, and weapon. There are six possible murderers (numbered 1 through 6, Professor Plum to Mrs. Peacock), 10 locations (1 through 10, ballroom to cellar), and six weapons (1 through 6, lead pipe to spanner). Detective Jill tries to guess the correct combination (there are 360 possibilities). Each guess is a theory. She asks her assistant, Jack, to confirm or refute each theory. When Jack refutes a theory, he reports that one of the guesses — murderer, location, or weapon — is wrong. The contestants are tasked with implementing a procedure that plays the role of Detective Jill. A brute-force program that tests all 360 theories earns a mere 50 points. An efficient program that tests no more than 20 theories earns an additional 50.

Problem 2: You have bins of capacity V, and n items each of size A_1≤i≤n. Find the minimum number of bins you need such that the total size of items in each bin does not exceed its capacity. Hint: this is a packing problem.

Problem 3: You have any number of N points on a table. Your goal is to write a program to connect all of them by lines of minimum total length in such a way that any two points is interconnected by line segments — either directly, or indirectly via other points and line segments.

If you think about it for a bit, you will realize that the connecting segments do not intersect each other except at the endpoints and thus form a tree.

This was, of course, and April Fool’s joke. When you clicked submit, you were redirected to this page, which explained the answers to the 3 problems (2 of which were unsolvable given the constraints).

Solution for Problem 2: Also known as the Bin Packing problem, this problem is combinatorially NP-hard. That said, optimal solutions to very large instances can be produced with sophisticated algorithms, and non-optimal ones also exist, such as the first fit algorithm. Because this question demands an optimal solution for all cases, no solution you provide will be correct given a 1 minute constrain and an arbitrary number of items, each of any size. (Well, if you had access to a supercomputer it might, but that’s a tad too much …) Read more at Wikipedia!

Solution for Problem 3: This problem, also known as the Steiner tree problem, is NP-hard for general N (which is exactly what this question was asking for)! In fact, an expression of this problem was among Karp’s original 21 NP-complete problems. As an interesting aside, computer science folklore has long held that soap film, applied to a series of glass plates may solve this problem where computers may not. See this paper for more.

We hope that you’ve spent some time thinking about Computer Science problems you might not have otherwise known of, and …

Happy April Fool’s!

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.

Speaker Profile:

We’ll be having a joint event with NES (the NUS Entrepreneurship Society) this Saturday (24th March 2012), as an experiment to see how many hackers we can inspire to work in or start a startup.

Time: 9.30am – 1pm
Location: HSS Auditorium

The context is web/tech startups, and the theme is: ‘here’s how I did it; you can do it too.’ We’re getting some hacker-founders, and NES has gotten some business-founders (all if them from tech startups) to come share their stories, and the format is TED-style 20 minute talks. After that everyone may approach the speakers and talk to them, one-on-one. And free lunch is provided. :)

We have four speakers:

• Lee Min Xuan, co-founder of PlayMoolah
• Meng Weng Wong, VC at JFDI, Perl hacker, founder Karmasphere, pobox, co-author of RFC4408 Sender Policy Framework
• Chavy Goh, founder of Saxxom
• Wong Hoong An, co-founder of HungryGoWhere

Register here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFBzRFktekxMN2FYZjVLWEk2QUYwTWc6MA

It’s always good to come meet these people and make contacts, in case you decide to do a startup in the future. ;-)

I hope to see you there!

Warmly,
Ced

PS: Our goal in this scenario is to build up to a stage where we can do Startup School, similar to what YCombinator does in the Valley – http://startupschool.org/

We’re not sure if this is a good idea yet, so we’re doing this small-scale event as a data gathering exercise. If you like free food, TED-style inspiring talks and some mingling with hackers who have started companies, do drop by and support this. :)

PPS: Feedback, post-event, is much welcomed.

Once I got over the initial revulsion, however, I realized that there is a small kernel of truth in the idea. The biggest dangers to digital freedom today is no longer with proprietary software (vs Free Software) — arguably, it is with addictive, networked applications that collect our data and hold us hostage to their services.

What do I mean by hostage? Well, if Facebook were to turn evil in the future, you do not really have any alternatives. You cannot say: “I will take my data and my friendships and go elsewhere” because the truth is there is no elsewhere. The alternative is to live without Facebook, which is to live without all the benefits that social networking has given humanity. This is not a real alternative after all.

Social networking services matter to us because the Internet is quickly becoming a defining social structure of our lives. If a regime were to crack down on its people, Facebook (or services like it) will likely be a tool used by that Government to control its people. More control makes regimes happy; the Gestapo would probably be very pleased with Facebook. It is, after all, the biggest directory of Jews on the planet.

But it’s not just crazy extreme scenarios that we should think about. You’ve probably heard of the dangers of giving your information to big companies. As an example, you might buy a wig from one website, and read a few articles about chemotherapy on another. Taken separately, these pieces of data say little about you. But if that data is combined, a person may deduce that you have cancer. This is a breach of privacy. It doesn’t matter if you don’t mind people knowing; you should still be given the choice to withhold that information.

Addictive, networked applications compound these dangers. You willingly give your data because the application is addictive, and the application is allowed access to different facets of your digital life because it is networked. And there’s no good way out of it.

Trying to get out of Facebook, for instance, is an interesting experience. When you attempt to delete your account, it throws pictures of friends in your face. “Tom, Bob, and Alice will miss you!” it says. This doesn’t strike me as good behavior. In fact, it smells slightly abusive, as if the service were holding you hostage with your friendships. If you wanted to, you should be given the choice of taking your data, your friendships, and your profile information with you. And you should be able to use that data in an alternative social network, the same way you may switch email providers or telephone providers, but still keep your your email address and phone number. This is fair to you as a consumer. You shouldn’t be punished because you are choosing to opt-out of Facebook. [1]

Stallman does not see this as something directly related to the Free Software movement. “What is the Free Software movement’s response to addictive, networked applications?” I asked. “That’s a meaningless question.” he said, “That has nothing at all to do with Free Software. It’s like asking ‘what does animal cruelty have to do with computers?’ I may have an issue with Google using non-Free Software, and that’s a valid Free Software objection. But the issue that you’ve described is a different thing entirely.”

And then, almost as an after-thought: “The answer to this is to store your own data, instead of storing it all on Facebook.”

Perhaps we need a Richard Stallman for the Internet.

When Stallman saw that proprietary software was threatening the hacker culture he grew up in, he responded by creating a credible alternative. It took him a few decades, and a couple hundred people, but he did it. Similarly, we may need someone to create a credible alternative to Facebook.

This is a lot harder than it seems. Stallman’s primary challenge when writing the GNU operating system was technical: it took a lot of man-months to write an OS from scratch. But if the resulting software was technically superior, hackers would eventually flock to use and contribute to it.

Writing an alternative to an addictive, networked application is a lot harder. Even if you were to produce a technically superior social network, you’d still have a hard time convincing people to join it. And why should they? Their friends are all on Facebook. This is what we call a network effect. [2]

You wouldn’t be done if you solved this problem, however. To truly protect Freedoms, you’d still have to come up with a protocol for importing and exporting friendships, and photos, and personal information. Ideally, you should find a way to convince Facebook to implement this protocol — something that’s going to be hard to do. And on top of that you’ll want to write a distributed social network that’s as bug-free as is feasibly possible.

The good news is that hackers are already making some headway on this problem. The open alternative to Twitter is Identi.ca. The open alternative to Facebook is Diaspora. If you are a hacker who cares about such things, you should probably consider contributing to both projects.

The bad news, however, is that neither have figured out a way to solve the network problem. While they are still busy building out their platforms, Facebook and Twitter are growing at tremendous rates. Every new user they add to their site increases the overall value of their network; making it harder for new social networks to challenge existing giants.

So the network problem is a big one. But I don’t think it’s impossible to solve. Paul Graham suggests that the right way to solve a big problem is to approach it indirectly. The way to create an alternative social network probably isn’t to say that you’ll create an alternative social network. The right way is to probably say that you’re building an about.me.

A Stallman For The Internet

Let me go back to the original assertion of this essay: “what if the Free Software movement is irrelevant?” It isn’t, of course, not entirely. But I do believe that the biggest threat to our digital freedoms is no longer in the realm of proprietary software. If anything, it lies now in the realm of unfree data.

My generation needs a Free Data movement, just as Stallman’s generation needed a Free Software movement. Free Software has arguably made the world a better place: better for programmers, and better for users. Free Data is but an extension: the same principles, applied to networked applications in a networked world. The challenges are different. The liberties at risk are the same.

Here’s one last thought: in 1983, people needed Stallman to show the way. We’ll probably need someone like that today. I hope we find him soon.

[1] A logical extension of this argument seems to be: social networking is so important that it should be a public utility. But that’s an idea for a different essay.

[2] To be exact, this is known as Metcalfe’s Law.