In another week, this junkyard of trash is supposed to turn into a float. No, not gold or other riches, I’m afraid. This is part of the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) rag and flag events. The float is the rag part of it. That rag is an understatement of the beauty of the floats and performances that will be put up students, one of the primary freshmen orientation activities in the new academic year. I’ve long held some reservations…
Just like I’ve been a long time Linux user, I’ve also used Solaris for a long time. Not the whole time throughout, no doubt. But I did have SunOS on what I could call my personal workstation back in the mid 1990s. That was SunOS 4. It was also known as Solaris 1.x back then, thanks to Sun Microsystems’ rebranding exercise. Yeah, that’s so long ago. We’re at Solaris 11 now. In the last year, my portfolio expanded to include…
Another oft asked question is about using a Mac in school. Specifically, in NUS, since that’s where I work. This post is a lot more focused on users in NUS, although I’m sure several points are going to be quite generic and be quite applicable to other university students. Or possibly even be general enough to be a useful insight to those simply wondering about using a Mac in a largely Windows-centric world. The usual concerns people have are about…
I get asked pretty often about which MacBook I’ll recommend. It’s difficult to give a good detailed verbal answer when I’m asked this question in person. So here’s a much more long-winded answer for anyone who cares to listen to my opinion on this topic. It’s pretty clear to me which MacBook is the right one to get, but it is not so easy to explain the reasons behind the choice. Let’s put this in some context. My focus here…
You thought that would be it. An appeal for support to help him get into school. Then it got exposed by the Sunday Times article yesterday that Alvin Wang, the person seeking support for his appeal to get into NUS, actually did get into NUS. In fact, he was offered a place in the School of Computing’s Information Systems course. But he did not want Information Systems, he wants Computer Science. All the theatrics about the online call for support…
This morning, you might have found yourself waking up to all the buzz about helping Alvin to get into school. School, here, being the School of Computing at NUS. Oh yes, that’s where I work, hence it caught my attention, a lot more than most other viral marketing campaigns might have. It got so much of my attention that I’m now actually writing a blog post about it. What is this buzz about? Well, Alvin launched his website www.helpalvingetintoschool.com to seek…
It was Climate Action Day at NUS yesterday. This year, it’s also more commonly known as the Day of No Rubbish Bins. That’s because the organizers, for the strangest and most inane reasons, felt that rubbish bins have something to do with climate. The action this year was to remove all (or most) rubbish bins around campus, and this is supposed to create awareness about our climate and environment. Yeah, right. It is working, because we’re now all so indignant…
I recently found myself leading an application system project: CodeCrunch. This is an online system for automated assessment of programming tasks. It is designed to help students learn computer programming by providing a web-based system to retrieve programming tasks, submit program solutions, perform automatic assessment, and obtain feedback of testing results. CodeCrunch originally began as a student Final Year Project, until we inherited the system in early 2010, and rolled-out to go-live in July 2010.
Sometimes I feel very worried about the computing students we’re getting in my school. Yet at the same time I’m amazed at how we could achieve the top spot in Asia and 12th position worldwide in the Computer Science and Information Systems Rankings 2011 (2011 QS World University Rankings). Some of the users, both students and even some staff, that I had the opportunity to interact with leave me in utter shock that they could belong to computer science school.
We have for some time wanted to conduct an event styled like Sun Tech Days or Microsoft Tech Days. The sort of conference or workshop that would cover a variety of techie topics. No sales, no marketing, just technology. Of course, considering our resources and our target audience, ours would be just a baby version of what the big companies are doing. It would still be interesting and unique, here in my school, because there aren’t quite other workshops like…
