All the theatrics about the online call for support was to help him choose specifically which course in the School of Computing he wanted. He got into NUS. He got into the School of Computing. But he did not get the Computer Science course he wants.

Today, Alvin put up an update on his appeal-support website. He explains:

“Just some further clarification, I was offered Computing (Information Systems Courses), and as the skills that the website portrays, and rightly so, there are no majors in Information System Courses that are relevant to me. When I said Computer Science, I meant Computing (Computer Science Courses), which gives me an option to become a Communications and Media Major. I will be then able to specialize in Content Creations and Mass Communications Group (which is User Interaction and Experience) as well as Games Technology Group.”

His appeal-support website was misleading in that it did not present us with the whole truth. But he did not lie. If you were really passionate about something, and you really, really, wanted that something, what would you do?

It does sound like Alvin is extremely clear about what he wants to do. Possibly even too clear. It’s good to have some direction and focus in what you want to do. Yet, at the same time, don’t let that prevent you from broadening your horizon. A university education is different from that in a polytechnic. I hope he knows that NUS will make him, as part of his degree fulfillment requirements, to take enrichment modules from other faculties.

It’s also possible for Alvin to fuel his passion with personal projects outside of school. Afterall, it looks like he’s quite capable of doing it. He doesn’t need NUS to help him do that. He could study and graduate with a still-somewhat-relevant degree, and he could supplement his resume with plenty of real projects that he’s completed. Employers like to see real projects done, not just university transcripts on the modules you’ve taken. (I’m assuming, of course, that he plans to work for someone.)

Now, we’re all going to be suspicious about his true intentions. Did he come up with that explanation after he got exposed, or was that all truly the original reason that drove him to setup his appeal-support website.

At any rate, I’d still say, let’s give him the benefit of doubt.

Related posts:

1. Why Does Alvin Need School? This morning, you might have found yourself waking up to...
2. On The Second Week Of School This is the start of “Week 1″. It is the...
3. Ian Goes to School Ian has started going to school today. It’s the same...

What is this buzz about? Well, Alvin launched his website www.helpalvingetintoschool.com to seek support for his appeal to get into NUS. It’s a pretty well designed site. Clean, uncluttered. Of course, it helps that the site had a single purpose to get support for his cause. The main offense that some netizens have taken with the website is the use of white on yellow in some sections. Big white text on a bright yellow background is not the best mix, in my opinion, but I wouldn’t critically fault that choice. However, small white text on that same bright yellow background is a little too gaudy to read. Poor colour combination there.

Otherwise, I thought the rest of the page looked pretty good. I liked the unique fonts he has chosen. The headers are set in Lilita One. Good, bold, fat font suitable for headlines. But more interesting is the main body text, which is rendered in Merriweather. It’s nice to know that people are taking time to choose typefaces rather than simply going with defaults or whatever norms that anyone else goes with.

Now, what is the purpose of my post? Well, why does Alvin need to get into school? It seems he’s doing pretty well already. Nowadays, the Internet is such a powerful channel to find information. I very quickly found out more information about Alvin. Information like his address, his mobile phone number, and ooh… it looks like he’s been freelancing building websites. I think he’s doing a pretty good job. At least there’s no gaudy white on yellow in his portfolio. Does he still need a degree from NUS? I think he could build a great business around his talent for the web.

Well. Maybe. Paper qualifications help you a lot in Singapore. Running a business involves risks. If you want to work for someone, paper counts a lot.

For his determination and originality with this effort, I wish him all the best at getting an opportunity to be reconsidered for a place in NUS. He did not say it, but I hope he has tried appealing, unsuccessfully, through established channels.

I hope Alvin realizes that school is not as fun and exciting as all the stuffs he’s saying he’s done on his viral site. I’m sure the current students of the school have lots of miseries to share. But I wish him all the best!

Update (22 Apr 2012): So as you might have read from the Sunday Times today, Alvin’s website did not tell us the entire truth. He did in fact get into NUS School of Computing. He was offered an IS course, but he did not want that. He wanted to be in CS. I suddenly feel really annoyed at having been misled by his theatrics.

Related posts:

1. The Helping Alvin Get Into School Saga Continues You thought that would be it. An appeal for support...
2. On The Second Week Of School This is the start of “Week 1″. It is the...
3. Ian Goes to School Ian has started going to school today. It’s the same...

Yeah, right. It is working, because we’re now all so indignant about the lack of rubbish bins and the stupidity of such action, which has prompted us to find out who is behind this.

The organizers want us to generate no waste on this day. Hello, how do you generate no waste? Our human body functions naturally generate waste. Waste happens everywhere. How do you make waste not happen at all?

So, I understand that one of the ideas is, for example, to bring your own lunch boxes instead of requesting takeaway carriers. So when you’re done with lunch, what do you do with the lunch boxes? Don’t you need to wash them? Don’t you need some washing detergent to make them clean and hygienic? So where does the water and detergent go after washing?

If you remove rubbish bins everywhere, where is everyone going to put their rubbish? Do you seriously expect that every single last person who would have used those rubbish bins will dutifully find a proper way to dispose of their waste? I think, littering will go up! So now our cleaners have to do more work cleaning up. Maybe, using more water in the process. Is this what Climate Action Day is about?

That’s not to mention all the wasted manpower involved in removing the rubbish bins at the start of the day, and then reinstating them at the end of the day.

What in the world are they thinking? This is really so dumb.

This is about as silly as the Earth Hour events happening on campus. At NUS, Earth Hour means a whole bunch of people coming back to campus, which is on a Saturday night where no one (or at least most people) would be working on campus anyway, to turn off the lights, waste one hour of precious time, then turning back on the lights. Think about not just wasted time, but also transportation and carbon emissions generated from an unnecessary trip to work.

But perhaps this Climate Action Day did achieve its awareness goal. At least for me. Right intentions. Totally failed execution.

Here’s my contribution to Climate Action Day. Check out the Story of Stuff’s original video that was released two years ago.

Related posts:

1. COE Shortages In Coming Months? Just announced by Transport Minister Raymond Lim, the number of...
2. Visit to Bukit Timah Campus I recently visited the NUS Bukit Timah Campus. I was...
3. NUS Students Are Getting Stupid I’ve been wanting to say this for the longest time....

We had pushed out CodeCrunch with the intention that it will one day replace an older automated programming assessment system we’re running. The two most important advantages of CodeCrunch are: web-based user interface, and system designed to scale out.

Everyone’s familiar with using web browsers, and so clearly any web-based system is going to be much preferred over another that requires client-side software installation. No need to elaborate anymore here.

The other advantage about scalability is rather fascinating. One of the limitation of the other system (and possibly many other simliar systems used elsewhere) is that it cannot easily scale to accommodate more demanding workloads. Think about a programming lab exam where there might be 500 students submitting programs for automatic assessment. Sure, you deploy more power hardware, faster CPUs, more RAM, etc. But in our past experience, the achilles heel is working with Java programs. How powerful a system do you need to support, possibly, 500 concurrent Java compilations and testing sequences? What if each JVM required a few hundred MBs of memory?

The only solution, really, is for the system to scale out to a distributed architecture. Better yet if the workload can be scheduled asynchronously. This is, in my opinion, the biggest strong point of CodeCrunch’s system architecture.

Today, the CodeCrunch cluster comprises:

• One cluster head node: Database, scheduler, and central storage.
• 6x worker nodes: These are the compute nodes doing the grunt program compilation, testing and assessment.
• 2x web server nodes: The web servers have very light load, but we run two simply for redundancy purposes.

The cluster is fronted by a pair of load balancers, which also serve to terminate and accelerate SSL connections. On top of the failover/high-availability provided by the load balancer, the SSL termination is particularly helpful, because it relieves the web servers from encryption/decryption overheads. (Our load balancer also performs on-the-fly content compression.)

The distributed design allows the system to scale out to additional nodes rather trivially if required by the workload demand. The nature of asynchronous job scheduling also means that the system will not work itself to death if, for any reason, it cannot keep up with the workload thrown at it.

An interesting phenomenon of web application systems is that, if not properly designed, they often run into a danger of killing themselves as they near peak capacity. Here’s how it typically happens. As the rate of web requests increase, the response gets slower because of CPU bottlenecks, storage I/O bottlenecks, database lock contentions, etc. As response gets slower and slower, at some point, users get “fed up” and click reload on their web browser. The web server doesn’t necessarily know that the previous request has been “abandoned” and simply sees the reloads as additional web requests, thus further worsening the situation. If not properly managed, the problem will simply escalate exponentially until the site kils itself.

The problem is actually so easy to solve as to simply add more nodes to a distributed system. At some point, your distributed system will also get overloaded. The challenge is really to get the system to “fail” gracefully.

CodeCrunch’s nodes are, actually, not real physical hosts. They are virtual machines running on blade servers (like the one pictured above). This allows us to easily move VM instances from a more busy physical host to a less busy physical host when needed. It also allows us to easily manage hardware failures. Better yet, we can even easily spawn additional VM instances during peak usage, or shutdown some VM instances and consolidate others into fewer physical hosts during lull periods. Oh yes, that’s what some vendors are selling as being “green”.

We use MySQL for our database, and like most MySQL users, we have not gone the path of MySQL Cluster. This means that the database is both a potential performance bottleneck and a single-point-of-failure. Not too urgent at this time, but at some point we’ll need to look into this.

Another concern is with storage. There is currently a single central storage volume. We can easily the volume size without too much trouble. In fact, I just did that this morning (JADDOG’s guide was helpful). But this central storage volume is a single-point-of-failure.

Not all problems need to be fixed, of course. The MySQL and storage are concerns, but it may turn out that solving them may not be worthwhile for our purposes.

Related posts:

1. Building Scaleable Web Apps – Syscalls I recently found myself babysitting a certain web application project...
2. Moving on to Solid-State Drives I think the best upgrade you can do for your...
3. Cold Storage is Charged This Cold Storage is charged. With static electricity, that is....

What prompted this post, which I had actually wanted to write many times before, was an incident that happened today. Someone did not understand what a tarball is. Nevermind that, maybe some people aren’t familiar with that terminology. It might even be okay if some people don’t know what to do with a tar.bz2 file. It’s alright. I gave the command line needed to unpack this tarball. In response, I was asked again about what to do with the tarball. I sensed something odd. I reiterated that I had already provided the command line, the actual command to be typed in our central Unix login host.

Now, guess what I was asked in the next email? “… have to install a SSH client… and type in that command… ? I could almost sense the person thinking: “You mean this is more complicated than double-clicking an icon?”

You know, it isn’t so bad if this person were a freshmen. It’s only the 2nd or 3rd week of the term (I think). But hey, this person is a group leader who is going to tutor freshmen in an introductory programming course.

This is so unbelievable. This is a C language programming course, and the work will have to be done on Unix hosts. I wonder if this person would even know how to use the gcc compiler. Or gdb. The way the email read, it seemed like our Unix login host was like a mysterious shroud of mystic magic to this person. Oh, our poor freshmen. Or maybe not… they might be equally hopelessly lost. At least some of them.

There’s one really funny incident that was related to me. It happened at my own helpdesk. A student had come up complaining that our Unix login host was making his keyboard hang. Yes, that’s right, the keyboard of his notebook. Our powerful server could remotely cripple his keyboard. Sounds absolutely ridiculous. But he insisted, and demonstrated it to the people at helpdesk. So that did he do? He was using Mac, so that had its own terminal and a CLI SSH client. He had SSH’ed into our Unix login host, and upon being presented the password prompt, was upset no amount of typing elicited any response from the prompt.

What happened? He had typed his password, but did not see any * characters being echoed back. He thought his keyboard hung. He didn’t even think of pressing Return.

This generation of users have only lived on the web. Password entries only happen on web pages, and * characters are always echoed back. A CLI password prompt that doesn’t echo back anything is totally alien to them.

This generation of our users are so dependent on helpdesk that you’d sometimes be totally awed by their lack of common sense and initiative. Actually sometimes I think it is also the fault of our helpdesk to have spoilt them.

This is happening here, in the top Computer Science and Information Systems school in Asia.

Related posts:

1. The Unix Workshop in 2011 I was recently involved in delivering a Unix workshop to...
2. Pickup A Free Notebook Computer If you’re looking for a fantastic free notebook deal, I...
3. Wow! Is that a Mainframe Computer? A computer science student saw this, and asked if it...

Our original event was planned to run at the start of the year. But it was rushed, and ultimately because of lack of time and lack of organizing resources (i.e. the manpower to get the project moving), we postponed the plan. We rescheduled to target the start of the new academic year, and we also pared down our ideas somewhat… just to get something easy and simple going for the first time.

So, our first ever COM Tech Days (as we have chosen to call it), took off 2 days ago on 24th August 2011. Very simple affair. No banners. No food. But I’m quite encouraged by the response. It’s not an overwhelming crowd, but I’d say reasonably sized considering we only spammed email to the first and second year students, a freshmen orientation page on Facebook, and that’s about all the publicity we did. We didn’t even tell our staff, or people outside the school.

I’m now thinking about whether we could run this as a monthly event. Just a simple one hour talk in the afternoon just one day of every month. We could still run a bigger event once a year. But the idea of a monthly talk is to keep the momentum going, keep up the presence of the event, and continually pique people’s interest. Of course, on the other hand, there is the big issue of whether we can sustain such an effort. I’m still quite encouraged, however, that we might be able to work something out. We’ll definitely need a dedicated team of people to drive this.

One of the agenda behind COM Tech Days was to discover and meet up with students who are interested to join our Network Associates student helper program. We had been doing this every year through a Network Workshop previously. COM Tech Days replaces that.

What is this Network Associates program about? Well, most of what I’ve written before is still relevant, so read my previous post. If you’re interested, you’ll know how to contact me.

Related posts:

1. Recruiting Student Network Engineers We’re starting to recruit student helpers again. They will help...
2. Old Eateries Turn High-Tech I’m quite surprised to see some of the “traditional” kind...
3. The M1 3G network is down Seems it is now M1′s turn to have problems with...

I’ve heard many complaints about how the internal shuttle bus service in NUS has become absolute madness since the start of the current academic year. This year saw the opening of University Town, with many classes (apparently unnecessarily) moved across to the new facilities, and transportation facilities that seem to be inadequately planned. I haven’t been to University Town, so I haven’t been personally affected.

But I did have to take a bus from School of Computing to the Staff Club stop a few days ago. Service A2 would take me there. This was before the lunch time peak hour. There shouldn’t be too many people on the buses, and the roads would not be that crowded with other private cars heading out of campus for lunch. I expected to be at my destination in 20 minutes or so, including the waiting time for the bus.

So when 10 minutes passed without any sign of my bus, I started to get impatient. I checked online (thanks to the convenience of smartphones) and saw that the worst case frequency at this pre-lunch hour was 12 minutes. Alright, let’s wait a few more moments. Several empty cabs passed by, I was very tempted to take them. But it would be so silly to pay $4 or so just to get to another side of campus when a free internal shuttle bus service was available. So I waited and waited… and finally, the bus arrived 25 minutes (at least) from the time I started waiting. I wondered if it might have been 30 minutes or more since the previous bus arrived.

My bus ride to the Staff Club stop took me 13 minutes, for a total journey time (including waiting) of 38 minutes. It could have taken even longer if I needed to go further. 38 minutes is just totally and completely ridiculous. How will students go from one class to another class on-time? This academic year, lecturers are told to end classes earlier and to keep strictly to that timing. I don’t remember the new ending time for classes, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to be 22 minutes past the hour (thus giving 38 minutes of time to travel to the next class… and that still wouldn’t be enough because you’ve got to consider time to travel from the classroom or lecture theatre to the bus stop).

So now I’m beginning to appreciate some of the frustration that students are facing. Perhaps, like how our new Minister of Transport, Lui Tuck Yew, who took to public buses and trains to experience Singaporean’s gripe about our public transport, our senior management in NUS should try go take a few bus rides themselves. Preferably on a day with blistering hot sun, and on a tight schedule. Try doing that just one time a week, every week.

I don’t know why classes have to be moved to University Town. Can’t classes be planned such that there is minimal need to go there? How did NUS survive before without University Town? If perhaps there was some higher-level executive decision that people must be made to visit University Town, then such decision should have been followed up with proper transport planning.

One of the new things that happened with the internal shuttle bus routes is that they’ve changed an express service D into a pair of 2 super long routes service D1/D2 (difference is in the direction of travel). Our public transport operators tell us that long bus routes are no good. Yet in NUS, the transport planners somehow thought that long routes are actually better. It’s no wonder that so many people are complaining about D1 and D2. (I’ve not taken D1 and D2 myself… although I was a frequent rider on D in the previous academic year.)

I’ve got several ideas about how to improve the transportation in NUS. But I think just using some common sense would resolve many of the problems. Not just about buses, but all the road users in NUS. Peak hour congestion in NUS can sometimes get quite messy. Drivers don’t undertand the meaning of yellow boxes. In fact, I think one of the biggest culprits are the internal shuttle buses themselves. Even when it is pretty obvious that they can’t clear the yellow box, and that most of their vehicle would obstruct traffic from other directions, the drivers still move forward and obstruct the junction.

Then, there are also the pedestrians. For some insane reasons, NUS students just completely don’t understand that roads are built for vehicles to travel on. Roads are not pedestrian pathways. There is simply no end to examples of students crossing the roads, walking in the middle of driveways, etc… as if the whole space was actually meant for pedestrians to stroll on. I wonder who would be the right authority to come down to nab these people for jay walking.

I can’t imagine when the Circle Line station at NUH opens… how much worse traffic is going to become on campus.

Related posts:

1. The Singapore-Class Transport System Transportation is in the hot seat lately. Last week, it...
2. I Hate Writing Minutes I hate writing minutes. I wonder why hasn’t anyone yet...
3. How to Get Free Pizza I heard about it from a friend. I didn’t try...

I was recently involved in delivering a Unix workshop to the new freshmen intake of AY2011/2012. It’s something that the freshmen attend every new academic year. The idea is to expose them to Unix, particularly since many of them haven’t seen such an operating environment before, so that they would not be totally clueless, particularly when they start attending classes that requie them to use a Unix system. Nowadays, the role of Unix has changed somewhat. Many people don’t login to our Unix servers… not unless they absolutely have to because of their academic work.

It seems very contradictory that although Unix seems to be more “commonplace” nowadays compared to a decade ago, yet actually fewer people are really interested in it now than there were a decade ago. What do I mean?

A decade ago, Unix was not “everywhere”, many people didn’t have the opportunity to use such a system, and in fact, perhaps many people never even hear about it. Today, however, everyone knows about Unix from movies, mainstream media, and how Unix runs many of the servers behind famous Internet services. Linux is so much more common, and even Mac OS X is really an operating system built on Unix roots. With Unix becoming more prevalent than ever before, you’d expect that more people would be familiar with it nowadays.

Yet, it seems that fewer people are interested in Unix. They might have heard about it, but asking them to use it is a totally different matter altogether. I remember that years ago, people had a lot of fun snooping around in a Unix login shell, discovering what they could do, creating mischief now and then, etc. They did this on their own, because they were interested and perhaps fascinated about what a big Unix server could do.

It’s not quite the same nowadays, or even from back a few years. Most new students are nowadays avoiding Unix as much as they can. They have “official” email delivered to their Unix account, but one of the first things they do is to figure out how to forward the mail out to the campus Exchange server, or to their own personal Gmail account. They login to their Unix account only when they have to. (When they have to, it is during the first practical programming class, and then there would be a mad rush to reset passwords because they have forgotten/lost them.)

So the strange thing is that while Unix ought to have become more heard of, the reality is that actually fewer people seem to be interested in it. For many people in this intake of freshmen, possibly this Unix workshop was the first time ever they typed anything into a Unix shell. I see so many people struggling with ^S, because they think it saves their file in the text editor, but it ends up suspending the terminal and they think the program or system has hung. Then, there is a plethora of other problems stemming from typos, out-of-order command sequences, etc.

I used to joke that in the past, we know when the freshmen were having their first lab when the terminal bell sounds incessantly, because they were struggling with using the vi editor. The vi editor would ring the terminal bell with every invalid command input. Today… they are using nano. No bells to draw attention to them, but nevertheless, still plenty of challenges.

Related posts:

1. This Tap Runs UNIX Seen at a wash basin somewhere in Singapore, this tap...
2. Internet, Unix and Me My exposure to the Internet and UNIX was pretty limited...
3. Computer Science Noobs Sometimes I feel very worried about the computing students we’re...

Although other people may have their complaints about public buses on our roads, I think in comparison, the SBS Transit buses that ply inside NUS are super road-friendly. The internal shuttle service bus drivers (at least some of them) seem to behave like the NUS roads are built for them, and only them. I once wrote in to officially complain about one bus driver whose bus almost collided with my car… but all I got was a wishy washy reply about how the driver did not see me. A so-called “honest mistake”.

Then, there was another incident when a bus reversed into my car. The bus driver simply drove off, and when I subsequently managed to confront him, he insisted it was my car which collided into his bus. Yeah, luckily there was video footage. Despite my complaints, the driver was still allowed to ply NUS roads.

There’s also another type of bus problems: the private buses ferrying NUS staff from home to work. I think the problem is probably with the passengers (who are NUS staff)… asking the bus driver to let them alight at the most damn convenient spot, never mind that it will actually block off the road and cause it to be impassable, even if there is a bus stop with a proper bus bay just 20 metres away. Just because they are too lazy to walk those few metres. It is just so irritating.

Next, there are the pedestrians. Students seem to be the biggest culprit in this group. They cross roads as if the entire length of road was simply a big giant zebra crossing. Some don’t bother to even look at traffic, while some others actually make eye contact, and then expect the motorist to stop, so that they can just cross. It seems so ironic that university-level students are worse-behaved than those from primary schools and secondary schools. It isn’t that they don’t know the road rules, it’s their complete disregard of the rules.

This is almost like driving down Orchard Road on the night of Christmas eve. Except, Christmas eve happens only once a year.

Related posts:

1. Shaming Idiotic Drivers I wonder what has happened with Parking Idiots blog? Some...
2. Web Widget For Drivers Ever since I signed up for broadband data on my...
3. First Ghost Bike in Singapore I was on the bus coming down Clementi Road this...

I know, it is day one of operation. But this is Food Junction. They are not a new-comer, and should have had a wealth of experience operating their other food outlets. It is such a disappointment and anti-climax after waiting through so many months of delays.

Okay, on day one, you’d expect teething problems. But I’m not complaining about teething problems. First up is about space planning. Look at the photo.

There’s just no space to queue. I know, this is day one. Maybe everyone wants to visit on day one. Sure, take away half the people. Clearly, the circulation space is just insufficient. There was one stall where its queue had no where to squeeze but to form back into a service area behind the stall! (Ah… don’t tell me that the planners had the idea to use the service area as an overflow space for patrons to queue…)

Then there’s the “people” problem. I was queuing at this noodle stall. One of the staff simply stood there and did nothing… except just looking. There was another lady, collecting payment and adding condiments. Simple job. The main action rested on the third person… he took orders, he prepared the items for cooking, did the cooking, and practically assembled everything into the almost finished order, short of the condiments added by the second person. Seems like the work load was very unevenly distributed. Don’t they have some commonsense? Particularly the first person who was doing nothing?

Oh yes, I told my colleague about that first person. When we were done with our lunch, we looked back at the stall as we left the place. Guess that? That first person was still standing there. This time he was busy with something… sending SMS. Totally oblivious to the queue in-front of the stall. The boss perhaps? If he’s the boss… then go collect money! At least help out with something eh.

Then, about tray returns. After queueing so long for food, surprise… you also queue to return your trays. Why? The tray return area is so small, there’s just not enough space to put your trays. So you actually got to queue to wait for the cleaners to remove some trays, so that you can find a spot to lay your tray down on. I thought this planning was very dumb, because you just have to look at how tray return was done previously in the same canteen before Food Junction took over, and follow! (One thing quite commendable in NUS is that the culture of returning one’s food tray is quite prevalent… but it is going to get spoilt by Food Junction.)

Just something about the coffee in this place. It is absolutely horrible. Actually, the quality of the coffee itself seems to be “okay”. But the preparation was just overwhelmingly too diluted. You can see it right away that it is too diluted. It looks like the Food Junction staff just couldn’t be bothered about it.

Then more about coffee. There’s another coffee shop (toast box I think, or something of that sort) in the adjacent space just outside Food Junction. Then, there’s also Yakun downstairs. I guess someone in NUS decided that coffee and kaya toast are absolutely the most important nutrition for NUS students.

Next, in today’s connected world… we expect GSM signal everywhere. Not so in this place. NUS buildings used to be more “open”, so the few GSM antennas around wasn’t much of an issue. But with all the renovations going on for so many years, it is already quite well-known that once you close up open spaces to add air-con, build more walls, etc… surely the GSM signal reception will suffer tremendously.

About Food Junction’s pricing. With Kopitiam, there is an across-the-board discount of 10% for using their “privileged” card, or 20% if you are even more privileged. The general rule in NUS, I thought, was a 20% discount. But apparently the discount applied by Food Junction is totally random. Not just from stall to stall, but even within the same stall, the discounts across different items are inconsistent. E.g. at the prata stall, the discount ranges from 30% to 50%. There is onen particular food item that sells for $2 if you’re a NUS staff/student, but $4 if otherwise. (The noodles I had for lunch was discounted 20%.) I’ll really like to know the discounting formula.

Let’s see what other feedback I hear about Food Junction in the next couple of days. In case you’re interested, this Food Junction is at Central Square, or otherwise more commonly known as Yusof Ishak House (YIH), in NUS Kent Ridge campus.

Related posts:

1. North Indian Pakistani Food I was at the famed ABC market and food centre...
2. Lardy Food from a Hospital Look at the large pieces of fried lard, and they...
3. Emperor Q by Ministry of Food Ministry of Food is quite an interesting name for a...