This semester is probably the worst I’ve had so far, ironic as I actually thought it’d be one of the best.

I mean…12cp major project, you finally get to do something that you enjoy doing, come up with something original but instead, we were lured into a project that seemed interesting at the time (robots, wiimote, opengl) but it’s turning out quite badly.

We have client deployment due next Friday and I’d say we don’t have as much done as we should have. At our current rate I’d be happy if we just got a credit.

I guess our lack of result is probably due to these sort of things happening.

I check the statistics of my blog every now and then it makes me wonder sometimes if a real person is going through my posts progressively or if it’s a web crawler. Unfortunately, wordpress doesn’t track IPs so I can’t tell if it’s a bot. Funnily enough “someone” or “something” visited my Epitome post. The title is actually meant to be Epiphany although Epitome doesn’t sound too off-topic of a title so I guess that’s the reason as to why nobody pointed it out. In addition, I tend to have extremely random blog titles so people might have just ignored it like they have with my numerous other posts. However, the more likely reason is that they simply did not think too much into it.

I find that as the years go by the amount of things to write about decreases dramatically. Back in High School, I would make constant rants about anything that I found annoying or interesting. Then Uni came and it became somewhat more problematic as I had two different sources of readers, and my less than obvious references would generally leave at least one crowd scratching their heads. Now, I tend to get more visitors from strangers than I do from people I know. However, those visitors generally visit my “Tutorial” posts but even then, they might take interest in a typical post like this.

So the question is, what the fuck do I write about?

I’ll talk about something I haven’t talked about in a while.

People.

How often do you guys judge someone within the first few seconds of meeting them? You might judge them by their race, clothes and/or initial contact. How strong is the first impression?

I tend to react quite strongly depending on how the first impression goes. However, first impressions can change sporadically, might change during the second meeting, it might be a gradual change…it might even be a change after several years.

Not too long ago I was placed under a rather inconvenient situation (which I shall not mention as it may release the identity of several individuals), instead of attempting to help me figure out what to do, my friend of many many years decides to emphasise on my stupidity. It’s sort of like yelling at someone for tripping over a step, they don’t intend for it to happen, it just happens. What I found interesting was that this other fellow who I rarely talk to decides to go out of his way to help me. It’s moments like these where I tend to step back and conduct a bit of re-evaluation.

Varying circumstances also lead to re-evaluations. What does this mean? Well, have you ever been friends with someone simply because it benefited you? I cannot express the number of times this has happened:

Friend: I’m gonna tell you something, just don’t tell anyone else.
Me: Sure, why would I tell anyone? I mean…who’s there to tell?
Friend: Exactly, that’s why I’m telling you this.

It shits me so much. Might as well not tell me, not like I have any impact on the matter. As soon as your circumstances change, your so called friend won’t bother coming to you for anything. Let me ask you computer geeks this…if you never had any pro skills, would some people still bother talking to you? I’m sure you all have PLENTY of contacts who only talk to you when their “computer dies” or “internet dies” and you just want to scream at them for being such an idiot. On a side note, I absolutely HATE it when people come to me and say that their “computer is slow” when they really mean the “internet connection”. Not too long ago I got asked “So…can you hack into computers and stuff?” after I told them my degree is IT.

I’ll probably just leave it at that for today.

Before you shitheads go pointing and laughing at me for still playing the game that ruined people’s HSC, let me say this…

…

fuck you.

Anyway, so lately there’s been many developments in the gaming community revolving around making a “Dota alternative” to free the current game of its reliance on the 7-year-old Warcraft 3 engine. First there was Demigod which is pretty poor. Too graphics intensive, felt like you were controlling a single pathetic unit in a RTS game.

Then you have League of Legends which has the original DotA developer on their development team. I recently got an invite but haven’t tried it yet probably won’t since HoN is so much more awesome.

More recently I’ve been playing Heroes of Newerth (HoN) which ismore or less identical to DotA. All the items are based off the ones in DotA Allstars, same recipe cost, statistics and ability, just different name and icon. Heroes resemble closely to Dota with some new heroes and some ability alterations. Even the map is more or less identical.

Before you calling it a “dota rip off” you should try it first. I haven’t had a single bad game. When I say bad game…I mean, ragers or laggers or douches in general. But that will probably change once they release it to the wider public.

I would like to just point out several key benefits of this game.

Firstly, the hosting is conducted server side, meaning that you don’t actually connect to a host. This means that anybody can host. Thus, you don’t get the “Waiting for player:” dialogue which is oh so common inside Warcraft 3.

Secondly, there is a rating system. Every time you play a game, you gain points for winning or lose points for losing. Because of this there is also an auto-balance feature  so you don’t get “imba teams”.

Thirdly, there is leaver protection. The system records every time you leave a game. Thus if you leave enough games you won’t be able to join certain games. However, if you do happen to disconnect from a game for whatever reason, HoN allows you to rejoin the game! As long as it’s within 5 minutes. Enough time to reboot the router and rejoin

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, there is a “concede” option. Players vote if they want to forfeit the game. How is this important? This means that you don’t get douches rage quitting a game because they feel that the game is gg.

I have 5 4 3 2 0 invites available. If you wish to play let me know and I’ll send one your way.

Here’s a trailer.

Let me set the scene. The year was 2000, I’ve just finished my selective school test so my life for the next 6 years was set.

I was visiting China for the first time in 4 years, it’s been so long that I hardly remember anything any more. The place where we lived which I thought was huge turned out to be this tiny 3 bedroom apartment. In fact, even now I still picture it to be rather spacious, maybe it’s just the 8 year old me picturing how things were then.

Anyway, I was quite excited. I had a pocket full of cash and back then the conversion rate between AUD to RMB was 1:6. You could buy a decent breakfast for 2 RMB, a decent lunch for 10 RMB, but that’s ignoring the high possibility of catching food poisoning. So I was visiting this local book shop. It wasn’t one of those tiny book shops…it was sorta like the Dymocks equivalent, except they sold all these other random things on the side, such as electronics and video games.

So naturally I was going through the video games section as happy as a fat kid in a candy shop.

I bought three games that day, and of those three games, only one remained till today.

Games from Aus usually cost around $100, but I managed to get a legit copy for only $10AUD.

So what does a 12 year old kid do when he gets his hands on a copy of the Sims?

Well…it’s obvious isn’t it?

This is promptly followed by going on the toilet which I must say wasn’t as “exciting”. I also managed to find a “nude patch” on the internet that removed the blur. YES I KNOW, I am extremely sad. But come on, the censor gets pretty annoying after a while AND it’s not like Maxis decided to add detailed textures of the human body into the Sims.

To date, I have legit copies of The Sims, Livin’ Large, House Party and Hot Date. Hot Date made and broke me. When I bought Hot Date I was pretty excited. Installed it straight away. It added lots of additional features to the game. For one, there’s more than one type of making out. So naturally I went through every single one of them. It also allowed you to “have fun” in various other locations such as the change room of a clothing shop. Eventually after playing hours and hours on end of the Sims, I eventually got sick of it and didn’t touch it…until yesterday.

So 8 years on, they’ve released the Sims 3. I skipped Sim 2 for some reason, I felt unclean playing it. Also my computer was way to slow to run it well. My current comp struggles slights with the Sims 3, but it’s still playable. No matter what people say about the Sims, it’s still the world’s best selling game of all time. I mean, I tend to play it mostly for the building features, who doesn’t want to build their dream home?

I started to reminisce last night, so I downloaded all the in game music files

I’m sure those who’s ever played Sims will remember this song.

When last semester began I was offered some job working for a start-up company that was interested in having “university-ties”. I thought it would be a pretty good opportunity. It involved using web technologies and python. A month after the offer, I still didn’t hear of anything, I wasn’t too phased about it. The excuse was “investing company haven’t put through the project yet”. I went through 4 whole months of unemployment, living off youth allowance.

Thank god for youth allowance and the stimulus package. Don’t know how I would survive uni whilst maintaining some sort of social life. Most of it went towards the ski trip and it was also meant to pay off my old iphone contract (which for some reason they still haven’t charged me for).

I applied for another job through the same job agency for Intersect (a not-for-profit organisation). I blogged about it as well few posts back. I was pretty hopeful, the Director of Engineering and Senior Developer seemed to be pretty happy with my performance. I thought “Finally, I can make some money and actually buy things without having to worry about whether or not I can afford it”. I got pretty excited when I got told that I would be starting work on 5th August. I even bothered to go shopping at Tarocash and bought myself 4 shirts, pants and a belt. All up around $250 (last minute sale ftw). I was pretty damn excited.

Days came and gone with no response. The excuse this time was that the HR manager is apparently “sick”. Well, fair enough. It’s flu season after all. I even caught the cold the weekend before I was meant to be working. Since I didn’t get any responses I decided to call them up myself. Apparently the person that’s coordinating my job with the company is also sick. How convenient. I had to call up somebody else that said will try and get in contact with me with the situation.

Days later, I got a call from that person telling me that the CEO of the company decided to not go ahead with the recruitment. At the time I didn’t really feel anything. I didn’t really care, I can’t get emotional on the spot when it comes to these things.

A week later, I decided to contact Intersect. They told me that because I was referred by SydneyTalent they cannot hire me. I thought fair enough., I’ll contract SydneyTalent instead. So I did. I got a reply the next day saying that I’ll receive a follow up email. I didn’t. A week went by and I sent another email asking for the status of the situation. I got a reply within a few hours telling me the same things that I already knew, however with one extra piece of detail, they told me:

“As with all students you are free to look for work as and where you see fit – SydneyTalent is only one avenue available to you.”

So I got in contract with Intersect again explaining to them they shouldn’t have any problems with hiring me. The person on the other end doesn’t seem to know what to do, she told me that the positions have been filled up but told me that I would be considered for future roles. Bullshit. There will be no future roles and if there are I won’t be considered.

What annoys me is the fact that I wasted one whole month chasing this up to find out that NOBODY can help me. The people who wanted to recruit me couldn’t any more. The people who was trying to help me get recruited wasn’t considerate of my situation at all.

I guess there is one thing I’ve learnt from this experience. Don’t sit back and let these corporate dogs shit all over you. Chase things up if you don’t hear back for a few days. Get both sides of the story cause chances are it’ll save you from losing a job.

This is a rant about the uselessness of anti-virus programs. My argument is that having one installed is no different to not having one installed.

Anti-virus programs serve one purpose and one purpose only, to prevent viruses from entering your computer. But in order to do that you have to be regularly updated and you also have to trust the anti-virus program in distinguishing viruses from genuine applications. AVG has been notorious for crippling machines by deleting critical system files. Once a host is infected with a virus the anti-virus program becomes useless. It alerts you that you have a virus but is unable to eradicate it. In fact, eradicating viruses from a computer takes more effort than reformatting. It can take up to 3 hours to format a computer and bring it to it’s original state (assuming you have all the necessary tools available) but it can take days of research in getting rid of a particular virus.

I mentioned in my first point that you must be up-to-date before they serve any real purpose. The problem with the cat and mouse game is that the mouse will always be one step ahead. It doesn’t matter how great your detection rates are, it’s only takes that 1% of viruses that’s not detected to compromise your computer. And it’s only that 1% that’s out there, for the other 99% of viruses that can be detected don’t even exist in the wild. When was the last time you heard anybody being infected by the “blaster worm virus”? So if you’re only capable of being infected by that 1% of viruses out there what’s the point of having anti-virus? You’ll be infected nevertheless.

So what do you do when you are infected? The anti-virus program usually screams at you that you have a virus, it asks whether or not you want to “fix” the problem. You select “Fix it” and nothing happens. 5 seconds later the same dialogue box appears. There exists online support forums that try and help you fix your problem but the turnover rates are usually 72 hours. Big companies invest millions of dollars into anti-virus protection but whether or not do anything is another issue. At CISCO they use McAffe. I used to get a lot more complaints about system slowdowns and what not than I get about virus issues. The productivity lost due to slow pc performance would probably outweigh productivity lost due to virus infections. When a user is infected by a virus, usually it goes to the onsite support team in which they conduct a laptop refresh. Like I said, it’s easier formatting than it is removing viruses.

If you have any opposing arguments as to why anti-virus programs are useful, I would love to hear them.

I constantly get spam on my blog from bots that use “Cheap Viagra Online” as their username. I guess it’s a valid strategy. Because sooner or later guys will be old enough to have to use it right? Maybe I’ll keep one of the spam comments for future reference.

I read an article the other day about some researchers developing an algorithm of detecting spam before it even reaches your inbox. That would be useful if it has an 100% accuracy rating. Which I doubt it does. I’m still pretty happy about my current gmail inbox which doesn’t receive any spam. Even my hotmail inbox which I’ve had for like 8 years now averages 10 spam emails a week. I guess the spammers must be making some sort of money otherwise they simply wouldn’t waste time doing it.

~~~

During the HCI lecture, Ronnie Taib suggested that we can come up with our own HCI projects. I’ve actually had one in mind, but have little idea on the actual design. It’s a relatively simple problem that doesn’t really require a solution. I was thinking about designing an iphone app that helps you navigate through the Uni on the iphone. It seems rather simple but there’s a couple of problems:

• I believe that the iphone SDK does not give you direct access to the maps api, the best you can do is launch Google Maps with trip information and building location
• Cross campus support will be tricky
• Buildings would need to be regularly updated (Some locations aren’t even at USYD)
• I DON’T HAVE A MAC

I guess I’ll see what happens then.

~~~

I’ve also caught a cold. I still have no idea what the differences are between a cold/flu. People “think” they know and they “try” explaining but it makes no sense. I’ve even heard people say that “flu is a virus, a cold isn’t”. I just googled it and ninemsn gives a pretty good explanation. It even suggests drinking Honey water which is what I usually do anyway. I probably caught it from the daily interaction with students over the past week or so. At least I can rest over the weekend and hopefully be well enough to attend uni and also work (if that’s even going ahead) on Wednesday. What was ironic was that yesterday one of the people from Timetabling said “I can’t believe nobody has caught swine flu yet!”. I’m getting sick and tired of hearing these swine-flu remarks. Lucky we live in the modern era where pandemics can be controlled, certainly wouldn’t be laughing about it 50 years ago.

~~

I also just paid for my Uni fees for this semester. It gives the message:

Important: Please print and retain a copy of this page for your records.
You must close this web page and exit the browser application after printing your receipt

Fail system is fail.

I’ve been changing timetables for students of USYD for three full days now and you get a wide range of personalities. Most people fall into one of the below categories.

The Arts Student – The type that demands to have all their classes on as little days as possible. These people sometimes find the nerve to complain about their 2 day full-time timetable.

The Asian International Student – They’re usually not too bad, can’t speak fluent English but are understandable. They tend to ask me “Do you speak Chinese?” where I usually reply “Yi Dian Dian” (A little bit). Overall, they take longer than the average student but are still manageable.

The bitch – Ah yes, how can you have a list of personalities without the bitch? They walk up without saying hello, if you can’t fix their timetable they sigh, thank you without emotion and leaves, if you happen to fix their timetable they do the same thing but skip the sighing. Where’s the love?

The Couple – Somewhat annoying. Usually the girl comes and gets her timetable changed and then gets her boyfriend’s timetable to match hers. When it’s not possible it’s as if a puppy died. I haven’t had anybody come up to me going “Hi, I would like to change my timetable, I just broke up with my girlfriend so can you move me out of all my tutes and lectures?”.

The First Year Science Student – These guys are ridiculous. They have 24 hour week timetables and they wonder if they can get a day off. I had some guy ask for 2 days off. I actually laughed. No seriously, I did. On top of that they also want to get rid of their 8am starts. Mate, if you want 2 days off and no 8am starts you’re in the wrong degree, perhaps take a look at a future with an Arts degree.

The Friendly schoolgirl – Possibly the type of people you’d want to meet since they’re attractive and you naturally want to help them out. They don’t complain and are appreciative of your help.

The Gang – A group of friends rush at you in an attempt to have matching timetables. Generally unavoidable when confronted.

The idiot – Some people cannot seem to comprehend the idea of a clash or a full class. This one girl wanted me to move her into another class it went something like this.

Me: Sorry it’s full
Idiot: Are you sure?
Me: Yes
Idiot: Can you try?
Me: I have…
Idiot: Can you try again?
Me: I can try a thousand times but that’s not going to move you into a class that’s full
Idiot: Can you just try again?
Me: *taps the keyboard frantically to emphasis point*
Idiot: Oh okay so what do I do now?
Me: *exasperated* Stay in your current class?

The I-have-a-clash type – The MOST annoying type of people. They come up to me with the words “I have a clash” and expect me to fix it. They ask stupid questions like “How does it happen?” Well…you see…you’re doing two subjects and they happen to the same timeslot, that’s how it happens.

The irrational – These people are rare and somewhat confusing. They have these nice timetables with a day off but they insist on coming to uni every day. I don’t bother asking for a reason, as long as they’re happy.

The life-story teller – I’m here to change your timetable not to listen to your life-story. Just tell me what you want and I’ll see what I can do.

The tutes-on-one day type – Rather simple, they want all their tutes on one day so they can just turn up for their tutes and skip the lectures.

The two friends – Usually two best friends who do the same degree. Similar to the couple but nicer, not as desperate to get the same timetable. It’s a bonus if both of them happen to be friendly schoolgirls *wink*

The two-timer – These people have had their timetable changed but feel obliged to “double check” that they can’t get a better timetable. It’s as if their timetable problems would magically disappear after a day.

I’m sure there’s more that I can’t remember. Hope this list was somewhat entertaining.

The reason why piracy is so rampant is the fact that it’s so damn easy. Back during the days of dial-up, it was hard. I remember having to download ripped games (games that don’t have any music or video to cut down download size) and using download managers to auto-connect when disconnected. I left my computer on overnight for a week just to download the latest version of Roxio Easy Media Creator (?). These days it’s a simple matter of going to your favourite BT tracker, doing a quick search and voila, minutes or hours later your download is complete.

You then have shady sites like PirateBay attempting to JUSTIFY their existence on the internet as being a fair and honourable website. It’s like having a company called “Organised Crime PTY LTD”.

Okay, so we’ve all walked down the path of piracy but these days pirating apps isn’t as “useful” as it was say 5 years ago. Before people would pirate an application because it’s necessary to do something but these days there’s open source alternatives that can do the same thing if not better. There are exceptions though like GIMP but even programs like Open Office are slowly catching up to the game. The only challenge now are stuff like games and media. I own perhaps 15% of the music in my arsenal which should be substantially more than the average person. I don’t know anybody that buys music online and I for one probably won’t start either until they’re dirt cheap.

I recently purchased my first iPhone app, I came across it browsing through the app store. It’s an application that tells you your usage details for your phone/internet. I did a bit more research, had a look at the free alternatives which were non-existent or just bad, had a look at the paid alternatives (crappy reviews) and decided on a whim to just buy it. It’s called iiQuota and now I can keep track of my phone usage without having to painfully log into optus. I bought another App yesterday called Tripview which helps you catch public transport around Sydney. The timetable is all stored locally (which can also be updated) so you don’t have to go online to view the timetable.

Alternatively, I could jailbreak my iphone, install a program called “Installous” and simply get the applications illegally. Installous is actually a legitimate application designed to install custom ipa files. But then there’s Appulous which provide access to cracked applications. Now the reason behind Appulous is that the appstore does not provide a try-before-paying option for their apps. I beg to differ. A lot of decent developers provide a free alternative with some features missing or compensate through the use of ads. In the free version of Tripview for example, saving your trips have been disabled. Their reasoning behind their service is just another lame excuse to steal from developers.

On a side note I also learnt that itunes does not give you an option to “confirm” before purchasing an app. I accidentally clicked “Buy now” and it immediately processed the request. Thankfully, the amount was credited back to me after filing a report but according to Apple “this is a one-time exception”.

So I went for my interview at Intersect today. It’s a not-for-profit organisation that does projects for research institutions. It went pretty smoothly in my opinion. My interview was scheduled for 9:30am and I got there just in time.

Interview started off like any other, brief run down of the company, asked some questions about myself and what I do. Finally they decided to get technical. Gave me a rather simple problem. You have a char array and you want to reverse it how would you do it?

My answer was…”Well, I’ll first look up if there’s any inbuilt functions to do so”. I was pretty sure there isn’t such function in Java but in python it’s just one line. They replied with “Let’s assume there isn’t, but that’s a pretty good place to start.”

They then left me for 5 minutes which was more than enough time to write it up.

When they got back the Director of Engineering said “It’s wrong” and then the Senior Software Engineer replied with “That’s absolutely correct”. So I’m guessing I heard incorrectly but it left me to ponder on words that could possibly sound like “wrong”.

They then showed me a simple ui diagram and asked me what I would test to try and break it. I replied with the usual stuff like division by zero, overflow and underflow, letters and symbols, rounding errors etc…

They seemed fairly happy with my replies and said they’ll get back to me after all remaining interviews have been conducted.

As I was walking home I began thinking about the upcoming months. If I do get the role it’ll be a 3 months contract. By the time it ends it’ll also be around the time that exams kick in. After exams is Internship period. Now if I happen to be working for Intersect and if they do happen to hire me after the 3 month contract with a more long-term role would I still be with them? Or would I take up the internship? It’ll probably come down to money.

It’s a decision between working for a not-for-profit organisation that’s dedicated to helping research institutions or working for the corporate money hungry giant.

On a side note I recently re-discovered this childhood anime of mine. I watched it in China and when I came to Aus, it was on Cheez TV. I could never remember the name and whenever I described it it was something along the lines of “These people have these things that they hold in their hand and then they transform into these robots…except they’re not robots but humans…”. It’s called Tekkanman Blade and it’s extremely extremely old so I doubt anybody would take interest in it. I’m watching it again to regain some of my childhood memories. If you’re interested just wiki it.