Category Archives: NUS

Things about NUS

End of Year 1, Start of holidays

Today is my last paper for sem 2 of year 1 in NUS.

Not a bad sem, but certainly can be better.

I slacked through most of the semester, playing osu! and dota2. I did go to the lectures and tutorials, most of them. I also tried making notes along the progress of the modules for both CS2100 and PC1143 which are more content heavy. I guess it helped during revision since I can recognize the terminologies and understand the concepts better.

Still, I did pretty badly for all exams because I did not really study as hard as last semester. During the reading week and exam week, I put most of the time doing travelling around the campus and sitting in front of computer playing games or browsing through other people’ lives.

Let me try to predict the grades while I still remember how I did for the finals:

For GEK1505, I never really studied but I guess the concepts are okay, final is a bit hard so I guess I can get B+.

CS2100 final is a disaster, I left almost half question blank because I got stuck at the first structured question. Given my “still okay” CA marks, I should be getting B+.

IS1103 is okay, I did not do well for the first individual assignment because I did not know it was graded, but final and term report are okay, this should also be a B+.

PC1143 is hard, I could understand the concepts but I could not solve most of the questions in final. Given that the percentage of final is not that high, I hope I could get at least a B.

And CS2020 should be fine, except for the final where I did not perform up to my standard, A or A-.

Holidays, as usual, is packed with agendas.

First thing on my mind is my peer mentor position at RVRC. As peer mentors, we are supposed to organize an orientation event for the freshmen, this could take a long time, especially considering the fact that we have only less than 20 people in total now and we are all not very experienced in organizing orientation. I guess I will just try my best to contribute ideas and do some videos for the events. And I may also want to be some kind of “game master”, it looked fun to me when I was an OG kid.

I also need to do an orbital project with my teammate. This should not be too hard once we have our ideas laid down. We could try to use some new tools like Meteor. Hopefully we can spend several weeks on this and get a nice and useful application done.

I am also planning to do an implementation project with my CS2100 lecturer on Android. It looks easy to code, so should not take too long as long as I am not one coding the back-end.

Then I could also do some projects for Computing Club if I have time to spare, such as the “module tree” app which guides you in choosing modules throughout entire uni life.

I hope the holidays does not end up being dota2 everyday. Haha.

The best Friday Hacks session so far

Today I attended the Friday Hacks(#68) by NUS Hackers as usual. I knew that the topic today is on NUSMods, a web app developed by a SoC senior – Beng, that is extremely popular and successful in NUS, and there will be a guest Jeff Moss who is a famous security expert. It turned out both talks were interesting and meaningful.

For the first part, Beng mainly talked about the history and design philosophy of the NUSMods. It was an inspiring story considering that he did this in year 2 and the web app went through a lot of changes before it finally become successful and popular among NUS students. In particular, the part on designing the app is interesting, he talked about “hackers who can design the app well enough is as rare as unicorn.” And I found this to be relevant. Sometimes the app may have the best functionality but the poor design may not attract the users or simply render the app unusable. Luckily, there are some books on design philosophies that are useful in designing apps. I figure that I should take a look at them when I have free time and before doing some serious web project. He also mentioned about the future of NUSMods which includes some APIs for new developers to use the data from NUSMods as well as using NUSMods’ existing popularity to transform it into a platform for displaying other apps relevant to NUS(taking the interpretation of NUSMods as NUS Modifications). These ideas may be relevant for me when I do my future projects.

The second part of the session was a short Q&A session for Jeff Moss and some of his colleagues. A lot of insightful questions ranging from personal security, NSA’s surveillance, issue of trust and prospect of computer security were asked and the reply given by the pros were very informative and insightful. We learnt about how strange phenomenons may be related to NSA’s surveillance programmes, the prospect of post Edward Snowden era for computer security. Some even drilled into the fundamental issue of the extent of trust we should give to others. A good point is that in IT industry, we have to ultimately give our trust to some strangers. It is not possible for us to build a functional computer, or in similar sense a full range of software. Hence, whatever we do, we need to trust the other people who developed the building blocks for the technology that we are using, be it the operating system or the processor.

Abnormal internet connection

I am experiencing some abnormal internet connection issues now.

-Using default DNS server(DNS server from NUS)

It appears that I can open some websites in the browser without any issue, such as Bing, wordpress, quora.

However, pinging these websites does not give good response:

For other websites like Facebook and Google, Google News, they open rather slow in web browsers and sometimes does not even load.

Pinging them also yields poor result:

After changing DNS server into Google’s 8.8.8.8, the problem remains.

This should be an issue with NUS network as websites such as Facebook and Google loads on my phone(with 3G connection) in usual speed.

About everything and nothing

I have been thinking about this issue of being everything and being nothing for a while.

In CS1231 lecture, the lecture mentioned a quote that is something like”A friend of everybody is a friend of nobody.”

I also realized during sem1 that “greedy algorithm does not work in university.”, trying to do a lot of things simply makes me incapable of achieving anything.

This is true for my CCAs, when I took up too many duties and responsibilities, I just simply cannot accommodate all of them into my schedule. When I have friends from totally different cliques that are very exclusive in nature, I found myself hanging in the air, not belonging to anywhere.

So it is ture that we must abandon something in order to achieve others?

New Sem!

Today is the official first day of my second semester as a CS undergrad in NUS.

I am happy that I have secured all my modules without much trouble unlike many others who have to appeal or send emails to get their modules.

I am also glad that for all my modules, there are some friends who are taking together with me. I used to like doing things alone but I feel that having the correct friends may be a better experience.

As I have planned, I would shift more focus onto studies and only a few other activities.

I hope I could learn something useful from all the modules, but not study hard just to get good grades for the modules.

Taking easy modules to get good grades or being forced to take hard modules because they are are core modules, these are not the correct mindset.

What is the point of going through university if you do not come out as a better person in terms of knowledge and skills that you want?

Therefore, I believe choosing a module is like picking a skill that you want to equip yourself with, so that you are better than others who are not taking this module. That is how people become specialized in certain fields and achieve something others could not.

Back to main track, I believe all the CS modules would be able to give me better understanding of different aspects of computer science, and that is exactly what I want to know the most.

Computing Club, on the hand, can offer me chance to develop something that is useful for the student population and the same time, improving my technical skills and inter-personal skills.

A great semester awaits ahead!