Last post (of the year too)

I was supposed to blog about this sooner (say, after the poster presentation) but I was really busy after that (I had to finish writing a Maths paper for a project), and straight after that, I had to study for my exams so yeah... However, after my final paper, I went straight to slacking though (movie-watching, karaoke) and I started playing Harvest Moon :S (Tale of Two Towns is really good though; I think it's comparable to FoMT which is their more successful series. But ToTT has alpacas! :D)

I also started sniffing every morning somehow. Don't really think I'm sick, but I think it's because it's cooler these few days, so my nose isn't very good. I've also started working for CS3217 ^^

But anyway, Merry Christmas to all! Happy Boxing Day! I'm not so ^^ about results but well, they were better than expected? Didn't expect the grade for CS3216. I'm also glad that I put in effort for MA3229 and MA4247. MA3220 didn't go well for me, but I think it's mainly because I have no interest in it at all. SSD2210 went okay, considering that I only studied 3 hrs before the paper (open-book), but I'll exercise my S/U on it, since it's the only chance that I get to do so. >.< (Okay, enough of the honeymoon after SEP; I'll work harder for grades next semester.)

Also, I got my feedback from CS2103. I didn't manage to guide them as much as I wanted to, so my comments ranged from average to good. But hopefully, next semester (with CS3217) will be better! I'll do my best in giving feedback!

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Anyway, I'll just go through my thoughts of CS3216. I think a few things went well. We got along okay, although sometimes we encounter scenarios of getting stuff that we didn't expect. (It can go better or worse to be honest.) I think poster session-wise, I was having more fun introducing the application rather than thinking about grades. xD But I think there's a certain joy you get from talking to random people and hearing their opinions about it. After hearing their feedback, I realised we have a lot of stuff to improve on! (resizing all the graphics for once =.= Having graphics that were too high-res is indeed a problem) We also had freebies which I am proud of! (thanks to Kai and Benjamin for making them!) 

In all, we did a great job!

To go through my initial hopes for CS3216 (okay, now that I read it, it sounds a bit childish xD), I did fiddle with various APIs. I didn't really do much for HTML5 so I can't really speak for that. I was hoping for more weekend tutorials and I vaguely recall Su Yuen doing a Flash tutorial for the rest when I was in Y1. Wish we could have more tutorials but that would have resulted in more time spent on CS3216, and this semester was really quite tiring for me.

I had a good time working with different people, e.g. Jim from Assignment 2, Kai and Benjamin from Final Assignment etc. (listing these people because they're from vastly different backgrounds.) I had an interesting time "filling in the gaps" because there were times where I didn't really like doing certain stuff but I kind of forced myself to do it. 

I didn't really manage my time well, if I were to judge it based on my final exam results (my results for the semester with CS3217 is better) but I took higher level modules this semester, so it's understandable that my CAP went down a bit. I didn't stay in school every weekend to code, like in CS3217! But for the final project, our last week was really spent in the SDE lab. Also, if I had managed my time better, I wouldn't have finished my Maths paper so late. :S

With regards to writing better, I don't think my writing has improved, because not enough criticism I guess? And really, this is not a writing module. A bit of personal history, my writing really sucks as compared to my peers and I'm used to just obtaining a pass grade for English and Literature. But what I learnt in JC while doing GP was that you don't really have to be really good at English (but sure, the vocabulary does help) but you have to make sure your ideas are clear. So I did considerably better in GP in JC. 

(Also, I founded this new theory recently on why I don't do well in literature - mainly because a) my English isn't good and b) my MBTI type is a P and not a J. >.< So whenever questions like "what does the following excerpt show about Snowball's character?" appear, I tend not to answer them well. On the other hand, if the question was less open-ended, like "Snowball was scheming. Do you agree?", it's easier for me to answer, because I notice all the clues that would point towards it/against it. So while I'm bad at literature, I'm actually surprisingly okay with critical reading.)

But anyway, writing well doesn't mean you use terribly complicated words to discombobulate people (sorry, couldn't resist), but it's also a matter of how you express yourself. In any case, I think lots of people don't really express themselves well (they don't seem to think through what they are trying to convey), so I'm always confused when they talk. :S (okay, sorry for slight rant.)

With regards to the usefulness of the stuff that I created, I think most of my assignments were meant to be useful. In the end, the usefulness level may have dropped due to poor execution. Of course, there could be stuff that I thought were useful but the world doesn't really think it's useful etc. >.< In the end, there are certainly improvements to be made for each assignment, but gah, no time. 

With regards to gastric problems, I didn't actually suffer as much, but during assignment 1, I had heartburn. So I gave up on fast food for the rest of the assignments, which really helped. Anyway, I personally think nutrition is very interesting, but it's pretty much a grey area. There are many types of diets around (vegetarian, vegan, raw food diet, low-carbs etc.) and different sayings ("tofu is good vs. soy is bad" and "butter/coconut oil is good vs vegetable oils"). I think the best way to approach this is by trying out the diets and see which is most suitable for yourself. By trial and error, I found out that eating too much rice/carbs made my gastric problems worsen, so I ended up with a no-carbs diet during the period when I had gastric pain. To make myself full, I ate more meat and vegetables. The most important part though, is to be aware of these diets and try them out, especially if you have problems with your current one (in a way, your body can only worsen if you keep eating the wrong diet.)

My last thought about CS3216 is the idea of first impressions. I don't think the problem with first impressions are that "you should always leave a good first impression", but rather, it must actually show your real personality. I don't really see a point in having a good first impression if your personality is crap, and it's really sad if you have a bad first impression, even if you're really nice. (Well, it could have been a crappy day for you.) I believe that (First impression == What your real personality is), and that's okay/better in the long run. On a second note, I know we're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I really do hope to get better at telling someone's personality from the first impression that I get. >.< (because I am often nice to the people who are not nice and not nice to the people who eventually turn out to be nice. :( ) I think I need better judging power. >.<

And that ends my CS3216 reflections.

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Two interesting videos that I've watched recently. First up, it's on babies and moral. You can watch for the sheer cuteness of everything though (cute puppets and cute babies!). :D But I think it's really interesting how people are naturally bias (so we aren't that moral after all.) On a side note, I think it'll be interesting to see how pets (dogs/cats) fare with the puppet show morality test though. ^^

Another one on propaganda here. This one is a bit more mmm, conspiracy-theorist-esque. Most of what the video says might or might not be the truth, so it's interesting to see how grey things can be. The most important point I guess is that everything is propaganda, including the video itself.

That's all! Congrats on surviving the long post and CS3216! See you in CS3217! :D If you're wondering, no, I am not going to continue writing here, so no need to keep a lookout here anymore. This is really the last post I am going to make on this blog. :)

Twelfth Week

Hey, sexy lady!

Prof. Colin will dance Oppa Gangnam Style on Monday, the last lecture! So, remember to bring your cameras tomorrow :D

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The week has been alright, but we haven't made much progress. Yujing animated the splash screen and I didn't do much. :S (I did the settings page, but we need to change it when the graphics are out.) Also, corrected a few bugs on animation stopping when going to home screen.

For this weekend, I ended up reading blood type comics, thanks to Jay who posted the 9gag comic on studying on Facebook. There's also a cute youtube video on this. Haha, if you haven't guessed, I am the B blood type, i.e. the one that doesn't like to study >.<

I found English translations here. I really like this particular comic because it happened to me before. xD (We were supposed to bring items (which represent ourselves) to class, and I really just forgot about it. >.< No wonder some teachers don't like me.) If you can read Chinese, you can also look at the comics here. 

(Just a word of caution though; don't judge people entirely by their blood types. )

It's also end-of-term feedback these few weeks. I'm worried because I don't think I did a good job at the start, but towards the end, when I wasn't so busy with CS3216, it got better. Hopefully I don't do too badly on the ratings. :S Also, hopefully they give comments for me to improve. ^^ In any case, if the feedback is terrible, then at least I know I suck as a tutor. xD

Final Project Presentation

I think it's a bit strange to see a Final Project Presentation when we are not really done with our projects (MVP yes, production quality definitely no), but I guess there's no other slot to put it. Also, I'm glad we had the opportunity to see how the other people in 3216 are doing today. Our presentation went pretty well - I think we're the only group who was well within the time limit, but I think it's because our video was really well-done (three cheers to Kai for spending so much time on it!), so we didn't need a lot of slides to elaborate on our application and its features. The font size was a bit small though, I must admit. >.<

Okie, going through all the app presentations one by one!

Classroom Quest

I'm so used to this being JFDI that "Classroom Quest" sounds so foreign to me. Most of the pages they demo-ed looked okay, but I think it can be a little bit more attractive. I think students are easily awed though, or at least, I think I would be if I had to use such a website for my classes, so in a way, they don't have to make it too cool. Usability is a must, but if it was me in my secondary school days, as long as it works better than IVLE, I'm fine with it. The thing that would concern me most however, is reliability. Mainly because students are actually quite kiasu about their grades. 

Intraix iOS App

To be honest, I didn't really understand the whole Intraix thing prior to the presentation, but when they demo-ed it, it was pretty cool. I like the animated statistics + scrolling (good to steal, so I assume that's what Jon Lew was talking about when he said that we should work together.) The rotatable menu is also quite cool. I also like the colour scheme. Throughout the presentation though, I had this one thought at the back of my head and it was, "Who is the speaker? Has he always been in CS3216?" I guess it's partially my fault for not interacting with more people. >.<

Clickee

Arduino! I was actually expecting the Arduino to fail, not because of the group, but because all the Arduino presentations I have seen have always ended up in... moderate success only. So I have this opinion that hardware is well, unpredictable. But they succeeded in showing us that it works. However, I'm still a bit confused by how they're linking the website with the Arduino controls. Umm, how many Arduinos does it take to light up one lightbulb anyway? (Genuine question here! I want to know whether it's cost-feasible to implement it.)

iMeet U 

The first presentation of the entire session, which must have made it more nerve-wracking. There were quite a few technical errors, but it must have been an awfully lot of work for them to make two separate apps. At this moment in time though, I really do hope that they concentrate on just one, because one good application is better than two buggy applications.

Splinkit 

Besides our group's application, this group's application is another app that seems to have changed/ deviated a lot from its original idea. The UI does look not bad, but I think getting users to use it would be a challenge. I don't really see the difference between this and Facebook events/Eventbrite. It does look nice though. Also, is this the group with the time formatting that is missing a '0' at the back?

CrossView 

The interface of CrossView kind of reminds me of Instagram's interface. I think this group needs to work a little more on getting users to use the programme, especially since in a way, they're being compared to Hush! due to the similarities that they have. I don't think I'll use this app, but that's mainly because I don't share pictures on social networks. 

Hush! 

Hush! is more developed and I think the group did a really good job on tackling the question of "how we improved Hush!" Since Hush! (and CrossView) are applications that are already done, I think they have to do more work to convince people that they are not slacking. (In a way, my group came up with something totally new, so people are more impressed by the changes - It's like comparing 0 and 1 for ours, and 1 and 2 for theirs. The first is a infinite amount of change, while the latter is a 100% improvement, although the increment of 1 is still the same). Hush!'s interface hasn't really changed as much (but I'm neither a UI-person or very observant so...) but they do have a list of features that they have added, which I had hoped that they could have demo-ed more. (emoji!) 

With regards to the use cases, I think they should come up with more concrete use cases. I think they don't want to limit their use cases, but because people don't know what to use it for, it might be good to suggest a few possible use cases so that people can relate to it and use it for those purposes. I think there's a slight distinction between having a set of use cases and limiting the use of the websites to those use cases only. And coming up with those concrete use cases makes the audience feel like y'know, that they have done their homework, especially during poster session. (I.e. don't just use the "backmouthing your own organisation" use case.)

Between Two Trees

I like the use of green on the mobile application. The feel of the application is quite okay, but I was a bit confused because Pei Yi mentions the children sometimes when she actually means the parents. (Or at least that's what I felt.) Because she mentioned the word 'children' more than 'parents', I felt like the application was for children to play with, even though I know it isn't. Did anyone get the same confused feeling, or was it just me? 

One UI thingy that I found weird was on the Admin interface, where to add a user, you add the picture first. Logically, we always type the person's name first. Adding the picture usually comes second, so it felt strange to me. But... if it's a client requirement, then yeah. The children are also listed as users, which felt a bit strange since the children don't use the application at all, but it must have been a hassle to type "XXX's parent" instead. 

Some more thoughts on Mini Monocle

Haha, after going through the presentation, I wasn't really thinking any more. Also, I couldn't decide whether Jon Lew's question of "What else do you guys have for the next 2 weeks?" as being sarcastic or not (sarcastic being "you guys have so much more to do", non-sarcastic being genuinely asking what else do we have to do), so I wasn't sure how to answer. But yes, we still have a big component to finish, which is the retain user bit. Sound and animation yes. We also have a couple of bugs to fix (the monocle stops spinning if you go to the home screen, and then back to the application. >.< Cheap way of doing it is to well... just go back to the normal title screen, but prompt them on whether they want to continue their game xD but I'll see whether I can continue it's animation...) 

Also, as a side-note, doing CS2103 has its perks. I think I learnt a lot about software engineering while being a tutor. Today (or yesterday), I learnt about the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. (There's a better description here.) It does tell us that to even become a novice, we must be familiar with the rules, so that's why I think in CS2103, through CE1 and CE2, we tried to enforce the coding standards. Only in the Final Project, then did we give more autonomy to the students to provide them a chance to hit the "Competent" and "Proficiency" level. I also think there is no such thing as "inborn intuition", but rather because people can apply what they know, they immediately see the solutions to the problem. (To apply what you know though, you need to know a lot of stuff.) So in any case, yes, I shall try and follow this method more with respect to acquiring skills. I think in a way, I don't like following rules, so that's why I like to hit "Experts" as much as possible, but I think I fail quite often because I try and skip too many steps along the way. >.<

To end off, my friend has been seeing Dropbox fail on him very often recently, but we both concur that the Dropbox fail icon is really cute, so here it is! 

Eleventh Week + Final Project Update

IMPT!!

Before I begin, it's important to realise that Prof. Colin has NOT posted for a week. :D That means Prof. has to dance Oppa Gangnam Style during poster session! Kekeke!

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In any case, final project is making progress. We have a sort of MVP. Now we have to make sure that it is intuitive and fun, and to finish up random loose ends. (Bug in linker now. >.<)

Also, the road to developing Apple Apps is also littered with obstacles. Here is a list:

1. Could not run simulator on school's computer because we were not in the _developers group. (Solution: Badger Musa for two weeks.)
2. Could not run the app on the device because our certificates were not settled. (Not really solved, but interim measures were taken. Also asked Haocong, Jesmond, & Mengran for help, but they couldn't solve the issue with the NUS certs. Resorted to asking Apple Support, but Apple Support didn't help much in solving the problem.)
3. No 24-hr access or at least, weekend access to PL1. (Solution: Borrow GUI's Mac Mini, code whenever lab is free, or not free xD. Ended up going to SDE to code. --> Honestly, this sounds ridiculous, but at least they have 24 hr labs for both Windows and Macs, and also permission to install things that they want (permission easily sought from one of their seniors). Why doesn't SoC have the same thing? >.>)
4. Mac Mini's OS is Snow Leopard, i.e. highest Xcode version permitted is 4.2 (iOS 5.0). Not only that, it cannot be downloaded on the Apple website. Had to *ahem* acquire it somehow.
5. Because of differences in Xcode version, storyboard could not work. (Solution: Had to replace some dependencies in storyboard to code.)
6. Accidentally upgraded iPad to iOS 6. Here I mention that it's always good to test on the latest stable version, but how was I to know that our school's computers doesn't support iOS 6? >.< (Solution: Ask Colin for a new (or rather, older) iPad.) In any case, I'm going to suppose the school will install the latest Xcode on those computers next year for CS3217. 

Thanks to GUI (Edward Chua) and Haocong (Haocong lent us his developer's certificate!) for their help, we managed to code out a MVP. Kai and Benjamin tested it on Saturday although they worked until really late on Saturday morning. Partially my fault also, because an unexpected problem turned up when deploying on the device. >.<

Eldwin says that my situation was very interesting as a whole. To quote him, "I've never seen anyone face so many obstacles developing for iOS in my life!" The good part is, I'm not the type to bang on my head on the table or cry when faced with such problems, so even if there are more problems (which I hope there aren't), I'll still do my best to solve them. Either that, or I get angry at the people who are causing the problems. >.> 

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Eleventh week's talk was the Entrepreneur Roundtable. I missed the first speaker because my lesson ended late, and I went to get dinner also with Yujing. I found Darius' talk interesting (the timeline part interspersed with a lot of other events was funny. Why is it that "co-worker gets a girlfriend" always turns up in such stuff? xD) A lot of them told very personal stories and it was enlightening to hear how they went through ordeals etc. 

Under Colin's and Su Yuen's insistence ("Why did you not talk to him?!"), we also talked to Bjorn about our app. He was pretty skeptical about our application (parents are lazy and won't bother too much about it), but after consulting Colin and thinking it through, I believe most parents work quite hard for their children, although it's true that there are always black sheep around. In any case, I got more inspired to test out the application after the consultation.

Speaking of consultation, our app crashed in the simulator during our meeting with Colin, Su Yuen and Angad. Mostly because the camera simulator was using a deprecated function. I won't bother fixing that part because it's not as if our real app would use a camera simulator. =.= But I was pretty sad about it crashing, since I spent the previous weekend on it.

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Recently, I made a personal website for myself. It's done using Twitter Bootstrap so it looks pretty generic, and the toughest part was overlaying my name over the navigation bar. =.= Okay, the other toughest part was organising the content - what I wanted to include, what I didn't want to include etc. It has a simple and clean interface and I pretty much like it for a v0.0.

But I can't wait to tear it apart for v0.1. I'm not disappointed in v0.0, just that it's not really 'me'. To be honest, I don't really like simple and clean interfaces. Here, I will diverge a little and provide a link to a very old pdf on how culture affects UI design, and I think, "This must be it." 

As an example of how culture affects UI design (besides the obvious Arabic right to left thing), I present to you the Rakuten website, Japanese market versus Global market version. At first (and that was when I was in Secondary school), I thought that the Japanese page was really hard to read (partially because Japanese was, and still is, hard to read for me), but I got used to it over time. However, recently, when I look at the global page, I find that it's a lot more readable, (No more flashy advertisement at the very top, less colours/headers/options, making it a lot cleaner) but I still won't use it, because the Japanese page, while it isn't really sparkling clean, it's a lot more appealing somehow, with all its colours and arrangement of content. (Concrete example: The navigation bar in the Japanese page is entirely red, while the global page just has a red line drawn on top.) I personally think it's okay if other people prefer the global page rather than the Japanese one, because that's their opinion, while I have mine. (Well, as long as they are not being Eeyores about it; making Piglets like us look small. xD Yes, I have been reading "The 德 of Piglet".  ^^)

I think I grew up more on a flash-based website design rather than pure html/js/css stuff, so I end up loving websites with that type of look more. I also really like the idea of personalising the site, rather than making it generic-looking, so yes, I dislike my generic-looking v0.0. (Actually, generic-looking isn't anything bad, and as an example, Google has a pretty generic interface and people still like to use it. The only bad part is that I link "personal", as in personal website, with the word "personalised".) To end off, here are some trends and examples of sites that look good (imo). I think these designs have a holistic approach here, rather than every element being designed separately. In any case, I shall attempt to make sites as good as these, when I have more time/ ideas.

Website-making

I spent my morning coding but I got a bit bored today, so I decided to read up about various stuff related to website-making. I've decided that I can't really criticise people's web design properly unless I do web design myself, so yup, I had fun doing lots of coding today. (Objective-C in the morning, website-making from late afternoon to now.)

I find this link useful, although there are a lot of broken links/images. :S This is not bad as well. After reading, here are some of my opinions:

1. Content is important. I was looking at a bunch of good webpages, and most of them structure their content for their audience very well. There were some that were quick to answer the audience ("what can you gain from us"). Some even did it in a highly camouflage-y manner (the example they gave was Twitter, which I kind of agree, because after reading the Twitter About Us page, you kind of end up thinking in your head, "yeah, Twitter seems okay to get..."). But yes, content is very important. 
2. There's a lot of artsy stuff involved. Things like visual weight, Rule of Thirds, colour wheel, whitespaces etc., are stuff that you can learn from other fields. For example, you'll probably know Rule of Thirds if you do photography. You might know about whitespaces if you do icon designing (which I suck at.) In any case, my next artsy endeavour should be about the colour wheel! (Which I will do after the final project of course. T_T Too busy!) I'm going to have fun mixing lots of colours together!
3. I think it's easy to make a website, because Twitter Bootstrap makes it exceedingly easy. Because of this, I like graphics-intensive websites a lot more, e.g. Komodo Media. I keep going "awww..." at this site. I'm not sure how tough it is to slice everything up (from photoshop or something) and piece everything up again in code (because I haven't done any websites that are image-intensive), but the effort would be well-worth it. Okay, if I draw better, and if I manage to get better image editing programmes (MS Paint should totally allow transparency to be saved >.>), I will try and do something more image-intensive. But failing that, simple and clean interfaces are good too!

In other news, I think I have been a bad tutor. :S I will go pay more attention to my tutees. I was thinking about it, and I have this belief - "You're a good student if you can understand what concepts your lecturer is trying to test you, and you're a good tutor if you can understand what your students are thinking." I'm not really on the same wavelength as my students, so I will buck up and try to think like them. I will talk to them more!

And enough slacking for the weekend! Tomorrow I have to rush through lots of work. T_T

Ninth and Tenth Week, Assignment 3 and Final Project

Ninth week's talk was on Privacy/Security + Project Management. I like the first part and I have learnt new ways of SQL injection. My favourite method of SQL injection was to drop tables, so I guess I must be quite kind-hearted. :D (Because if it works, they will know that their website is susceptible to it, and usually, people keep database dumps, so they should be able to recover data.) Okay, I'm just kidding.

There was a lot more security stuff, and it's interesting to hear about all these. The only part that was wrong was the architect/foundation analogy of incorporating the security into the design. (The architect usually plans the design, while the engineer is in charge of the foundation! So it should have been the engineer's fault and not the architect's fault, if the foundation is bad xD) If CS3216 is going to continue, I highly recommend this talk for my juniors. I also really want to kope the slides. :S

The talk about project management was enlightening also. I learnt about more jobs that were related to the IT industry. I learnt that I was a technical writer in my assignment 3! (Writing and presenting information is hard k.) I also really like the idea of lean software development. (無駄なことは要らないよ！) To be honest, I don't practice a strict agile or waterfall style; I just use my intuition mostly on what is important and what is not. 

The talk this week was a bit boring for me, because I haven't taken networks yet. (But next sem, my favourite prof. will be conducting this module! <3 hahahhaa) To be honest, even though CS3216 is for a diverse range of people, the talks are mostly about CS-stuff, which is quite boring if you don't understand it. For this talk, I do understand the fun in configuring things to allow more people to access the application, so it was okay. But for the minor details, I was a bit lost.

Also, had midterm (for complex analysis) today and SSD presentation on Monday. Died completely for midterm today (passing is a very good grade in level 4000 Maths modules, but I doubt I will pass.) SSD presentation was swell; I got along with the archi-people well. Two interesting points: 1) Our presentation flowed pretty well because we actually discussed about the flow of it specifically. We really discussed about the "architecture of our presentation", what should go first and whether it fits etc. At one part, I was a bit scared that it wouldn't flow, but my groupmate made it flow. 2) I have uncannily similar thoughts with one of my group-mates. Like, I can't help but agree with everything he says because I was just thinking of the same thing a second ago. The only difference is that he makes his points more convincing, so I should probably learn from him. ^^

I also celebrated my birthday with Kai last week. It was such a surprise that we had the same birthday. To be honest, it's quite nice to celebrate birthdays together. ^^

We didn't really do well for Assignment 3, but I didn't like some of the comments that the tutors made. The marks are okay though. I don't think the swipe thing was entirely not intuitive. Maybe it is, but it's one of the "once you get it, you get it" kind of thing, and swiping is quite an accepted gesture for mobile apps. The fact that they had to try 20 times was =.= also, because I tested it on a few devices and they all worked perfectly. Maybe it's time for them to upgrade their mobile devices. :)

The rest of the comments are okay, so no worries.

Regarding final project, Yujing and I got into a small argument (would you consider that?) with Jin Guan during the weekend. Yujing and I decided to stay overnight in the lab from Friday to Saturday to do work (I had to be in school to talk to my SSD group mates on Saturday also), but we didn't tell Jin Guan about it. But our work was mostly stuff that's not related to CS3216, (I did my SSD presentation and studied for my midterm), and we wanted a sort of girls' night thing, so we pulled another mutual female friend to study/work along with us. 

We did talk a little about CS3216 and we just decided to use Core Data (instead of just SQLite alone). When Yujing told Jin Guan the decision, Jin Guan got very upset because 1) he was unhappy that we didn't ask him to stay and 2) we did not discuss about using Core Data or SQLite with him. 

We weren't really doing CS3216-related stuff so there's no point in him staying. (Moreover, the lab is closed during the weekends.) Because of the girls' night thing, we did end up talking a lot of sensitive stuff so it would have been inconvenient for him to stay over. The reason why we did not discuss with him on whether to use Core Data or SQLite was because we did not want to stress him out further. Jin Guan is the type to get stressed out very very easily, and the more choices someone has, the more stressed out they might get, because deciding between the choices is sometimes very difficult. Also, he already has a lot to learn, given that he hasn't coded in Objective-C before. Asking him to think about Core Data vs SQLite would just stress him further.

In any case, when I asked him whether Core Data or SQLite is better, he did not really give a response on which is better. =.= To be honest, it's one of the things that should just be done instead of deciding the pros and cons of it. I can understand that Jin Guan feels left out and all, but honestly, I don't think it's that big a decision to warrant the whole group coming together to discuss. It's also one of those things that can't really be discussed because none of us have good points supporting Core Data or SQLite. I mean, if I had good points against Core Data, and if my team decided on using Core Data, I do have the rights to disagree with them, but since there's actually nothing that wrong with using Core Data, I don't see why Jin Guan was being so uncooperative.

Anyway, I got too busy (SSD and complex midterm) over the weekend to bother about the argument. In the end, we decided to use Core Data and Yujing wrote out some Core Data stuff. Jin Guan is continuing with it. I... need to hurry and do more work.

Also, one of my friends asked me about something and I'm really happy about it. Not sure if I have time to commit this semester though. ^^

QR Code Reading - Quick Win No. 1

Oops, really bad design. Can't see anything but the QR code is scanned and displayed in the text view in the middle. I haven't tried it on my device yet (my apple developer account has just been activated!) but will try tomorrow! The reason why I have to select a picture instead is because the iOS Simulator doesn't work well with cameras.

Also, credits goes to Eldwin for providing me with links for help! I just mentioned casually to him that I was going to do something on reading QR codes, and Eldwin's like, "Oh, I did something before, do you want my code?" SO NICE! 

Going to have to go full steam ahead in the coming weekend! We're behind time because of some issues, but we'll work hard!