Thoughts from a Techie

This is an awesome place. Well that's what people who belongs to that institution (almost) always say about it. I'm not officially an NTU undergrad until tomorrow after online matriculation exercise & medical check-up result, and I've just checked in on Saturday. Regardless, it's still an awesome place. 1) The pioneers of Pioneer Hall (from now on referred to as "18" because I want it that way - probably because it sounds like the way Hunger Games districts are referred to). Being a foreigner, staying in a hall is an obvious and simple choice. Even when I've already been in Singapore for more than 4 years, I obviously don't have the confidence and the money to go out there and rent a HDB flat. But when the actual results came in and the new 18 popped up, I was disappointed, for they assigned me the most expensive double aircon room out there when I explicitly stated my intentions for a non-aircon room together with my roommate (teaser: he...

This is the season for developers' conferences - big events at the Moscone. Starting with Apple's WWDC 2014, keynote address this morning in my timezone. As usual, I didn't stay up for Apple conferences. Simply not a big fan. Plus streaming requires QuickTime, which is pretty useless besides the streaming itself. So I waited for the whole keynote to be available on Apple Events, installed QuickTime (really Apple?), sit back and enjoyed. And it was a pretty enjoyable keynote. Craig Federighi certainly knows how to crack people up with OS X naming. The whole Handoff setup is absolutely brilliant. And of course let's not forget Swift. (Makes me immediately think of Taylor Swift. No big deal.) Except the comparisons. Seems like they do it every year without fail. When they talk about OS X, they compare with Windows. When they talk about iOS, they compare with Android. And they only, and always, talk about latest version's adoption. OS X Mavericks vs Windows 8. i...

Good time to break my string of three long opinionated serious posts for something more light-hearted and fun. Fixing stuff. DIY goodness. Long story short: once upon a time, a few mistakes ago, I dropped my Samsung external hard drive. It was lying on the cold hard ground. Ohhhh ohhhh ohhhh ohhhh ohhhhh, trouble, trouble, trouble. The USB connector inside the drive snapped out of its integrated circuitry (IC). All my hard work torrenting movies now gone. Or maybe not yet. I was determined to get things fixed and I got lucky. I'll explain my "get lucky" moment in a short while. But in the mean time, the best I could do was breaking the drive open. And it took an enormous beating. Forgive the bad focus but you got the idea. Only hard prying could get this thing opened. And I was greeted with this bad boy. Nothing like I had ever seen before. Some technical stuff: normally hard drive connectors are SATA-to-USB which makes accessing data from...

Note: This post is actually a not-so-literal translation of the previous one (http://nguyenhuyanhh.blogspot.com/2014/04/3-tuan-canh-google-docs-nhung-khoanh.html). 29/04/2014, 21h00. The very last time I press that "save" button in the Apps Script editor. Did a copy-paste special values-only on the data, officially locked that into the database. Done with the first round of RED Your Song contest (bit.ly/TSVNContest) organised by the fanpage Taylor Swift Vietnam (which I'm a current admin of) and sponsored by Cornetto. It requires participants to submit a YouTube video of them singing to Red by none other than Taylor Swift. I've only been in this position for a little more than a year, done this data collection on Docs twice or thrice and I must say it's a pretty interesting job. Probably thanks to my love for El Goog (yes, their Spreadsheets are really powerful) and my general interest in stats. However this time the task is slightly different in nature - it...

29/04/2014, 21h00. Lần cuối cùng trong 3 tuần canh google docs cùng apps script mình bấm nút save. Copy hết số liệu, ko formula, paste lại chỗ cũ, sort range khóa sổ. Vòng 1 cuộc thi RED Your Song (bit.ly/TSVNContest) chính thức khép lại. Từ trước đến nay 1 năm làm ad mới 2,3 lần dùng google docs nhập liệu nhưng cũng đã khá quen. Công việc rất đơn giản nhưng thực sự thú vị, chắc cũng tại tâm hồn thích tính toán + tình yêu vốn có với anh google. Nhưng lần này hơi khác vì đây là cuộc thi, giải thưởng rất lớn, yêu cầu tuyệt đối không có sai sót vì sai một li đi mấy chục triệu. Cứ chiếu thể lệ mà làm. Cái gì ko hiểu ko biết thỉ hỏi TN. Thế mà cũng nhiều vấn đề phết. Không hiểu thay vì đập muỗi mà muốn đập bàn đập ghế bao nhiêu lần vì khó chịu, vì nóng. 1. Khó chịu nhất, khó hiểu nhất là KHÔNG ĐỌC KĨ THỂ LỆ TRƯỚC KHI GỬI BÀI. Bao nhiêu bài thi trong số 48 bài đã nộp (49 nếu tính cả bài nộp 1 tiếng sau khi hết hạn. thi lần này có vẻ hot :)) bị mình/TN nhắc về tên + phần mô...

I don't watch many awards shows. I only watch those with Taylor Swift on (you know, I'm a big fan of her); most of the times music shows. This is the first time I've seen a film awards show live. Well there must be something there for me isn't it? Taylor is again nominated for Best Original Song. Given she's only an occasional actress, being nominated for a Golden Globe for a song/score category is a big deal and I'm quite interested. The nominees for Best Original Song in a Motion Picture are: Atlas, from The Hunger Games: Catching Fire; Let It Go, from Frozen; Ordinary Love, from Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom; Please Mr. Kennedy, from Inside Llewyn Davis; Sweeter Than Fiction, from One Chance. And the winner is, Ordinary Love, from Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. Quite deserving, I guessed. After all just looking at the nominees, not just the songs but the artists behind them and the films they represent, I figured it would be difficult for Taylor to...

Not a Google event so I'm not going to post my live blog here. First thing, I'm really frustrated at Apple for not providing a livestream. It boasted its own iTunes Festival being livestreamed to 100 countries, yet it couldn't provide the same for its own major event. Well one positive consequence of this is the huge amount of interaction due to the lack of livestream (heck, I can't type that fast watching a livestream!), but still there's much to be desired. Other than that, as with any other Apple products events, it's packed with a lot of hoo-hahs - 64-bit chip in a phone, fingerprint recognition, camera with burst, slow-mo, stabilization, fine-tuned exposure, etc. Seems to be a large focus on the "it just works" kind of stuff! Well I foresee a lot of Google+ Auto-Awesomes from this kind of camera. And well since there's no livestream I switched to my favorite Taylor Swift music to kind of escape the quiet and creepy night (it's 1am wher...