Alternative Tools beside Lightroom

Photography Hobbyist can now rejoice as there are finally a decent photography Software beside Lightroom. A German company who developed Snapseed mobile app was bought by Google in 2012 and today Google decide to give the software for free. So what are you waiting for?

Nik Collection

Here are some Tutorial links

The new technology has finally arrived... a year late.

Nike will be coming out these adaptive shoes soon. Sure it will be cool but in terms of comfort and functionality, would it be beneficial for the athletes?

Developer Survey 2016

Stack Overflow has conducted a very interesting survey about around developers. I used to be frequent visitor, but have not come back since I started on my new job. (including my blog) I have been working more towards analytics and data. I hope I got the time to work on it and improving myself and get more motivation in Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2016

My first Hackathon experience

It was my first experience joining a Hackathon Competition. Thanks to my ex-colleague from IBM, I managed to find something I want to accomplish long time ago. To join a geek kinda competition. :)
This Changi Airport Hackathon was organized by UP Singapore and the competition lasted around 24 hours excluding the pre-workshop.

Before the event started, there was a pre-hackathon workshop where the organizer will introduce the background challenges to tell us about the key challenges which Changi Airport encountered. From there you get to know the key problems and opportunities which you might be able to collaborate with Changi Airport in future if your project seems to be feasible for them. It is also the time to find the suitable members to join as a team for the hackathon.

Following that after a few days, there is Ideation Workshop where the exercises will help you to share observation participate in the discussion and your ideas to share with them. This will be the final opportunity to form / join a team for the hackathon.

On Day 1 of the hackathon, this is where your solution started and start coding. There is also consultants around to advise you if your idea/prototype. For my team, we were thinking about experiencing and enhancing the capabilities of engaging the customer better by introducing an interactive concierge using IBM Watson Dialog. Something like Cortana built into i-Changi App helping to answer any queries and suggesting ways to spend their time at the airport.

On Day 2 is where you do your final touchup and ready for your final presentation. There will be presentation clinics which will help to refine your presentation. It will be judged by the top level management from Changi Airport Group and the result will be disclosed on that day. I am glad that team won the 3rd prize despite we were really rushing to get the app running up and meet the minimum baseline objective.

This is what I learned from my first hackathon.

• Preparation - This one I guess everyone should know. Things what to bring for that day. Don't forget your jacket! You will be staying the whole day in a room and it might be freezing for you.
• Decided for an idea - The time you step into the place on day 1, you should have a glimpse of an idea how your final idea and end product should look like.
• Communication - Your team should have agree on what to work and how should it be done.
• Keep the scope small - We know that every ideas are great to have but the most important thing is that can it be delivered within timeframe? Are the deliverables to big to cover? Especially for events like hackathon, your team cannot afford to make any mistake in the later part and discovered it is impossible to finish. there is no such thing as plan B here.
• Know what to use for your tools - I admit I wasn't prepare for this event as my software was not ready when the day starts. I loss some of the hours to get everything done and get started.
• Bring your tumbler or water bottle - as most hackathons was held indoor, they usually host in very cold places. You need to remember to bring your jacket and your bottle just in case u need to warm yourself up.
• Dual monitor - I find out myself by working with 1 monitor really lowered my productivity. If possible invest a portable usb-powered monitor if you can, it helps alot.

Would I join another competition again? Yes I would! Though its pretty intense but its also quite challenging and satisfying!

Tweets on Singapore General Election 2015

GE2015 dashboard tweets is created by me. It is based on my free time and interest to know the insights about what people are talking about during the election days. It is not supported, funded or aligned with any political party. Pls reminded that these information does not ask you who to vote for. It is just information extracted from tweets from one main source, twitter.

Compare to my previous project, I have added sentiment scores to show if the tweets is geared towards negative or positive tweets.

You can check out the interactive dashboard here.

Sentiment words based from : http://www.cs.uic.edu/~liub/FBS/sentiment-analysis.html

A 'Relevant' Resume.

In the world of job market opportunity, every resume just look the same. Mentioning about your success, promoting your skillsets, bragging out your achievements...

Ever wonder of doing a different resume?

http://designtaxi.com/news/377846/Man-Fills-R-sum-With-Failures-Non-Skills-Gets-Eight-Responses-In-A-Month/

This may actually work? I may try out next time to see hows the response. :)

Heart of a Gamer

One of the person whom I respected most and brought me fun during my childhood times.

I can still remember his speech from GDC. I remembered that I literally listened the whole speech. Especially when he first introduced himself on the stage.

On my business card, I am a corporate president.
In my mind, I am a game developer.
But in my heart, I am a gamer.

http://gdcvault.com/play/1014847/

RIP Mr Iwata.

My first Raspberry Pi project

I won a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B during the Singapore Microsoft Build 2015 at Sentosa Resort World.

Rather I was quite surprised by it because it was the last prize that was won by me. (How I wish I have won the Microsoft Band too so I can work on something!) I have actually planning to get either one soon maybe end of this year or next as I am thinking to work on some IoT project on home automation.

Anyway here's how it look like after unboxing it.

The size is about a little bigger than a credit card size

My initial project is to make a casing for it

Well it didn't quite make it because

• It was left in open air and there is no way for me to cover it up.
• The plugs didn't fit quite well as it was obstructed with the lego pieces from Mindstorm.
• It was quite flimsy and not easy to remove the pi.

I decided to scrap it and worked on using lego bricks instead and here is my result.

Start from the left : Usb cable as powered adapter, HDMI cable. RJ-45 cable and Bluetooth dongle to control my keyboard and mouse.

The interior how it looks like.

Installed Kodi aka xbmc for media box home entertainment. Able to stream internet TV without any lag in performance. Very satisfied how small this Raspberry Pi 2 can do with just a small piece of device that cost 49 SGD. You can get it from here to start your own project too!

Tweets on Mr Lee Kuan Yew before and after his passing.

I have created a project collecting information on social media about Founding Father of Singapore Mr Lee Kuan Yew to find out what are the people tweeting and also who are the people tweeting about it most.

You can use visualization here.

Unfortunately one of the Tableau component is not showing up and leaving a blank space on the right. I will update it when they get back to me. That space was for the information who is the person tweeting it and what he is currently tweeting. Scary huh?

Out of Memory Exception running Java in R

I encounter this problem when I tried to run a function that execute Java to export a dataset from R to xlsx. It seems like its not a good way to export large dataset using the library(xlsx) as it may eat up the java memory. So I do I resolve this?

I have tried running the following command to expand the heap size but it does not work. options(java.parameters = "-Xmx1000m")

The way I found is to use XLConnect library.

Instead of using write.xlsx(myDataset, file = "myfile.xlsx") from the xlsx library, I used library(XLConnect).

writeWorksheetToFile(myFile, data=mydataset, sheet="mySheet")

It has a function to clear the memory, xlcFreeMemory().

If all else fails, try writing to CSV format then convert into xlsx from Excel.