It is kind of funny that I have entered into 2017, and realise the blog here has been left deserted most of the time. Partly I don't have time to plan and write, but more likely I have not put priority to do so.
I have recently bought a(nother) new Raspberry Pi - this round it is a Pi 3 B, and the whole set with case and LCD from Amazon UK. Everything looks beautiful, and only months after I have returned from the UK I get the chance to give it to my student for his final year project.
If you have been using Android Studio > 1.5, a while ago, we might have been pampered by the automatic creation of new project with Fragment built-in ready for immediate development. Such luxury is helpful, but it also may taken away the understanding of how we can actually add fragments to a new project manually. This will happen when you have upgraded Android Studio to 2.1.1, and are not familar with the latest changes to the user interface.
Since last October, I have been working on porting the previous MyUniBus shuttle bus tracking service to a newer version using Cordova based hybrid environment (details on that will come in another entry, hopefully soon). The backend resides on a digitalocean droplet (the cheapest!) with only 512MB RAM, which is sufficient in most test cases. When I say in most test cases, it actually means - in real world applications, it may reach its limit.
Last week I had the privilege to attend the Confluence 2016 conference in Amity University, Noida, India. First of all, I gave a keynote speech named: "From IoT to IoP: Towards Democratization of Data". At the same time, I also presented a presentation for a paper named "Wi-Fi Fingerprint Localisation using Density-based Clustering for Public Spaces: A Case Study in a Shopping Mall".
Time flies. how true.I have "rebooted" this blog by thinking I should write more. Guess what, after a few updates at the beginning of 2015 - nothing much practically happened here since then. In real-life, many things happened. It was a great year with interesting research carried out, publications accepted and quite some travelling done. Teaching wise I have again explored a few more things to hopefully better gauge the needs and outcome. All in all, a fruitful year. The following is kind of a short summary (remind me if I missed something):
I was privileged to be invited to give a talk at the Star Education Fair 2015 yesterday, titled "Speaking in Code: Career in Coding and Programming". It was a good session with almost a few hundred students and parents listening to us. Together with me was Gurpardeep (APU) and Chin Ike (KDU), covering topics from general career prospect of IT/Computing jobs, atttributes/attitude of a good computing graduate to interests upcoming career path - Game Development.
truly a good movement I must say - I have observed so many people struggling and giving up on coding, because the learning just does not make sense. I have asked around and I think no one knows the $1000 answer that 100% uplift the burden any budding coder has.