Reflection on Facebook/iPad app seminar

Well, so the Facebook/iPad seminar is over, tomorrow is a public holiday (but not for every CS3216 student, I’m quite sure haha), then Thursday is assignment 1 deadline, assignment 2 supposed to be issued today, and I am sitting here writing a blog post. How cool?

Ok let’s start. My assigned iPad application is InClass by group 5. Since I haven’t had a chance to play with it, my reflections are basically base on their presentation. There are two points that I am quite concerned from the app:

-       UI design: it turned out that most of the “bad and ugly” things tonight contain UI design. Why’s that? I don’t know, but in my opinion, I think it’s impossible to make a UI that satisfies everyone. The inClass app is an example. I think it has a good UI, but as they presented, the UI itself is not quite intuitive.

-       Target a specific group of user: I agree with this term, as it is true not only for applications, but for every products out there. Knowing who the application will serves is a must, and luckily (as a student), I think the inClass satisfy very well the need of student for taking notes and managing tasks.

And also there are some points worth noting from the seminar also:

-       There are only 1.5/11 (the Sims social and half of Pekay’s little author) apps are about Facebook app. While the name of the seminar is *Facebook/iPad seminar, more than 10 choose iPad. And we don’t even touch iOs programming this semester right? Is Facebook app dying? Maybe, as for what I’ve seen, top used/grossing “apps” on Facebook are games. And our group spent quite a hard time to figuring out which Facebook app to choose also :(.

-       Microsoft’s talk last week and the HTML5 workshop seems to have a good impact. Half of the groups today chose it as their implementation solution (and note the fact that 10.5 present an iPad app). HTML5 will take over the world?

That’s it. Back to coding. One last thing, having to give a reflection on an app that I haven’t used before and only heard it for 7 minutes is damn hard for me :(

Ah one more last thing, may I know when will iPad v2 come Prof ? Week 4 already :(

Reflection on lecture 3

So it has been 3 lectures hah. Time flies so fast when you concentrate doesn’t it? Ok here are my thoughts about the lecture then.

I was quite impressed by the power of HTML5, not by the presentation slides but by the “SVG girl” clip. Wah it looks amazing like a cartoon, 3D cartoon. And how fast it rendered! I liked the geo-location feature too (it somehow related to what I am going to do for the mobile assignment), and beside the <canvas> is quite cool. Last Saturday, the CSS workshop, Kent shown us a clock rendered dynamically, now there is even a fish tank with 750 fishes swimming! And yes, I really feel the need to pick up CSS3 and HTML5 fast, really fast then.

The other part of the lecture was kind of an advertisement for Microsoft product lah. IE9, the Mango phone and Microsoft Azure. From what I see, there is certain advantage using IE comparing to Chrome and Firefox from the rendering speed perspective, but it is not enough then. If there are more and more HTML5 web app, Chrome and Firefox are going to adjust their browser too. In my opinion IE is not gonna taking back the browser cake then. The same goes for the Mango phone, as I think first their UI is not as intuitive as Apple’s, and their apps market is not as good as Android’s.

Last, just a quote from Prof Ben “the world is moving toward mobile, social and cloud”. Figure out what to learn next? :)

On mid-submission of Facebook assignment

So the deadline is over. As Prof said it is more for him to give us comments than for grading, I believe it is quite important too. We already spent two nights at SoC, pushed each other on Saturday (just before deadline, I know) to make the page work “functionally”. The page is up, and partly working as we expected, however what important is we only have about 10 days to complete it. And there are lots of features waiting to be added. I guess there are more nights at SoC are waiting too =).

About the process, I think I’ve improved a lot in terms of preparing before deadline. Yes I don’t want to let my teammates down (and, I received a warning from Prof Ben too). More than that I think this is a chance to learn what I really like, so I spent almost every time I had on the project. It turns out that I learnt a lot too, especially PHP, since I am quite familiar with MySQL, HTML and Facebook API already. About Facebook API, I have seen quite a number of complaints about it from my friends :P. I suffered about it too in the summer, but then I really appreciated it. Why? Since when you can work with the poorly documented Facebook, you can easily adapt and work with others :P. Twitter is an example in my case.

By the way, the Facebook/iPad seminar is coming, and 3 in our group don’t receive an iPad yet. As our assigned app works on both Facebook and iPad, I guess we can only concentrate on Facebook if we cannot have the dear iPad2 this weekend :(

On setting up database for Facebook assignment

I’m not sure this is allowed(?), but after spending quite some time setting up the database to run on AWS, I think I will document it a bit here, for me if I get trouble on this later (and maybe for later CS3216 batch too?)

Assumption: you had an AWS EC2 running instance and you can SSH in.

First, make sure you have installed MySQL server. If not, use yum install mysql-server

Then following these steps:

1. Configure MySQL to start on startup
ntsysv
check "mysqld"
2. Start up MySQL
/etc/init.d/mysqld start

3. Set root password
mysqladmin -u root password new-password-here

If you got problem on this, saying

mysqladmin: connect to server at 'localhost' failed

error: 'Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO)'

then continue from step 4, else you can continue from step 5

4. We need to resetting the mysql root password.

First we need to stop mysql:

Now to start mysql using –skip-grant-tables:
 

NOTE: Remember the ‘&’ at the end of the line as this will start the process in the background. Also take note of the PID (process id) highlighted in red – we’ll need this later

So far, so good. Lets login to mysql so we can change the password:

Now to change that password:

With that out of the way, we still need to kill the mysqld_safe instance of mysql we started earlier:

Great! Lets start mysql again and see if we can login:

That’s it for resetting the password.

5. From here you can use access the database on your server normally =). Hope it helps.

Reference:

http://www.scottmurphy.info/mysql-amazon-ec2-install-workbench-ssh-tunnel

http://goscalable.com/category/cloud/aws/