Well this is just a summary of a long post about my trip to Singapore, and the code::XtremeApps:: 2007 Programming Competition held there this past weekend. Don’t expect the full blog post to come out anytime soon, though it is in draft.
This competition conflicted with the eGenting Programming Competition, so I had to make a decision. Have a chance at possibly winning first prize again at eGenting, or risk the safety net and go into uncharted territories (at least for me) that is Singapore, and push myself to the max.
Even though it’s so very near this was my first time I visited Singapore, and I am quite impressed with it. They say the grass is always greener on the other side of the field, hell I think it actually does, at least the trees. But once again, this is just from a tourist perspective.
My team members for the competition were once again Kamal, and Kegan from the previous Rails Rumble competition. Together we formed Team RSB, the Ruby Super Brothers (*cough cough*)
Arriving in Singapore, Kamal and myself checked into Carlton Hotel, and lured by the prospects of free Internet, I plugged my beloved IBM laptop into the wall socket, powered it on, and left it alone, while I got comfortable in the hotel room. A few moments later, I returned to my laptop to find the screen completely blanked out. After several minutes of restarting, trying to resuscitate it, I came to the conclusion that it was dead.
My laptop died on arrival to Singapore. How great.
In fact when Kamal put his MacBook charger into the wall socket, it started omitting strange noises, and we deduced that the wall socket must have been faulty.
Later we went to Sim Lim, the Lowyat of Singapore (or so I’ve been told) looking on trying to isolate the problem, and have it fixed within the day. But that didn’t go so well. The repair shop said the mobo was fried and there was not much else I can do about it.
After arriving back from Sim Lim, we talked to the hotel trying to get them to claim responsibility over a faulty wall socket, but that didn’t work at all.
Luckily by the end of the day, I was able to borrow a laptop from Kamal’s relative and setup a development environment on top of Windows Vista. That was also a first experience for me, using Windows Vista. I didn’t have the liberty to install Ubuntu, as I didn’t want to mess with the partitions, so I ran the server version in VMware Player. It was more trouble than it looks, perhaps when I release a verbose version of this trip, then you’ll see.
Now I had to win first place. To repair my current laptop, and or buy a new one.
The code::XtremeApps:: competition lasted for 24 hour, and was held by the renowned (at least the University, don’t know about the school) Singapore Management University School of Information Systems. The campus is really nice, with a very modern architecture.
There was a large number of participants, with over 80 participating teams consisting of 1-3 people each. Surprisingly there were quite a number of girls, and some nice/cute ones to boot. I also noticed that at least half of the participants were carrying MacBooks around, and some were wearing either WWDC shirts or Digg.
The theme for the competition was:
Hospitality and/or tourism services in a participative society.
“Participative society”, well that must have flagged something! Social Networking!
Our Team came up with EventPedia.sg, an event aggregation with all the social networking features (save for folksonomy) site for Singapore. During the first round of judging I was quite thrilled that we were able to build a complete site in 24 hours. Minus the tests for it!
Bummed out after staying up for more than 32 hours, we decided to call it quits, and returned to our hotel room for some nice shut eye. But before we could even rest, or at least I couldn’t (Kamal and Kegan were already in dreamland), we received a call saying we’ve made it to the second round of judging the next day. Now I could sleep easily.
I was told that the second round of judging consisted of only 5 teams, so we only had to beat 2 other teams to get third, and another 2 to get first. Victory was so near.
But shortly after arriving, we found out it was 11 teams. Damn. After the judging was completed, we had some time to kill before leaving Singapore, and went to Vivocity.
After arriving home at 11pm, I checked my email. An email from the organizers. We had won co-third place. That is there were 2 teams who had won third place. I quickly went to sleep after that, from a completely exhausting trip.
I am completely disappointed in myself.
So after seeing Colin’s post on the search for a bluetooth headset, I thought I’ll post my search.
I’ve been looking at Bluetooth Stereo Headphones for a while to go with my Nokia e61i. I previously wasn’t much of a podcasting fan, but with my phone, I can easly transfer the podcasts to it, and listen to it while driving. Sure I could do it before on my computer, but I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the podcasts while hacking away on something else.
Good combinations:
- Podcast + Driving
- Podcast + Eating
- Podcast + LRT/Train
- Podcast + Taxi
- Podcast + Waiting for the person who should have arrived 45 minutes ago
The one problem that I’ve been having listening to Podcasts is that there is dangling wire down from my ear connecting the headphones to my phone. It increases the likelihood of accidents occurring that could be life threatening to the Nokia e61i. Damned!
While at Lowyat the other day I thought I’d press around.
Nokia has a product the BH-501. But when listening to it, the quality sucks. Songs sound like they are being played over a phone. Charges via the same adapter as my Nokia phone. 1 less charger to use. 1 extra charger to carry around. But sound quality sucked, so, no show.
Then there was the i.Tech BlueBAND R. This one came with a dongle so you could attach to to anything with an audio out. For example, your laptop, tv, anything really. Not bad I thought. It sounded great as well! Then I tried to test it on my phone. It sounded just like the Nokia one. The person said I needed “software” on my phone, so I let them load the software (MSI Player) and tried it out. Didn’t play all of my songs, except 1. But it did sound good. They said I should convert my music tracks. I said no. Then they suggested I listen to the music via the dongle if i wanted good quality. I said no, its Bluetooth for a reason, right? No wires. The dongle is nice if i want to connect it to non bluetooth devices though. Plus the mic feature wouldn’t work.
I’m sorry, I pay for convenience, not inconvenience.
It made me wonder, does the quality suck because the bandwidth between the headphone and phone is limited to Bluetooth at 40kBs?
I’ve done some Google-ing research on this topic, but the question is, do these headsets exist in Malaysia?
Any recommendations on some guys?
So continuing my series on the Nokia e61i.
Fullscreen Wallpaper
For some strange reason, if you take an image, resize it to the max resolution of the phone (320×240), and decide to use it as a wallpaper. It’s not fullscreen. This is because the status bars on the top and bottom block the way, and the image is squeezed between these leaving a gap on the left and right side. Very bad?
Example: The Good and Bad Wallpapers
Note: Notice the blank space on the left and right?
Disclaimer: Yes I also censored something…
After a bit of googling, I found the solution. Resize and crop to 320×198. Then it fits. So now I have the nice Dawn of Ubuntu wallpaper on my phone. You can grab my already cropped wallpaper if you are interested.
BTW: No I’m not going to stick a Ubuntu sticker on the phone, neither a GNU sticker. Though I have some Firefox stickers though…but nah… I might stick this though…
Mobile Code
Mobile Code is a way to encode information into a 2d image barcode, and decode it again.
Note: Notice the link is an IP address and not a domain? Why?
The image there supposedly stands for ‘http://aizatto.com’.
But in the list of mobile code readers only 2 are freeware applications Kaywa and UpCode.
Sadly Kaywa doesn’t support the e61i, and UpCode tries to connect to the internet via Maxis 3G, when a perfectly good Wirelees network is set up. Similarly I don’t have Maxis 3G service.
Video playback
So now I also have mini video player with me wherever I go. Awesomeness. But alot of my files are way to big in both file size and resolution for this tiny machine. Now I’m not underestimating the power of Nokia e61i but, it’s best to optimize things.
So I set my flags for ffmpeg, transferred the file. But no luck.
Thank goodness someone has covered converting videos via ffmpeg to be playable in RealPlayer.
ffmpeg -i movie.avi -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -s 320x180 -acodec aac -ar 48000 -ab 128 -ac 2 movie.mp4
Note: You may want to be careful of the size (-s flag) of the output film, so that it doesn’t look stretched.
Not sure what those flags are? Tip: man ffmpeg
Note: Ubuntu will blow up on you because of the codecs. There are suggestions out there though, so just look for em. I initially did this on my OpenSUSE box, so I didn’t even notice…
Example: the love bug by m-flo featuring BoA. That hotty is BoA 
Example: Creative Commons - Reticulum Rex
ODF Support
Thanks to the comment on my blog by Oscar B, there seems to be another alternative to ODF support on the s60. Though it looks a bit outdated (1st June 2006). Similarly its only quite basic.
Collecting Links
For all of these stuffs, I googled most of them. So I’ve been collecting links and storing them in del.icio.us using the s60 tag.
There is so much Freeware/shareware
There is so much Freeware/Shareware out there for s60, but how about Free and Open Source Software?
Guess the only way to solve that is to put my words into action…
s60 Development
Kudos to mypapit for advice on doing s60 development.
I have a growing list of ideas of what software to develop in (hopefully) the near future.
Possible software to develop:
- Better calendar, with tagging/folksonomy support
- ODT viewer - help adoption of ODT in Malaysia and learn the technical details of the fomrat
- FOSS video player
- Remote keyboard - I want to contorl my Linux machine!
Any suggestions? List them down!
If you have freeware alternative to these now? Please suggest some, especially for the remote keyboard. I’d love to give presentations using my phone so I don’t have to keep going back to the laptop.
Stupid Problems
So here is a list of stupid problems I’ve encountered. I’ve already checked if I am running the latest software/firmware. Yes I have.
- Audio recording is only for 1minute
- Where is the FOSS
- Mobile Code isn’t working as well as I hoped it would
