Notes on codes, projects and everything
About Me
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About Me
I am Lai Choon Siang. The place where I am living currently is in Subang Jaya, Malaysia. Most of the time, people I met online know me by my Internet Alias “Jeffrey04”. In my free time, I like reading books, traveling, taking photographs and blogging. I am currently maintaining two blogs; first consists mostly life journals in Mandarin language and the second, which is the blog that you are reading at, would be used to keep my findings and notes in web-development field. Besides that, I am also help in operating a Chinese blogger community website which helps to promote blogging in Mandarin Language among Malaysian.
I started learning about computer when I was in the age of 10. The first program I learned was Delta Drawing and recent studies claimed that it is actually a type of simplified LOGO language. I also learned a bit of LOGO before Windows 95 became popular and I quited the class which taught LOGO. Then I spent some time in learning the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) around the age of 12 and started to write some simple websites and applied CSS in later years. After getting used with installing scripts, then I built some bulletin boards using YaBB, YaBB SE, SMF, phpBB and Discuz without knowing much about programming.
In my secondary school life, I joined Malaysia Red Crescent Society and held the position as an Afternoon Session Representative, then Assistant Secretary, followed by Secretary and finally as a President. Besides that, I also joined Chinese Language Society and held position as a form representative. In these societies, I joined some camping activities, marching competitions and attended some courses such as basics in first aid. I also participated in educational slide making competition for physics when I was in form 5.
Then I entered Tunku Abdul Rahman College to take my Diploma in Computer Science and Management Mathematics. Throughout the two years of studies, I learned various programming languages such as C, basic JAVA, HTML and CSS, Classic VB and SQL as well as other subjects like Accounting, SDLC and Mathematics such as Statistics, Algebra, Calculus, Introductory Discrete Maths etc. Besides that, I also spent some time in learning PHP after learning the key-concepts of programming in college and built a simple blog. However, I migrated the blog to WordPress because of the lack of time and limited knowledge in spam prevention.
After obtaining my Diploma, I continued my studies in Advanced Diploma cum Bachelor’s Degree (in conjunction with Campbell University, North Carolina, USA) of Computer Science and Management Mathematics on a partial scholarship offered by the college. Throughout the two years of study, the new programming languages and technologies learned are procedural C# with ASP.NET, Object Oriented VB.NET, Oracle PL/SQL and Microsoft T-SQL, SWI-Prolog as well as some theory subjects such as basics in Database Design and Maintenance, basic Operating System principals, Windows 2003 Administration and Maintenance, Artificial Intelligence, OOAD as well as Mathematics subjects such as Quality Control, Applied Statistics, Theory of Interest, Mathematics of Life Insurance and Financial Market, Discrete Mathematics, Operational Research, Cryptography etc. I also took some liberal arts unit in Introduction to Psychology, Music Appreciation and Introduction to Short Story.
The topic for my final year seminar was on Solving Linear and Non-linear Equations using Numerical Analysis and built a web 2.0-ish tourism information website titled “Trekkr” with co-operation of Regina Foo. The final year project was built using PHP5 and MySQL5 with full Object Oriented MVC architectural. We didn’t use any framework at that moment as we wanted to keep the project simple (and the MVC architectural design is posted here). The final year project website was being uploaded to a real life web-server offered by my friend Clemence for testing in production environment and was taken down after the development completes. The web server used was Apache and was operating on Linux Operating System.
I am currently graduated from college and is looking for a job in web-development field. Unless I am developing projects other than PHP5, I would be on LAMP for my web-development projects. I used Eclipse PDT to develop my final year project but I am shifting to OpenKomodo for my future PHP5 projects. The operating system that I am using most of the time is Ubuntu Linux as it doesn’t cost me much money to work on it.
Random Posts
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Cold-start and Ramp-Up problems
Everyone knows folksonomy is (or was) cool and useful, however, when it is applied in real life, then problem arises. The idea of blogging this came while I am struggling to get my literature review report done (been doing it for months, I am being so ridiculous, I know). As a matter of fact, as I am dying to get it done, there are a couple of things that I found to be blog-worthy. So, I will be publishing a couple of brief overview to some of the topics involved in the coming days in a really casual (read: lazy, and full of personal speculations) way to this very humble little blog of mine.
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Adding a new settings applet for my daemon
This is basically a small incremental update to my script published here. For some reason, the previous version of the script didn’t really work, so this release should fix the problem. Besides fixing the problem where the daemon did not actually launched at start up, I have added a settings applet for this script as well.
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Fuzzy C-Means and Content Recommendation
This post is purely based on my own speculation as there’s no experiment on real-life data to actually back the arguments. I am currently trying to document down a plan for my experiment(s) on recommender system (this reminds me that I have not release the Flickr data collection tool :/) and my supervisor advised to write a paragraph or two on some of the key things. Since he is not going to read it, so I might as well just post it here as a note.
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#nand2tetris is fun
The Nand2Tetris part I at coursera is very much my first completed course. It was so fun to actually work through the material and it feels amazing to know how simple it is to actually build a computer from scratch. While it is simple, it doesn’t mean the course itself is easy though. I was struggling to get the CPU wired up properly that I spent two to three days just to get it working.
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Mixing Non-array and Array in array_map()
array_map function is a function that I use the most in my php scripts recently. However, there are times where I want to pass some non-array into it, therefore often times I have code like the snippet shown below:
$result = array_map(
'some_callback',
array_fill(0, count($some_array), 'some_string'),
array_fill(0, count($some_array), 'some_other_string'),
$some_array
)It doesn’t look good IMO, as it makes the code looks complicated. Hence, after seeing how the code may vary in all different scenarios, I created some functions to clean up the array_map call as seen above. Code snippet after the jump
