Posted on June 29, 2014 by orbital

One of our trusty advisers will play tutor this coming week to help you get through the basics of Map APIs.  Yos Riady will be giving our Mission Control #7, on Map APIs.  Yos has prepared for this session since even the beginning of summer, so it should be great!

While we’ll try to make the session webcasted, do try to make it down and give our senior students (ahem tutors) some support as they try their hand at teaching.  If you have already implemented these features in your Orbital web project, please still come down to help others with their projects.  On the other hand, if you’re stuck (I see some of you might still be), please come down or watch the webcast.

Remember, if these things are relevant towards your project, you can build them in and count it towards your three basic achievements to extend a Vostok project to Project Gemini level of achievement.

See you soon!

Post session update:

• Slides: http://goo.gl/zUmizz
• Document: http://goo.gl/OsENXC
• Repository: https://github.com/Leventhan/orbital-leaflet
• Leaflet Documentation: http://leafletjs.com/examples/quick-start.html
• Live! Video: http://youtu.be/TGStk3J-WOc?t=3m

Leaflet Book (Optional, Recommended): https://leanpub.com/leaflet-tips-and-tricks/read/

Posted on June 23, 2014 by orbital

Posted on June 17, 2014 by orbital

Dr Damith will be giving our Mission Control #5, a short lecture and homework for his topic of “Visual Design Basics for Non-Designers” tonight at SR2, at the usual timing of 6-8pm. Hope to see you there!

While we’ll try to make the session webcasted, do try to make it down and get a chance to hear our multiple teaching award winner in action!  Be prepared for a great lecture!

Post-lecture edit:

• Notes – Contains links to both of these other resources below.
• Slides (25 MB)
• Video (250MB; big, you may want to download asynchronously)

Posted on June 13, 2014 by orbital

Dear all:

This coming Tuesday we’re back to our regular Mission Control Schedule with a talk by multiple teaching award winner Dr Damith who will be giving a much needed talk about “Visual Design Basics for Non-Designers” at our own SR2 (n.b. special room, not SR3).  Most of you are building products to be used by actual people, so you need to pay full attention to this lecture.

17 Jun 2014, 6-8pm @ NUS SR2
Visual Design Basics for Non-Designers
by Damith Rajapakse

We’ll try to record this one down to Hangouts, but please try to come in and get the full 4D experience.   Keep watch on this post to get updates of the materials and (to be archived) webcast.

Post-lecture edit:

• Notes – Contains links to both of these other resources below.
• Slides (25 MB)
• Video (250MB; big, you may want to download asynchronously)

Posted on June 9, 2014 by orbital

Posted on June 5, 2014 by orbital

Dear all:

This coming Monday we’ll have our one and only Mission Control on the hot-button issue of security, with demos to boot!  It is open to the public, so invite your friends to come.  Christopher Low of ThinkSecure will be coming to SoC to give you a treat on how security works (and doesn’t work).

This MC session is not going to be recorded so if you want to hear this talk you must come down to SoC SR3 on Monday (N.B.: *not* the regular Tuesday date) 9 Jun, from 6-8pm.

Talk Synopsis: Two categories of people (i) People who spend a great deal of time online daily for work, play as well as staying in touch with friends over social networking sites and (ii) creators of social/web applications will find this presentation/demo extremely relevant.  Most of these “online-social” people are “Generation Z” folks who are IT- and internet-savvy in the way they use computers, tablets and mobile devices to stay connected and engage in heavy interactive communication to maintain their online social life.  However, very few of them give equal consideration to the way in which they use such media and thus open themselves up to web-based attacks.

This presentation looks at some of the more recent and stealthy web attacks which target “Generation Z” (or any user of such social media) while they are online and illustrates how some of these attacks are engineered and the impact they have on a person’s online social life.  For web application developers, understanding such types of attacks will help them code better to mitigate such attacks.

Through real life demos which will be shown in the course of the presentation, the presentation brings home the point that today’s Generation Z’s and web-app developers face a huge
challenge in both understanding as well as defending against such modern web-based attacks.

Post edit: The slides for Chris’ presentation are here: http://securitystartshere.org/downloads/pres-Todays-Web-Attacks-How-That-Impacts-Your-Online-Social-Life.zip

Posted on May 29, 2014 by orbital

Tam will be giving a short introduction on Databases — a precursor our School’s Database course with a focus on parts relevant to the beginner Vostok project using Google App Engine. He’ll also touch on the SQL vs. NoSQL debate (where Google’s Datastore is an instance of the NoSQL camp).

This is a beginner level session — applicable to any web-based project.

Materials:

• Notes for the session:  http://tinyurl.com/orbital14-mc3
• Slides: http://bit.ly/1ucNqLO
• Google Hangouts on Air (for live and archived viewing): http://youtu.be/aBcWmnei118
• Recording on SQL vs. NoSQL from 2013: http://tinyurl.com/orbital-sql-nosql

The Mission Control Session will be held at SR3 (COM1 #02-12) next week Tuesday (Note that the Matt Mullenweg event’s date was changed to Wednesday the same date as the Matt Mullenweg event, so you have your afternoon and evening filled); please check back with us at Piazza or on G+ Hangouts for updates.  If we have no problems with the recording you can try to join us on G+ Hangouts on Air, look for [NUS Orbital 2014] as the tag.