Posted on June 3, 2013 by orbital

Photo credits: Sean McEntee @ Flickr.

Min will be covering Prezi, a zoomable editor, as well as open HTML5 alternatives.

We’ll also be examining best practices for Prezi, and finding and correctly attributing sources for photos, sounds that you can embed into your presentations.

It’ll be held at SR3 from 6-8pm today.  Feel free to join us virtually via Hangouts and on Askbot.  See you then.

For your reference the list of Mission Control sessions can be found here.

Posted on May 23, 2013 by orbital

Courtesy: billsoPHOTO @ Flickr

To help you with what is expected for the first peer evaluation, we have done a sample project report, evaluation and response for the example Giftbook project. To see it:

  • On IVLE, under CS3108B_Orbital, go to Project -> **MISSION CONTROL** (Orbital Instructing Staff) -> Project Wiki to find the project report
  • You can find a sample evaluation of the project in the Folders.
  • The project report also contains a response to the peer review — after peer evaluation is completed on Monday 2 June, we will send you a copy of the feedback provided by your peers, and you are supposed to respond in your report by Wed 5 June.

Posted on May 21, 2013 by orbital

Credits: Scott Beale @ Flickr

Min will be giving a short tutorial and hands-on for Twitter Bootstrap — the CSS framework that is useful for giving a pretty decent look for most websites.  A key part of Bootstrap is in its responsive design, making sites look decent on small resolutions (low res smartphones) as well as big ones (your 30″ Apple Thunderbolt Display).

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

The Mission Control Session will be held tentatively at SR3 from 6-8pm next week; please check back with us in IVLE and Askbot for updates.

UPDATE: We’ve gotten permission from Blk 71 to host it at their space!!  Come join us over at Blk71’s Seminar Room 1.  Click on the event venue Image on the right for Google Maps info.

event logo (horizontal)_4 Event Venue_4

Post event update — Re-Recording done

For those of you who missed it, or were a bit confused about it; you can watch the re-recording I’ve done of the show here.

Posted on May 21, 2013 by orbital

Please check your email (as per your team registration) for the assignment of peer evaluators.  You should receive them within the next 24 hours from Min’s email address (knmnyn at gmail dot com).

Feel free to introduce yourselves to your CC:ed “booster” (the Orbital TA assigned to you to help encourage you to get through Orbital), and to your fellow teams (in the To: list)

Due to way IVLE configures project evaluation, you’ll be able to evaluate all of the other teams, but you only have to give feedback to the project teams that we’ve mentioned in the email.

Your peer evaluators may change over the summer, but we hope they will mostly stay fixed with these assignments.

Paypal’s team will be giving a short tutorial on Magento — an eCommerce web framework for PHP.  Unfortunately, the presentation cannot be recorded (PayPal policy) so you’ll actually have to be on site to get access to this tutorial.

The Mission Control Session will be held in SR3 from 6-8pm.  This is the default timing and location unless otherwise specified (we are working to have some sessions elsewhere when possible; we’ll let you know).

Also, if you want to participate in the hands-on session, you’ll need to have access to a LAMP / MAMP (virtual) machine.  You can requisition one through eForms in MySoC or come with your own.  For beginners, please note that this requirement (to set up a LAMP server) is not for the faint-of-heart — it can take more than several hours.  You may find it more enjoyable just to come to listen to the tutorial instead of actually trying the hands-on-exercises.  So this particular workshop may be considered more intermediate level.

We’ll also be on Askbot and G+ Hangouts (gmail ID knmnyn, perhaps others) to answer your technical questions (not just Magento) for those of you thinking of participating virtually.

Posted on May 20, 2013 by orbital

I’ve uploaded some slides for the project documentation requirements for the “log” and “wiki” parts of the documentation. They are available in the IVLE workbin for the course: Click here to go to IVLE Workbin

I’ve also created a 25 minute video that you can watch for the purpose of the documentation.
You can watch the video here:

Posted on May 15, 2013 by orbital

Hi all:

Here’s the list of videos from Orbital’s Liftoff Day 2.  Once you’re assigned to peer teams for grading and feedback in Orbital, please take note of the time offset in the Ignition video so that your peer teams can be reminded of your idea.  If your idea changes from your Ignition presentation, no worries; make another 1-minute video response to the Ignition video and post it in YouTube.

Git (Laurence, BillPin):

Getting Fired Up (James and Jeffrey, Silicon Straits and Golden Gate):

eCommerce (Alvin, Paypal):

<deleted by request\>

Presentation Skills (Davidson, Google):

Orbital Programme Structure (Wee Sun, SoC):

Ignition (Orbital students, SoC):

Posted on May 13, 2013 by orbital

Hi all:

Here’s the list of videos from Orbital Day 1.  Using this technology is new to us, so let’s hope all turns out ok.  Do ask us questions so that we can answer them for you — we want all of you to be able to complete these basic lessons so that you can get through completing a basic web application and fielding it on Google App Engine itself.

Design Thinking (Wee Sun, SoC):

Python (Sivagar, Google):

HTML / CSS / Javascript (Janani, Google):

Part 1

Part 2

Google App Engine (Wee Sun, SoC)

Posted on May 13, 2013 by orbital

We covered Python this morning, just the basics.  You should be able to recognize python code now (it doesn’t have semicolons and depends on indentation to recognize blocks).

We also covered HTML / CSS and Javascript in the afternoon.  These are the basic, common bullding blocks for everything on the web (including webpages you see on your smartphones).  You can try looking at the source of the webpages you see and feeling good that you have some knowledge of what that is and what it does.  Most of the HTML you see is generated programmatically, by servers that run software that replies HTML to your web browser.

CSS helps to interpret how that HTML looks like in your browsers.  We saw by tinkering with the CSS, the webpage can look very different.  One way to think of it is that the HTML specifies the page’s logical structure and that the CSS specifies what that structure looks like (its formatting).  Javascript is a programming language in its own right (similar to Python), but which all web browsers know how to execute and run right inside the browser.  It’s usually used to give dynamic effects on the webpage, so you’ll usually see that you need to load some javascript library to achieve some interesting effect on a webpage (e.g., animation, sorting, dynamic styling).

Finally we covered Google App Engine, the hardest part of today’s work.  Here we did the job of generating HTML programmatically in response to requests from your clicks to “run” the program.  The HTML is generated from HTML templates where some values are filled in by the app engine’s python code’s.  In particular, you are using python code (e.g., giftbook.py) to specify classes and handlers for those classes.  The responses that the handlers generate are HTML webpages (e.g., wishlist.html) that have placeholders for the Jinja2 template language to insert the appropriate values from Python.

We don’t expect you to get it all on the first try, but take a look through the code to see what you can understand and what you don’t.  We know it’s difficult to ask questions on what you don’t know — because you don’t know what you don’t know — but try your best.  We’d love for you to ask at least 1 question in our Askbot forum so that we can try to answer your questions offline.