Posted on July 11, 2014 by orbital

Introduction to Swift

In the last set of Mission Control sessions, we’ll be bringing you up to date with alternative (web and mobile stack) technologies that you can consider for future projects.  

Originally we were going to cover some introductory mobile app programming, but Min thought it would be more fun to lecture about something fairly new.  Min will be going over the basics of Swift, the new programming language outed by Apple last month at their WWDC event.

It turns out that while Swift is meant largely for developing mobile apps for the iOS platform, it is a full-fledged modern language, that inherits little bits from many languages including our favorite, Python.

Swift is a new general-purpose compiled programming language developed by Apple introduced last month. Described as “Objective-C without the C”, it aims to do away with some of the legacy drawbacks of using C as a basis for a modern programming language.

We invite Orbitees and the general public to learn about this new programming language’s basic differences through experimenting in the Swift playgrounds.  If time allows, we may cover a basic app that can be developed in iOS using Swift (this assumes some knowledge of iOS development that Min will gloss over).  An introductory level of knowledge of various programming languages will be helpful.  Unfortunately, since the Apple development environment is pretty closed and the language and tools for using it are still in beta, only those with access to Macs will be able to interactively do the exercises along with us.  Watch the Piazza forum’s follow-up to this post to access the Xcode Beta 6 IDE for Mac, needed for running samples in Swift.  The first hour of the workshop will be the tutorial, with free time for hands on in the remaining two.

While we’ll try to make the session webcasted, do try to come down for the session.  You’ll then be able to say you’re a Swift expert (pretty much everyone is not very swifty yet anyways, so you can’t be too wrong yet…)  Also, if you think others would be interested in seeing the tutorial, feel free to circulate the announcement.

See you soon!

Posted on July 6, 2014 by orbital

Our tutor, Mr Wang Gaoxiang, from our 2013 Orbital cohort will be giving you details about Unit testing in Google App Engine and Python this coming Tuesday.

While we’ll try to make the session webcasted, do try to come down for the session.  Your advisers have all chimed in to say that some prior knowledge of some of Software Engineering topics does help to make your life easier in the upcoming courses that you take in SoC in Year 2 and Year 3.  So we strongly advise that you read up on test driven development (TDD) and associate topics (like unit and integration testing), in addition to attending this optional Mission Control.

See you soon!

Screen Shot 2014-07-06 at 11.45.05 pm

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:

 

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

Posted on June 23, 2014 by orbital

Wee Sun will be giving our Mission Control #6, some hands on time with two important web standards for authentication and authorization: OpenID and Facebook Login 2.0.

While we’ll try to make the session webcasted, do try to make it down and get a chance to try these technologies firsthand.  If you have already implemented these features in your Orbital web project, please still come down to help others with their projects if they arestuck on these parts.

Remember, implementing such federated login methods do count towards your three basic achievements to extend a Vostok project to Project Gemini level of achievement.

See you soon!

 

 

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

CannedTuna
Photo Credits: CannedTuna @ Flickr

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

Today there are two important events that are happening.  Please take note of the following:

1) Your peer evaluations of your three peer groups are due tonight at 11:59pm SGT.  Consult the Peer Evaluation Group Post @235 to view which teams you need to evaluate.  Then post a private note to your EG’s adviser with your group’s feedback form to your adviser.  Your adviser will collate and post the evaluations by 11 Jun as follow-ups to the original Project README and log for Evaluation 1.

2) Tonight we have the special treat of having an external group, ThinkSecure, give a presentation about web security and social media, as Mission Control #4.  ThinkSecure’s Christopher Low will be giving the presentation and it will not be webcasted and recorded for technical reasons, so be sure to make it down to SR3 from 6-8pm for the session if you’re around.

TS-logo-tm-smallSee you soon!

 

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 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

https://www.flickr.com/photos/92334668@N07/
Photo Credit: tec_estromberg

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:

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.

Posted on May 29, 2014 by orbital

Dear all Orbitees:

Here’s an opportunity to meet with the founding developer of WordPress.  It’s at Blk 71 on (wrong initial date advertised, sorry) Tuesday 3 Wednesday 4 Jun 4-6 pm, and organized by the government’s National Research Foundation (NRF)  Likely to be popular – so book early if you want to attend!  Sounds fun!


Matt Mullenweg is best known as the founding developer of WordPress, the blogging software he guided from a handful of users to the most widely used open source tool. He is also the founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Akismet and more. Matt will be going on a speaking tour around cities in Asia and will be swinging by Singapore for an exclusive meet-up with the local start-up community here! Infocomm Investments Pte Ltd (IIPL) and National Research Foundation (NRF) would like to jointly invite you to a lively discussion with Matt regarding start-ups, entrepreneurs and innovation. During this informal gathering, you will also have the opportunity to connect with Matt and hear his insights on the past and future of WordPress and his experience in building WordPress and Automattic.

 Register Here!

Agenda
4.00pm – 4.15pm Registration and Networking
4.15pm – 4.30pm Welcome 
4.30pm – 5.00pm Fireside chat with Matt Mullenweg, Founding Developer of WordPress
5.00pm – 5.15pm Q&A
5.15pm – 6.00pm Light Reception and Networking