Midnight Blue

Midnight Blue, a photo by moodoki on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
The Southern Cross with Centaurus arching over it. Rarely in Singapore do I see so such clear skies.. Even so, the city is so bightly lit at night that we don't see much stars anymore..

Code jamming

So the qualifiers of the 2013 Google codejam is over. And I managed to qualify! It's both a humbling and nostalgic experience for me.

I started to learn how to program as I was greatly drawn by computer games and thought I wanted to create one or two of my own, but soon realized that its much more than knowing how to code. I couldn't create nice art, and hardest of all, a novel idea for a game.. Not to mention my then only basic skills at programming in QBASIC.

What actually got me seriously coding was joining the National Olympiad in Informatics(NOI) when I was in secondary school, where I first learnt of numerous algorithms. Honed my skills in C/C++ and manage to get myself a bronze medal on my 2nd year of joining. It was great fun, but I didn't find any opportunity to join more after that.. Until I learnt of Google codejam :)

After more than 10 years of not doing competitive programming, I guess my skills had became rather rusty, despite the need to code as my daily job. I really do think competitive programming is a far more demanding tasks as compared to typical software/algorithm development in a day job.

I qualified, but not with great results. Time to prepare and sharpen my skills. Round 1A in 12 days!

TextMode

Text Mode Love

It's strange. Computing power is cheap, I love to work on photos, I work with 3D rendering and computer graphics and I do research on computer vision. Yet, the interface that I love to work on most is still the text based interface.

A few days ago, I crawled out of my cave and found that Google has a wonderful command line data tool called googlecl that allows you to access Blogger, Calendar, Docs, and many other Google services from the command line! I promptly downloaded it, only to discover (a pleasant surprise) that it's in the macports port list! (It's also in Ubuntu's apt repository). So everything is just an 'apt-get install googlecl' or a 'port install googlecl' away:)

Together with markdown, now I can make my posts from the command line as well
:)

And here's the first post from the command line, and perhaps future posts as
well :) But, I'll still have to figure out the best way to embed images from
flickr :s

Jellyfish @ S.E.A Aquarium Sentosa

S.E.A Jellyfish, a set on Flickr.

Beautiful, delicate creatures aren't they? Poisonous too!

Sea Nettles: (Chrysaora fuscescens)

Moon Sea Jellies: (or Aurelia aurita)

Filmstrips

Filmstrips, originally uploaded by moodoki.

Via Flickr:
Taken at the [Outside]In exhibit at the ArtScience Museum, Singapore.

Everyone shoots with their iPhones nowadays... I wonder who still uses a 'real' camera, let alone film.. But they are beautiful right??