NTS: Projects to be done.

Chris — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:43:13 +0000

Exam is coming up and I have no choice but to put my development life on hiatus and focus on my text books. ( CS 245 Logic and Computation is actually fun) Anyway, here is a list of stuff that I have worked on and planning to finish them up during the semester break after exam until the start of next school semester in September.

Iron-Cook.com
Iron cook ‘s main objective is to provide a portal for anyone to randomize their meal plan for the week and have the grocery list generated on their mobile devices. It’s the CS446 course project that me and my group mates have been working on since May 2010 and currently we have the back-end web service and android client cores ready.

HKGolden Samurai
Another web service for exposing HK Golden API to native clients. As of now, the caching mechanism has been implemented and more UI work has to be done. The final product will be consumed by HKG maize, which is the first (and only) client for HK Golden on android devices.

University of Waterloo Login
A simple portal for passing the username + password when logging in the uw-wireless network. (Credentials are needed everytime a client joins the network and Firefox/Chrome doesn’t allow users to store their credentials on the browser)

GuruOnFire
After working on iron-cook.com extensively for the past 3 months I noticed a rewrite is required to follow the django/python/app-engine convention.

StudyTimer
StudyTimer is a small utility I wrote for myself. Basically it’s a timer that switches between “study period” and “break period”. Currently the skeleton of the client application is there and I have yet to implement the server side stuff.

Haskell + OpenGL ES/DirectX – I have always wanted to learn functional programming and do some geometry work with openGL/DirectX (XNA on Xbox360, windows phone 7) , hopefully the 30 days vacation is enough to learn these stuff.

Setting up Thunderbird for UW newsgroup

Chris — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:58:02 +0000

Long story short, back in CS 241 and 251 I was using google groups to access the newsgroup from waterloo. (uw.cs.cs241/251). However, searching for cs350 on google doesn’t do the trick and I was forced to setup a newsgroup client to serve my purpose. During my adventure, I stumbled upon this website from loo and basically they ask you to setup putty as a tunnel so that your thunderbird can pass thru this tunnel and grap the threads from the newsgroup. Of course, this is not a very smart thing to do because you need to fire putty up every single time and I don’t think that’s feasible for anyone who goes on to the newsgroup on an hourly basis.

Here’s my solution.

Follow the Configuring Thunderbird tutorial to the point where you enter name of the news server. Put “news.uwaterloo.ca” instead of “localhost”. (localhost is a unique keyword which means looking for on itself, since the tutorial uses putty to establish a connection to the server, pointing thunderbird to “itself” will utilize that connection and allows you to fetch stuff thru the tunnel).

After you’re done there should be a subscribe window pops up and asks you to subscribe certain group. In our case, we want uw.cs.cs350. Click done and you’re good to go. In case it’s not working, you can always verify it from thunderbird -> Tools -> Account Settings -> Your Account Name -> Server Settings and make sure Server Name is “news.uwaterloo.ca” and the Port is 119.

P.S. I found using the thread tool very useful to follow a long discussion. You can do that by clicking on the top-left button in your thread view.

Chris-Wong.net » Waterloo

NTS: Projects to be done.

Setting up Thunderbird for UW newsgroup