Presentation session on Sep 15th

Here's my take on our presentation session on Sep 15th. This was our first presentation session, so I thought of writing a roundup myself.

"Windows 7, the next generation of surrounding awareness applications" by Tan Chun Siong  &  Ho Tian Shun

The very first FMC1202 student presentation (historical moment ;-) was done by Chun Siong and Tian Shun. Thanks to both for a good presentation and for volunteering to go first.

Among other things, the presentation introduced us to the Windows 7 "sensor framework" API that helps us to write "surrounding-aware" applications in a hardware-independent way. According to what I understood, now we can write surrounding-aware applications without having to worry about specifics of the hardware component being used by the application. For example, we can write an application that deals with GPS data without worrying about who manufactured the GPS module being used. It was good to see the claims  backed up by code examples and live demos. The demo of auto adjusting text size to match the ambient lighting was cool. Thanks for the Windows 7 DVDs too - we know you went out of your way to produce those for us.

"Facebook the social network" by Ma Siming & Zhan Shiyu

This presentation started with a "not so technical" look and advantages and disadvantages of social networks. I especially liked the part about ways to make money using social networks. I agree that it is a good place to play games. In fact, it appears most of my Facebook friends are playing "Barn Buddy" Farmville etc during office hours. Fortunately, their bosses are not in their friends list or else they will be out of job before long. Another point raised was the added level of trust when business happens over a social network. That is very true. I'd rather buy from someone I know (directly or via a friend) rather than a total stranger. However, I later thought of two things that could cause problems.

• People may prefer to sell to strangers (if you sell to friends, you have to lower profit margins and you risk loosing your friend if something goes wrong with the sale or the merchandise. too messy, don't you think?)
• Once the intent to sell/buy is established via the social network, buyer and seller might do it outside the social network (to avoid paying commission). This defeats the purpose from the point of view of the social network.

A question from the class resulted in a discussion about one danger of using virtual worlds: some users might not realize where the fantasy ends and the real world begins. For example, someone who plays car racing games in the virtual world be tempted to speed in real-life driving too. It is a good point indeed.

"How videos are processed?" by Zhang Haoqiang  &  Li Shiyan

I will always remember this presentation as where I learned the meaning of 'video'. (According it Haoqiang, it derives from the Latin word that means something like "I see"). I liked the bit about the history of video processing as well. Often knowing how something was done in the olden days helps to understand how it is done now.
The mid-presentation discussion on how digital is different from analog was interesting too. Later I found this page that explains the difference.

Another insightful point mentioned was why videos are harder to encode (it takes hours of processing and a high-end PC to encode a video) than to decode (most low end PCs can play videos without any time lags).

In the 2nd part we went a bit deep (perhaps a bit too deep) into AVI format.

"Things you wished you knew about spyware / malware" by Tan Chun Siong

Our self-professed "geek" Chun Siong came back to share his knowledge about spyware/malware with the class.We all should be thankful to Chun Siong for sharing many useful tit-bits of info with us. For example, the bit about using on screen keyboards thwart key loggers and dangers of using pirated software were very useful.
Thanks for the tip about VirusTotal. It is a handy online virus detector that uses multiple detection engines. I used it several times already since I got to know about it form Chun Siong.
As  mentioned, bloatware is an annoying problem too and Acrobat is one of them. Has anyone tried to convert a doc to pdf using Acrobat writer? The visual "acrobatics" it performs during the conversion is as annoying as the long time it takes to finish the conversion.


To wrap up, it was a very good presentation session considering this was our first. Kudos to all six presenters once again...