PN Philippines Scholars Defend their Thesis

It's been almost a week since the defense of our thesis for the First Semester in Software Engineering. Yet the sound of the word defense and the mixed expression on the faces of my classmates after walking out from CEAC still lingers in my head.

It was a fine Saturday morning. Everyone was surprisingly early at school, except for some who still rushes to the internet cafes to print some documents for their defense. It was quite a busy day, which added a thrill sensation of facing a panel of professionals that would certainly ask questions about our study, from technical things to all sort of topics about Software Engineering.

There were five groups all in all with eight members each, except for one which has seven. The first group to face the panel was Team ‘Kinect’ headed by Mr. Mark Kevin Olores who is currently having his internship at Aboitiz Equity Ventures. They presented and defended their thesis to the best that they could. After the first group's moment of truth, the panel and guests were revealed. Supposed to be, three faculty members from the Computer Engineering Department will serve as the members of the panel, but unfortunately only two were available. Aside from the panel, special guests were also present. These include Madam Julie Tardieu, PN Philippines Education Manager, Mr. Guillaume Le Cousine, IT Head and Mr. Rhey Anthony Laurente, a PN Philippines Alumni who represents Zoog Technologies, Inc. 

Next group to impress the panel was ‘Tsuki’ team with Ms. Kriszia Cutamora as their leader who is currently an intern at NEC. Though they had a little idea on how things were going inside based on the first group's feedbacks, responding to questions was tough. The  third team, ‘Pro-Beginners’, with Mr. Neil Jayson Dañe as the Project Manager and an  intern from Accenture, also shared the same fate with the first two. But I'm pretty sure they were able to answer most of the questions as smiles were very visible on their faces when they came out of CEAC room. The fourth group entered the room without any hesitation in order to end the somewhat extended misery of tensions. Lead by Mr. Pedro Libradilla, an intern from NCR, ‘Team Poraree’ squeezed out the remaining of their strength to answer all the questions from the panel.

During this time, my calm mind seemed to start rewinding oddly all the things I prepared for our presentation. Every now and then, I kept noticing my team mates glancing at the door which made me feel more nervous. The fourth group came out, a signal for our group to be ready.  Though we have the most advantage since we were able to gather lots of feedbacks with the panel’s questions, the feeling of uneasiness seemed to consume us. DS2, our group, headed by our Project Manager, Ms. Khristine Censon who is an intern from Trends and Technologies, tried the very best to present and defend our thesis. Nevertheless we managed to make it to the end, with discussions which I think as the weirdest of all the groups since we received lesser questions from the panel and more discussions between our client (Zoog Technologies Inc.), our advisers and the panel. 

Everything suddenly felt light after the end of our defense. Sharing of experiences and picture taking were the highlight at that moment. But it was not yet the end of it, because our grades are yet to be announced after. That instance, the feeling of tiredness was visible on the eyes of everyone. Some tried to take a nap. Others continued chatting, while others were busy posing in front of the camera. Then finally the result was announced. It was a merry moment after hearing from our adviser that all had passed the defense. The sound of relief was very audible in the cozy room. It was a great relief, after all the numerous sleepless nights, weeks of preparation, research, documentation and some sacrifices.

However, we couldn’t have done it without our advisers – without their lectures, advices,　emails, text messages and most specially support. They were the first to believe that even if we are not taking full Computer Engineering courses, still we, Passerelles Numeriques scholars can do it. For us, who works almost 5 days a week, a collaborative project to be accomplished in a month or two with scattered members seem to be impossible to accomplish.

Yet our advisers always tell us that we can do it! With proper time management, plus following the principles of Software Engineering and probably lesser TGIFs, we were able to make it. All these are because of our best advisers and instructors, Mr. Godwin S. Monserate and Mr. Gran Sabandal!

In behalf of all PN scholars, by writing this article, I would like to express my gratitude to these great people who helped us a lot in accomplishing this event. It was a great attainment for us and we are proud that we are the first batch to experience such opportunity as PN scholars. I hope that our younger fellow scholars would learn as much as what we have learned from you. The first phase had passed; we hope that you would still be there in the second phase of our projects. We know that the next phase will be harder, but we now fully believe that we can do it. You have let us experienced what we thought was impossible to do; now we will make sure that this second phase will surely happen and will be more successful than the first one!

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Passerelles Numeriques All Batch Event: Dance Battle Competition

It was raining so hard when our class was dismissed at CEAC. Though most of us felt cold, I knew in my mind that majority of us are feeling relaxed due to the unfavorable weather. The staff has set a Dance Battle competition within the PN Scholars on the latter part of the day as what is customary on every first Saturday of the month. And talking about dancing, I’m not really that favorable with that kind of activity. That‘s why I sort of describe our feeling earlier as relaxed due to the weather.

As what we almost considered as custom routine during Saturday classes, we had our lunch at the old Tado’s (now Chickey’s) which is just across the University of San Carlos. Lunch was quick since most of us are really excited to get home. Suddenly, the rain stopped and the feeling of shyness seemed to consume me thinking that the Dance Battle will push through. After a short while, we found ourselves slowly ascending following the road towards the Family Park. It is where our regular activities on every first Saturday of the month are held. We have almost reached the top when we received information that the venue of the activity will be held in the center instead since the grounds at the Family Park are wet or rather muddy. We have no choice but to change route and head for the center.

Just a few minutes after we reached the center, the weather started to become rough again. We waited for quite a while until the rain slowed and finally come to a stop.

Then Ate Rosalyn Miñoza, one of PN Philippines’ Education Team, announced that the activity will continue and that we are expecting Mr. Thery Beord, a representative from the French Embassy who will be judging the competition. All scholars hastily prepare for their dance steps.

The contest will be done by group which is based on the usual grouping we had from our previous Saturday activities and are composed of first year, second year and third year students mixed up. The categories of the contest are Hip-hop and Swing which means each group will divide its members into two to participate both categories. There are eight groups in all, with group names derived from IT terms combined weirdly such as WiFi Projector, 3D Printer, DVI, 4G, Bluetooth Mouse and more.

Before the contest begins, the scholars had group pictures together with Ma’am Virginie Lombard, PN Philippines General Manager. All scholars seemed to enjoy the activity based on the smiles captured on the camera. Except for some that seemed to look bewitched for some reason that which I do not know.

The contest started with lots of cheers and all sort of noises from the audience. Some performers finished their numbers while others suddenly exit with their music still on the first or second stanzas. Others have to make a ‘take two’ with ridiculous murmurs from the audience. You can hear yells and cheering from time to time as if you’re watching a TV fighting scene, or a comedy and sometimes a little bit of horror. Not on the face of the audience, but on the performers.

The contest ended with the recognition of the winners. Only then I realized how foolish it is to assume, or perhaps ask something not to happen when it brings so much laughter and joyous cheering and so much life to people when that something happens.

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Change FTP Mode in Windows and connect using IE

Recently, our teachers in Software Engineering shared to us the files they used for our discussions on PN's network for easy access. What we'll do is just download those files using ftp. Unfortunately, some of us run into some unknown problems. Some who doesn't have any ftp applications such as Filezilla and just rely on windows explorer were unable to connect to the ftp server. As a resolution, our teacher was forced to send us the files trough email attachments which I think would not be the best way. But since I received the files without any problems, I settled to it and just forget about the ftp issue.

Later just this week, one of our clients in the company where I'm working ran into the same problem. And this time, it's not anymore advisable to just send an email with attachments as large as almost 1GB. So I tried scouting the net for the problem and of course, any possible solution. Luckily, I found a solution but never have a comprehensive understanding on the cause of the problem.

Though I had a little knowledge about the active and passive connections, some connection handshakes, firewalls and some restrictions which I think could be the possible cause of the problem.

For those having problems connectiong to the ftp server and don’t have any ftp client besides windows explorer, you can try editing the following settings to get you connected to the server:

1. Click Start
2. Click Control Panel
3. If you’re Control Panel is in Classic View (See Left Panel), just click Internet Options. If it’s in Category View click Network and Internet Connections then Click Internet Options.
4. A new window should open, Click Advanced tab.
5. Scroll down and find “Use Passive FTP (for firewall and DSL modem compatibility)”. It is under the Browsing category.
6. Once you find it, uncheck the box beside it and click Aplly, then Ok.

Alternately, you can just press Windows + R right away ang type inetcpl.cpl for shortcut, or you can open Internet Explorer and click Tools on the Menu bar and click Internet Options. You can then follow step 4 to 6 above.

If you still cannot connect, just post your comments below and I’ll gladly try to answer all your concerns.

Sources:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323446

http://compnetworking.about.com/cs/novellgroupwise/ht/setpassiveftpie.htm

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Site Does't Work in IE?

I was using firefox as a browser in in viewing my the output of the php application i made to the company where i am having my intership now. It was a straight road during the production of the application. But one time when i test if the application is a cross browser application, then one shocking output i didn't expect IE keeps on prompting an error what the big problem is i didn't what how would i trace the error sense i doesn't have "contol+shift+j" to view errors unlike firefox and chrome what ive done first is i trace the script manually huh =( doest work..Then i ask mr.google on how to trace bugs on IE then i got this link link here will sounds ok. I was shocked when i discovered, after all the time ive wasted it is the comma. Well that was an experience then atleast i know now how to debug IE hehehe...I was amaze how powerful the comma is.

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The Switch Statement

Last Tuesday, July 31, 2012, we continued our regular tutorial sessions with the First year. Since we haven't followed the flow of their discussions at the university, we tried to ask them questions if which part of their discussions they find it hard most. Majority answered the switch statement so we give it shot.

I know you guys find it hard to follow my discussion since they were mostly vocal so I'll show you the complete code on how to do it. The switch statement code that I gave you as an example are as follows:

#include<stdio.h>
#include<conio.h>

int main(){
 char choice='';
 clrscr();
 
 printf("Press [A] to Resume [B] for New Game and [C] to Exit\n");
 scanf("%c", &choice);
 
 switch(choice){
  case 'A':{
     printf("Please wait, resuming game. . .");
    };break;
  case 'B':{
     printf("Please wait, Starting New Game. . .");
    };break;
  case 'C':{
     printf("Exiting. . .");
    };break;
  default:{
     printf("Invalid Input!");
    };
 }
 
 getch();
}

For questions, feel free to comment below and we would gladly try our best to reply to each of your concerns.

Next Topic: The If...Else condition.

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Basic C Tutorials

This post will contain a series of simple C programming tutorials and examples. I think this will be helpful to the first years since they're on to this. For discussions on this post, kindly visit the forum.

Print text on screen

#include<stdio.h>
#include<conio.h>

main(){
printf("Hello World!\n");
getch();
return 0;
}

You might be wondering why the conio.h header file was included when our main goal was just to print some text on our screen. Well, let's try dissecting our code line by line.

printf("Hello World!\n");

This line is obviously what we want our program to do. The printf() function uses the stdio.h header file/library, now why would we need the conio.h header file?

getch();

This little function makes us see our output. Why? When we run a program, it will automatically exit if we don't include the getch() function. The getch() takes a character without printing it to the screen. Once a character is entered, only then will it exit by going to line 7. Therefore, getch() will stop our program from exiting until it receives a character. And the getch() function fortunately uses the conio.h header file. If you try removing the getch() from your program, you'll notice that once you run the program, it will exit automatically. Well, that's basically how we output text on the screen using C. Stay tune for more updates! Next: Accepting input!

Accepting Input

To accept input from the keyboard, we use the scanf() function which uses stdio.h header. Take a look at the example program:

#include<stdio.h>
#include<conio.h>

int main(){
 char word[]; //variable to hold the input, array of chars
 printf("Enter a word: ");
 scanf("%s", &word); //stores the input to the 'word' variable
 printf("You have entered: %s", word);
 getch();
 return 0;
}

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Word Lens translator app, now available for Android

The first Word Lens app came available to the mobile community last 2010 and unfortunately, was only available on iOS devices. Due to this unavailability, a number of mobile users asked for an Andoird version. So now, the developers of Word Lens app, Quest Visual, finally heard the people's plea by making it available on Android through Google Play.

The Word Lens translates captured texts/words on an Android device's camera from one language to another. The app includes an optical character recognition and a dictionary making it functional without an internet connection. To add with the original packed language translation, Quest Visual added Italian/English and French/English pairs to the original Spanish/English language translation which are now available on both iOS and Android platforms. To know more about the Word Lens app, check out Quest Visual's site.

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Installing Windows 7 without Optical Drive

Yesterday, I received an email from a fellow scholar that a colleague of his wanted him to reformat and install a fresh Windows 7 Operating System on her Samsung Netbook and ask if I could help.  I immediately replied with a yes since it would be another great learning experience. Installing an OS on a machine without an Optical drive is quite challenging.

So, after some exchanges of email during the break, I started scouting the web for the easiest and simplest solution on how to get a netbook boot on an external USB/HDD drive to install a new OS, since it’s what I think is the best option. First I found Syslinux, a small but powerful suite of bootloaders to start computers with the Linux kernel. I search for syslinux first because I have already tried using this when I was booting ESXi from a USB stick on our new server machine and it was easy. After some reading, I decided to look another one since booting from a USB stick would require at least 4GB of size when using Windows 7 and I can’t afford to have a 4GB USB stick. Next I found tftpd32, a utility that lets you load your installation files from a shared network media. This utility works same with Windows Deployment Services or its predecessor, the RIS, so it’s very easy to configure. After reading the instructions and downloaded the necessary files, I decided that this method should work best but still would need another alternative as a failover in case this one wouldn’t do its task. So I continued reading again until I came to a place on the web where after reading it, decided that this should be my failover solution.

After all the readings, I went home packed with what I think are the necessary tools to do the installation. First I tried the tftpd32 but failed to work at a certain stage during the boot process. To describe with you the setup, here’s a quick list:

Host Machine:

Brand/Model:   Acer 5500

OS:                  Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2

Client/Target Machine:

Brand Model:   Samsung NP-N150P

OS:                  (Currently runs) Windows 7 Starter

Both PCs are connected through a cross-over LAN connection.

The target machine managed to acquire IP from the DHCP on the Host machine and boot into it through PXE but after all the transfer of files necessary for booting, the target machine just restarts and would then boot again into the internal HD. I keep repeating the process and booted successfully once, but once the files are completely copied, the LAN connection icon on the Host Machine suddenly marks a red X which means they are not connected. The target machine gets to the Windows PE but it’s useless since the network is unavailable and the shared installation media can’t be loaded.

At around 10:00 in the evening, I decided to do plan B, aka the failover solution.

Here’s the step by step solution for plan b:

Prerequisites:

Your target machine should have a BIOS which can boot from an external USB storage. If it can’t, there are a lot of utilities on the internet which you can use to force your BIOS to boot from external USB storage. Some of this utilities are PLoP and UNetBootin.

1. Format any partition on an external HDD, make sure you back up all files stored on it.
2. Go to computer management by clicking start, click run and type “compmgmt.msc” (without quotes) then hit enter. The Computer Management windows should appear.

Note: This step may vary depending on the type of OS you have.

3. After that click Disk Management and look for the partition which you have formatted in Step 1. If you’re confused which one is the one you formatted, just go to My Computer and explore which Drive is empty, then take note of its drive letter and it should match the drive letter on the Disk Management.
4.  Right click on the partition that you have formatted and select “Mark Partition as active”
5. After that, just load the installation disc on your optical drive and copy all the contents in it to the partition that you have marked active. If the installation source is from an iso, you can just directly extract it using WinRar or 7zip.
6. After the extraction/copy is done, plug the external HDD in to your target machine, start the machine, set its BIOS to boot to the external HDD and your installation should start right away.

P.S.

Sorry, I can't post screenshot images right now since my pc runs on a Japanese language.

I 'm afraid you might freak out when I post images in Japanese language and spam the comment box. :)

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Without a mentor

I went to the office as early as 8:09 in the morning though my regular login time is 8:30 for the reason that I want to spend more time in the company to maximize my learning. As usual, I did the daily routine tasks in the morning. Checking servers and services if all is well and running fine and noticed after a while that my mentor is not yet around. After confirming that everything is ok, I setup our monitoring laptop for server/services unavailability notification/information. Although they were just multiple windows of the old and boring, yet powerful Command Prompts with ping commands running with the –t option added, they never fail to serve their purpose.

I was deeply impressed while searching for an open source Network Management System when I found openNMS and started reading its features.

Because it is free and offers more functions than that boring command prompt which don’t really do the ‘notifying’ thing but instead just shows an endless “Request timed out” when a host is unavailable, I was excited and continue reading further with seriousness.

Because I enjoyed reading the openNMS’ About page, I completely lost focus on my monitoring laptop and was suddenly disturbed when someone on the opposite table in front of me asks “Walay internet bai?”. I automatically turned and look at my monitoring laptop and saw the awful list of “Request timed out” continuously running on 2 of the five command prompt windows.

I immediately check all possible cause of the problem. Since all PCs failed to connect to the internet, I concluded that the Proxy Server which is running SLES11 could be the problem. I immediately opened Putty so I could ssh to the proxy.  It turns out that all are fine inside the machine. Squid is running well and all interfaces are up. No other configurations changed. So I turned to the modem, but its DSL led is lighting green and is blinking which means there is an activity going on. After observing for quite sometime while pinging www.google.com, one reply shows that it originates from our public IP address with the “Destination host unreachable” tag in it. At that time, I was thinking that the problem isn’t in our network but on the ISPs side. I also found out that when I try to enter Google’s IP address manually on my omnibar, Google’s page appear but takes too long to load. This led me to think that our ISP's DNS could be the problem. So I called help from the Systems admin from our other site. After a couple of minutes, he arrived at the office and started checking from physical connections to proxy and modem configurations. Then finally, he called our ISPs help desk and filed a ticket. The result – some problem is occurring on the side of our ISP due to bad weather and will be fixed probably the next morning.

Our internet downtime lasts almost until 4:00 in the afternoon after we decided that we should switch internet connection from our other ISP. After the connection was temporarily restored, I finally feel easy and started to move slower than the time when the problem was still on. Then I realize that it isn’t really easy handling and maintaining a company’s network infrastructure when you don’t have enough knowledge about networking. Good thing I learned about all of these things, so that I was able to at least describe to my other mentor, what could be the possible problem after doing my initial troubleshooting.

You might be wondering why I wasn’t affected when the internet connection was cut but instead continue reading about openNMS and was informed by someone else. Well, I really find it hard when testing two internet connections’ speed through switching my LAN’s gateway. So I searched the whole internet and found SwitchySharp. It’s an extension from Google Chrome that let’s you switch different gateways on your browser(Chrome only) without changing your LANs gateway as long as the two gateways “see” each other. I was actually doing a Speedtest before the problem occurred and forgot to switch back my connection to the other one which failed. Good thing I have this handy extension. For more information about SwitchySharp just go to their website here or search it directly from Chrome’s extension page.

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Passerelles Numeriques introduces new website

Just today, June 13, 2012 Ate Rosalyn Miñoza, our Social Worker in PN posted “Introducing the new website of Passerelles numeriques! ;-) ” in Google+.

The new Website went live approximately 12 hours from the time of this posting based on the tweets visible on their red-orange homepage. According also to their previous tweet, the site’s design was freely made by EnjoyCollective Global Communication.

The design seemed to apply on all of PN’s subdomain Websites. The PN Philippine Website which is supposed to be found at ph.passerellesnumeriques.org will now automatically redirect you to www.passerellesnumeriques.org/philippines if opened with the same red-orange look on all pages as with the homepage.

Some features of the site aren’t yet so clear to me since some of them maybe block by our proxies, but expect that more stunning features will still be added to the site as this organization produces great people that excels in creating this things.

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