Jeff Chan

What I’m Up To

Summer

• Website Maintenance @ Brite-view.com / Zinnet
• Intern @ FreshBrain.org
• Lots of robotics stuff

My Senior Classes

• AP Physics B
• AP Calculus BC
• AP Government
• Economics
• English 4
• Choir 1

Catch ya’ll later.

 Topics: Blog Updates, Life, robotics

I Am Still Alive

So I realize I’ve been inactive for around six months now. My last post was in May?
So basically, it’s Junior year and I’m more busy than ever. Over the summer, I took Precalculus and Trigonometry and that took up majority of my time. I traveled to Oklahoma for the 2008 International Botball Tournament and we earned third place overall. I was in Taiwan for three weeks in August.

So now, school has been tedious and time consuming. But I really like my classes this year. All my teachers are enjoyable (in different ways). I’m taking:

• AP Calculus AB
• AP Computer Science AB
• AP United States History
• English 3 (aka Counseling 101)
• Biology
• Spanish 3

and then… I have the usual stuff with robotics, client work (still), and some programming… Oh yeah, did I mention I need to study for SAT and SAT II’s as well?

I really hope I will be able to keep posting here though.

 Topics: robotics, schedule, school, update

Things I’m Working On

I must admit I’ve been very busy since the beginning of this year, and I’ve overlooked this blog. I guess part of it has to do with my lack of ideas on what to write about, so during this time of inactivity, I’ve come up with some great topics that I’ll be writing about these upcoming months.

So what have I been working on lately?

• Botball Robotics: The season started off in end of February and ends with a competition on April 19th. We’ve went through the whole brainstorming and building process and now we’re focusing on the programming. As I’ve mentioned before, we’re using a language derived from C to program. The language itself is considerably powerful in our case but I must say robotics programming is like no other software programming. When we do web development or software development on the computer, we just compile/save and refresh the application to see if it works. However, the most redundant part and annoying part about robotics programming is that you have to constantly reset the 10′ by 8′ game board, running all over the room, only after one trial. Imagine doing this hundred or probably thousands of times. But this year is different than last year. I’m come to enjoy working with other programmers. It’s so much easier to split up the tasks, rather than having one-man-do-it-all.
  I’m keeping my hopes high for first place, but regardless of what place we get, I’ll still post the results here .
• Google Lunar X Prize R&D Challenge: The whole team worked very hard on this and I think our hard work payed off! We earned second place. We were asked to design a rover that would travel the moon. The challenge is indeed inspired from the Google Lunar X Prize Challenge, except in this case, we’re just designing the robot, not building them.
• Work: I’ve had a chance to continue developing products with a startup in New York. We’re working with the MyBB platform, so I had made several enhancements to the software that I may release in the future.
• USACO: Mgccl’s blog post led me to this competition. I thought since the training course was free and quite interesting, I’d give it a shot. I’ve completed two assignments in C but it’s been a real pain, especially dealing with pointers and strings. Everytime something compiles wrong, it makes me want to use Java more… Supposedly, if you do well in the compeitions held by USACO, you can move on to the International Olympiad in Informatics which is considered the field goal for high school students in computer science… I don’t see myself there any time soon though.
• Course Selection: Speaking of Java, it was course selection week a few weeks ago at my school. I’ve decided on what I want to take next year. The AP classes I’ll be taking are AP Computer Science, AP US History, and AP Calculus AB. It’s really two AP classes for me because APCS isn’t that much of a challenge for me. The other three regular classes will be English 3, Biology, and Spanish 3. They’re basically required by colleges as must-take courses. There is no way in the world I’ll be taking an AP English class, and don’t even mention biological sciences — I hate them.
• WordPress: I’ve been back on track, working closely with WordPress, especially after the 2.5 release. I’ve reworked our robotics team website. Everything is now powered by WordPress. In the summer, I’ll be enhancing this site with some custom WordPress plugin ideas I have.

 Topics: advance placement, AP, apcs, botball, C, google, java, MyBB, programming, robotics, school, USACO, web development

Robotics Team Site Remake

Thank goodness the break is finally here! As usual, my task list is full of stuff: read history chapters, book report, RuneWire client, GHOP, portfolio, robotics, various code fixes, etc. GHOP with SilverStripe has been particularly interesting. I’ve completed 6 tasks so far and I’m definitely going to do more.

I’ve been debating whether or not to move the EVHS Robotics website to be SilverStripe-powered. Previously, it had been backended with about 20 minutes worth of code that did really simple content management. I was the only one updating the content so I basically did my own HTML formatting. Now that I have the chance and I’ve never actually made a real website with SilverStripe, I decided to give it a go. The team website is now powered by SilverStripe.

A few things I’ve had to compromise or took me a little time on. I wanted to go with the Haze theme but turned out that there are a few perks with the CSS which resulted in me giving up. The default theme may be a little boring but it looks fine. Also, it had took me awhile to fix the typography stylesheet to make everything look right; I prefer bigger font sizes. I wanted to create a page with an iFrame that linked to our Google Calendar, so I had to set up a custom page type for that— pretty easy stuff.

But now with SilverStripe, I can extend the website easily now. If we needed a forum for collaboration, I could set that up integrated within minutes. This also gives me an opportunity to let my team members create accounts and manage the content.

Overall it has been nice for my first experience building a site with a MVC-based content system.

 Topics: evhs, ghop, robotics, SilverStripe

Moon Bots!

Wow. It’s been almost three weeks since I’ve blogged. I’ve been meaning to share what I’ve been doing for robotics up until now.

For the past 3 months, I spent lots of effort in putting together a robotics team at our school. I definitely went through some trouble finding an advisor and sorting out other business. But I’m still going with this thing because I really enjoy doing robotics. It’s just a great way to learn and have fun.

Right now, our team is focusing on a research and design challenge modeled after the Google Lunar X PRIZE competition. We are supposed to design robots that will roam the moon and do certain tasks. I’m glad to say that we’re half way there. We now just need to draw up a final draft, model our designs, and create the final presentation medium.

The deadline is end of January, so by then, I should have our completed entry to show you guys.

 Topics: google, lunar, moon, robotics

I Return

Long time no see. I’ve returned from Taiwan! I’m still in the process of getting everything back in order including some RSBANDB stuff, school stuff, and lots of email.

First off, sorry about the pictures XD. I couldn’t get them uploaded for some weird reason, but here are the official ones not taken by me. Please also do take a look at this video. It’s awesome.

Now I need to actually start on my AP assignments, which are due in two days. It also sucks to not have your new schedule because your out on vacation… grr…

 Topics: advance placement, AP, botball, competition, Hawaii, pictures, robotics, rsbandb, Taiwan, vacation

I’m In Taiwan

I just got here into Taiwan after flying back from Hawaii last Saturday. It’s really humid

My team had pretty bad luck during the competition. During the double-elimination rounds (two loses and you’re out), one of our motors broken in the first round, so obviously we lost. After that round we took it to get it fixed. While we were fixing it, we were called up again to compete. So yea, it sucked.

However, the conference itself was fun. Got to meet smart people and Hawaii was fun. I’ll be posting some pictures later.

 Topics: botball, competition, conference, Hawaii, pictures, robotics, Taiwan

So Much Code…

You’ve probably been wondering why I haven’t updated my blog even when it’s summer… but here’s what I’ve been up to.

• Doing some client work – writing a pretty big plugin for MyBB
• Playing around with Ajax/Ahah – whatever you want to call it
• Diving into CakePHP – awesome framework. This thing will make my coding life so much easier
• Working on a new layout for this site. Yup, it’s my first attempt at designing one. Don’t expect too much though. It’s a very simple layout I like simplicity anyways
• I just ordered a new keyboard. It’s the Microsoft Ergo Keyboard 4000. It just get here soon. Can’t wait for it.

But here’s what I really should be doing but I’m not

• Do my AP World History summer assignment
• Programming robots
• Creating my portfolio

This is actually the first summer where I’ve actually attempted to accomplish my goals. I don’t see this progress continuing once I go on vacation to Taiwan.

 Topics: AHAH, AJAX, AP, CakePHP, coding, homework, keyboard, layout, MyBB, portfolio, programming, robotics, Tech, web development

Tumblelog

I’ve been thinking about getting a tumblelog because I don’t have much time writing long blog posts but sometimes I really want to share some things. The only downside about getting one is that I don’t have full control over the my domain, because I’ll have to point the domain to the hosting server. The other thing about it is that there is no comment system, so I’m still thinking about whether or not to switch.

So what have I been up to…

1. Final exams this week. School is out Thursday.
2. Working on a big project for a client, building everything upon MyBB through the plugin system.
3. I have a research paper due Wednesday, tomorrow, and I haven’t even started.
4. Preparing for the Internal robotics Botball tournament.
5. Upgraded this blog to new version of WordPress.
6. Finished reading Fast Food Nation. I’m now reading At the Center of the Storm, My Years at the CIA by George Tenet. I love autobiography and nonfiction books like this one.
7. Lots of summer assignment for next year’s AP World History class.

Catch up later.

 Topics: assignment, blog, Blog Updates, books, botball, Life, MyBB, robotics, summer, tournament, tumblelog, update

Aftermath

It’s been awhile since I updated here, primarily because of my busy school work. Since the last post, I’ve been working almost every hour on programming the robots, and the hard work paid off at the competition. Our team came in fifth overall and received a first place trophy for first place documentation. We also received several other awards including best sportsmanship, best onsite presentation, and double-elimination round finalist. ABC also made a coverage on the regional event.

We plan on moving on to the International Botball Tournament in Hawaii in July. So right now we are busy with mainly two things. Preparing for the Hawaii trip and rebuilding our robots. Our main problem right now is with funds. Going to Hawaii would cost us around $7000 for a group of seven. Right now, we are looking for any sponsors, but we seem to have no luck. Our last resort would have to be getting our hands dirty fund raising ourselves by selling hot dogs or whatever. At the tournament, we saw so many great ideas. In order to win, we must completely redo our strategy.

Besides the busy robotics stuff, I’m also preparing for an AP Chinese exam that’s coming up in two weeks. I haven’t even touched the study material so far. Also, I’m upgrading my Ubuntu machine to Feisty Fawn and I plan on configuring it as a LAMP server so I can get my feet back on web developing. After typing all this, I just realized how busy I am XD .

 Topics: AP, chinese, competition, robotics, tournament, ubuntu, victory

Work work work!

As the robotics competition is approaching(4/21), the two teams at my school are working extra hard. However, we don’t seem to be making progress at an acceptable rate. Sure, the major robot mechanicals parts are done, but there is still lots of tweaking to do. Along side with that, we have documentation work which is due a few days before the competition. I am probably the most stressed guy from the two teams. After the robots are finalized, I have to program for both team. That means I have to program four robots, making them perfect in a week or less. Right now, I haven’t done much, because our strategies are not yet finalized. However, I will do my best to get everything programmed this week — my supposedly enjoyable vacation.

Wish me luck!

 Topics: botball, busy, documentation, robotics, work

Schedule For 2007/2008

March is scheduling month at my school. I’m going to be a sophomore next year (yay!). Here are the classes I plan on taking.

• English 2 Accelerated
• Algebra 2
• Chemistry
• AP World History
• Physical Education
• Spanish 2

Unfortunately, I have no electives. It should be really interesting taking my first AP class. Interestingly, I’ll be taking my first AP exam this May, the AP Chinese Exam. I still need to study a bit more for that, but I think I can get a 4 at least. Besides AP World History, I might be taking the AP Computer Science A exam next year self-studying.

Lately, I’ve been really busy with Robotics meetings. We’re attending the Botball Northern CA competition in April. If we do win, we get to go to Nationals in Hawaii over the summer! I’m the programmer for both the two teams from my school.

 Topics: AP, botball, chinese, computer science, robotics, schedule