Thought of won't have enough time to pack stuffs but end up have some free time before 7pm. It's time to wrap up on DIP, so many things wish to write down. It's truely an amazing experience, starting from nothing and go all the way to become the champion.
When I first heard the word 'DIP' (Design Innovative Project), it comed with a little bit of doubt and worry. What's that all about? How to start? Choosing by project title or by supervisor? Work in big group of at least 20 people? Really hard to imagine and a lot of things to worry. What if I get inside a stupid group consists of all typical lazy labmates? Terrible. What if I join a group with some arrogant people who can only talk but contribute nothing? Too bad. What if I meet another bias unfriendly professor like the one I met in UROP? Let me go to hell then.
I think many friends share the same worry, hence to safeguard ourselves, I decided to pull all MSA people to form a huge group. It may seem losing a chance to make new friend but nonetheless it still worth. Tried my best to inform and include all in, except for a couple that I purposely left out. (Luckily most of us don't know who are them, haha). It's already 21 people, and after add-in hong yap (how lucky we have him as our great musician?), royston (how lucky we have him as our great presentor?), vinh (how lucky we have him as our beloved programming god?) and yip kuan (too bad he's the one I don't know from MSA and joined FOC before, haha), a group of 25 has been formed under our nice supervisor prof Goh.
Since the group was formed, I was relieved and wished I could contribute ideas behind instead of became the leader. I was really unsure about whether I have the time to be fully commited into this and lead the group well during holiday. And I hate the feeling of not getting my responsiblites done, hate of having many tasks, can't focus in one and in the end not giving out my best in both sides. It ruins my self-principle and I will feel guilty for sure. Perhaps I prefer to become idea contribution rather than decision maker too. But no one supported me. (If you don't want to become the leader, why you form the group? Just for the sake of repelling anxiety?) Even christopher who said will stand at my side also "betrayed" me, what could I ask from others? Sigh~ Just hope in that time nothing special will happen. And very lucky they've chosen ming yian as assistant leader (co-leader).
Following advices from seniors, I've opt to select projects based on supervisor instead of the content of the project. You can learn things in any projects provided your supervisor is good but the reverse is not true. So sent email to few "good" professors (good in supervising) and requested for title. After much debating and involvement from members, we've decided to choose prof Goh's project - interactive music learning software. Sadly to say it's pure computing whereby it's a general bomb that most of us want to avoid, but it may serve as a platform to overcome this barrier as well, looking from the other perspective. Worked hard on initial information gathering and proposal writing, and finally we got it approved and everything was fixed.
First task: grouping. It's always an headache stuff to do. Since it's a huge group of 25, you need to group into small groups with lesser number of people. But you can't just add in some meaningless group with no clear tasks and timeline. Moreover, you don't know how the projet work and be sure of what buidling blocks are needed. (Though our supervisor is really good, nice and friendly; she's not expert in computing field and she could only give us advice on music) The initial grouping before DIP started was OK and there were more fields involved and we need to research on it.
During that period, we met one guy selling a similar product and he told us that their software took about one and a half year to complete. Oh gosh!!! Suddenly felt the future of our project was at stake, could we come out with a software within the short 4 weeks time? We aren't professional software developers, we don't know any programming other than the basic C, we aren't familiar with linking software together and other stuff. When we went to consult wei han (CE expert) and asked about it, he just flashed me many many things that took me a lot of time to comprehend the ideas. Can we really do it?
Then came the hectic preparation for exams. Holiday (suppose it should be). DIP started. Before the day of orientation, I was wondering how to regroup our members? This time would be the more important one but I couldn't have an ideal ideas. Just couldn't think of it. So discussed with ming yian on that day and finally came out with the first stage grouping into six groups: music, vb, score sheet, blinking keyboard, tempo games and keyboard interfacing. It's a huge decision to drop out MATLAB from our project. Prof Goh always emphasize on its usage in future. But sadly to develop GUI I really don't know what MATLAB can help us. And perhaps it was a mistake to separate a group specially for visual basic. My initial idea was to let them explore the depth of VB, master it and teach us all so as to save time. But I underestimes something. It wasn't easy for anyone to pick up a language in such a short time, so forget about sharing and teaching. Impossible.
I was in the keyboard interfacing group, to buy the keyboard and link it to the computer. After decided to buy the YAMAHA keyboard, we were so excited and waiting for its arrival. But one thing was out of control: the difficulty in raising purchase order and money claiming. I never thought that money claiming was that difficult, later even boon keat 's claiming on photostat fees was initially rejected. Ya, I understand there should a proper control on this but then it seemed not to be reason. Our group in the next door spent 10k to buy a telescope. Our budget was allocated $200 per head. By right, the project can spent up to 25X$200 = $5,000 and we only spent 10% of it to buy the keyboard. If you want to control the budget that tightly, what for you allocated so much money for each project? What the hell tiny photostat fees can't claimed by petty cash? I really can't understand that. Perhaps I should thanks the "brilliant" lab assitant Ms.Wee for making us this trouble. A lab assistant whom wasn't assisting. But one thing I learned from this: When it was about money, the world changed.
Before the arrival of keyboard, we had nothing much can do except reading the MIDI specification and preparing to hook it up. I started understand MIDI but were still wondering how to use computer to call out the MIDI sound? Should we use another synthesizer program? Then why those online games of small size can produce the sound out? Maybe it's been embedded inside Windows sound system? How to call it out? After vinh discovered that VB can call both .wav & .mid together, I asked hong yap to produce a set of .mid sounds. But it turned out so easy in the end. The MIDI specification was actually defined inside Windows and vinh found inside one book that we could simply call it out by some defined functions. "How computer produce basic sound?" The question that has hauntered me from the beginning was finally answered. No need sound generator program, no need external synthesizer, we just need VB. How nice!
Hence it comed to the second question: how to get the MIDI message from the keyboard and decode it properly? I know these messages will be sent to USB port of the computer but then how to collect data from there? USB itself is also a specification...so do we need to study about it? No idea. But vinh once again proved his resourcefulness. By using VB6, he had written some code to capture the messages. A disastrous problem - the incompatibility of source code between VB6 and VB 2005 emerged. "One day one problem" (quoted from vinh), after solving the "delegate "address of" and "garbage collection", finally keyboard interfacing was done in 2 days. A real surprise. It was done by using VB. So no need worry about linking different softwares together. Initially we thought we need MATLAB to capture the messages.
Suddenly I realised something. While sending the MIDI message to computer, the keyboard still producing sound. I laughed. It was different from what I was told by a "professional" guy in Brah Basah. He said once the keyboard linked to the computer using MIDI-USB cable,the keyboard itself won't produce any sound, all sounds came out from computer. If you need both sounds, you need a rather new technology called fire-wyre cable. (Of course that cost a lot more!Ooops, money again) By reviewing all the events, I concluded that actually that guy didn't really know what we mean at that time and he just simply "rounded" it by using his technical knowledge on hardware. Ah, real life dilemma...this problem will be faced over and over again in future.
Yeah, the project seemed on the right track now and...I had nothing to do. Our group was "dissolved" unofficially. Since everything now was done by using VB and everyone was learning VB, so I should pick up VB. I went through online tutorials but found it a bit "dull" and time -consuming. Red some book as well but found it too hard to understand. Hence I decided to learned from start writing code even though I know nothing of it. What are those basic codes that I must know? And I started to think what I want to do in VB, explored, seeked help from others and then implemented it. But I still lagged too much behind. Totally couldn't understand the backbone of main program. What else can I do except stay back to study the code and program flow? By rewriting it, I somehow became more familiar with VB and the program itself. And by browsing all the properties of the picturebox, I found one effect that can make the keyboard looked 3D when it's pressed down, which was what they wanted to do before. I may not be intelligent as others but through hardwork, I still can found something that they missed and contributed to the whole project. A bit of self-satisfaction and confidence was building up, hurray!
It's already third week. We need to submit a project summary. Sick of writing, hence I decided not to join the proposal writing team (ming yian, agnes, christopher) but continued my VB programming. But everyone need to help them review some websites. I revisted happynote , played some games and decided to come out with a similar game on "ear listening". I started by creating some note pictures using Macromedia fireworks (but I think I really don't have talent in designing, all my preferences in color, shape and etc were often laughed by others. Sigh~) Really thanks to chi and vinh for helping me in writing the code and debugging. Other groups were also rushing to finish all the stages: score sheets' painting, gif generation , text input, theories' explanation... so I help out in finishing too. OT 3 nites, 1 for painting the score sheets, 1 for inputing the text files, 1 for learning Macromedia flash from yew meng. It's mainly all repetitive and tedious work. In the fourth week, I spent another nite to modify the resources to current path. Vinh said:"You are very good in manual work." Should I take this as compliment? Haha. Just hope by doing these won't make me even dull.
The fourth week was a challenging week. Problems emerged when we tried to combine all stages together. Unknown bug and crashes and in-synchronization of both inputs. Vinh and chi took care of the debugging and features add-in while I worked on to solve the in-shynchronization. It's purely disheartening problem. It made me feel so bad that our project was gone. We should throw it into rubbish bin. No way it serves as a learning tool when it can't even show the demo correctly. Sigh...after 3 weeks of hardwork...how cruel! Why we didn't face this problem from the beginning ? Shall I say this was fortune or misfortune?
But anyhow, problem still need to be solved. After being moodless in daytime, I started to tackle the problem in night by vary different aspects in gif files: size, movement, frames per second and tempo. Why the timing information contained in gif using different frames per second was different? Why did this difference (conversion error) only become significant starting from stage 3 onwards? Something must have to be dealed with the tempo that we used. Ya. After converting stage 3 songs using stage 1 tempo by default frames per second, the song suddenly became much more synchronized. It was a saving moment! And I can't control myself to yell loudly. Yes! Our project still had value and no need to be throwed into bin. The next thing need to be done was to redo all the gif files but somehow I got a quite irrating response from someone. It seemed like my fault to discover this problem so late and hence gave a lot more of works for someone to do in the last minute. Somehow I became the creator of this problem on purpose. Well, yes, you had work hard in previous week, I acknowledged it. But it shouldn't be an excuse to try to avoid continue working hard and show "face color" to me. Certainly you don't know what's the difference of just getting your own job done and spirit of teamwork. This event made me feel reluctant to separate work for their group to do. I would feel bad if I was to endure someone's "face color" without any logic just for the sake of getting jobs done. I rather spent extra time to do it myself. Luckily I still had ming yian's help on it. Almost everyone was doing their own individual presentation and report but I couldn't find any time to do it. So as ming yian, chi, vinh and some other else. It was the last concern.
Initially we wish to open the chance for everyone to represent us in monday's presentation but the responses were cold. Perhaps what Christopher said was correct: most of us just want to avoid it. Well, if that was the case, no point choosing our presentor based on friday's individual performance. And really thanks to chi & christopher's advice, it would be too late if we chose the presentors by friday. Hence, from nomination, we had appointed agnes, royston and hong yap as our presentors. Christopher and I worked on the presentation flow and then passed to them to decide and refine. Had one rehearsal in friday and it wasn't that smooth and many people had opinions on it. It may seemed discouraging for the presentors but this wasn't the entire point. The objective of rehearsal was to gain feedback on contents and the flow. The smoothness and styles only came after practices and practices.
Perhaps many people misunderstood good presentors are those who can talk genuiely without any preparation. Good verbal language command is only the basic requirement. To do a good presentation, you need to take care of every aspects: contents, flow, tone, speed, time, expression, gesturs and ec-cetera. And all of these differ from one presentation to another. You need many practices to make your presentation natural and fluent. In short, all good presentation came from practices and anyone can became good presentor if he/she keep practice. How many times? Many many times until you're really familiar with the content since you had so many aspects to take care. How to practice? Practice as if you were in the presentation. Don't memorize words but think carefully about the contents: what you really want to say and how are you going to convey it clearly? Seperate the contents into blocks and memorize the flow.
So our presentors had a second time rehearsal in saturday. It was much better. Looking forward for monday's one. But me and ming yian had another thing to worry. How about the Q&A sections? We talked about it and decided we both take care of general questions, and group leaders/ other in the same group answered those questions related to their group. Finally I had some free time to prepare my presentation in Sunday. First I put all the contents that I wanted to say and then started speaking it out verbally. Too much contents! Too long! Around 10 minutes. Hence I decided to cut those less impressive one. But still too long! Around 7 minutes. After practices block by block, I started to avoid using repetitive or meaningless words and control it within 6 minutes. A bit better but my tounge was already tired, hence began to do the layout and design of presentaion slides. Decided to do a quick summary on the whole progress and spent almost 2 hours to do the animations. And again, it's more towards manual work.
Monday was the preliminary round of DIP project. Our group was the second group to present at around 930am. Our presentors really did a terrific job and i thought the judges were quite impressed. Just a bit mess-up in Q&A sections. First was the wrong target of customers by hong yap, followed by overly defensive answer by ming yian. Ming yian knowed that as well and just hope that next time she can learn from this.But in overall we did it quite well and I was pretty confident that our presentation was among the best. When the judges left, everyone was relieved and started to enjoy before individual presentation in the evening. Finally I could concentrated on playing street fighter alpha 2. Come come come! (although I am pretty lousy in playing it)
It was always good to see how others present and try to learn what you missing. All of our group members were quite calm and could present their ideas clearly. (quoted from prof Goh) Certainly , it could had been the best compliment for the whole group. Besides this, I received some compliment from friends as well, which of course made me feel quite happy and worth spending time on preparing this. (Self-talking was always my strength, haha). A great news came during li lian's presentation that sent us roared, our DIP project had successfully entered the final! Woohoo! Finally all our hardwork were rewarded. Although we had only one and one software, technically wise we were less impressive but our preparation, presentation and team-work were among the best.
But that means another few days of OT...was pretty tired. The problem was that I wasn't pretty sure about how would the final go. How they judged? Based on presentation? Booth? or what? Luckily I remembered Ai Mei said before that her group entered final last year, hence I seeked her help through msn. I started to understand more about the flow and I predicted that it still weighed heavily on presentation. But yet again, a tough brainstorm on grouping. After many indecisive moments and doubts, We had regroup into few: marketing group, P&P group, book manuals group, presentors and programmer(only one=vinh). Certainly it was a mistake to include only 9 people in marketing group. Initially I wished to put 11-14 people to it but I chose to follow others' idea. They said too many peoples. If I knowed that they didn't understand why so many people were needed at the first time, I would stick on to my original idea based on what I saw from NTU business plan competition. But anyway, the marketing group still did an impressive job. Really thanks yean ching's group's efforts on it. But I did feel a bit sorry by not joining the marketing group. Part of the reason was that I know it would be tough, and I feeled quite exhausted at that time. I doubted myself wouldn't be able to contribute much to the writing of the plan while I still need to coordinate other stuffs. Perhaps it was an excuse. Perhaps I still feel a bit sick of vomiting out those kind of paper works. Anyway, that didn't mean I had nothing to do in P&P group (though considerably lesser).
Soon, I encountered another disheartening problem, lagging effect of gif files in laptop. Well, once again score sheets and keyboard didn't synchronized. Despair. It turned out that our way of developing this software was pretty primitive and resources occupying. A laptop that could run warcraftIII and heroes v couldn't run our i-MuLe smoothly. What a terrible joke! I never knowed that the computers we used to develop this software had 2GB of RAM. This was the second time I feeled that our project was a totally rubbish. Sigh~ But we still had one formal presentation to show. Die die we must found one supercomputer to demonstrate our software. Just hope that someone's computer can run it. But our hope was pretty dim. An inner voice came out from my heart, said that: To enter final was the maximum height that our project could achieved. We couldn't asked more from this.
Technically, our project was only software. Innovatively, there were so many competitors around globally. Somemore it could only worked in high performance computer? Well, it's time to end. We should be glad that we entered the final. Let's enjoy what others were doing in the final. Prof Goh said that the white light LED group was quite impressive, their idea was good and had a huge range of application. Ya, they even set up the booth the day before the final. How could we compare? But luck somehow standed on our side. On the next day, the very good lab assistant ming ling asked us whether we need a lab computer in the final. At least one supercomputer found. It was pure luck. Imagine if another lab assistant mentioned before was not on leave, she won't allow us to borrow the lab computer. How you could explain this except fortune? And we combined another two supercomputers using chakhon's and litting's for demonstation at booth.
The day had come and we were still rushing everything especially the book manuals and cd covers. We were less impressive than other booths with a lot of machines and robots. What we had were only 2 computers and some fliers. All other team weared so formally and we just weared casually. Perhaps almost all of our group members noticed the differences. No expectation. No pressure. Good also. The judges started visiting the booth and I've tried my best to demonstrate our program. Frankly I didn't have much time prepare on it but luckily I understood how the program work clearly and some key points of our marketing plan. Thier responses? Not too bad I assumed. But I still believed that we won't have the chance to win.
Just a moment later, my belief started to shake. The first group's presentation was not impressive. They seemed unprepared for it and what a shame the mouse controller didn't even know where to click the full slide show. And they were like introducing us the concepts of the products rather than the products itself. Were they doing an overview? In contrast, we did a terrific presentation. All our presentors were steady, fluent and good. We showed our team-spirit in Q&A section and our acknowledgement touched some of our group members. Then it followed by a boastful and aggressive presentation by a team worked on medical application. Disgusting. They should only focus on their product. Only cheap judges will be impressed by their ill-manners. And if they thought those people who attained professors status would be that cheap, that proved how "moronic" were them. The last 3 groups' presentation were quite good especially the fifth one. But I feeled many parts could be improved. It's general problem to explain technical information to audience. You just couldn't flash all the details and expect the audiences would understand. Even if the professors understand they wouldn't think that these were good presentations. Should find some way to keep it interesting while still maintaining the technical level of the presentation. That's hard but that's critical. But anyway, that's only for presentation. I didn't know how the judges judged, surely it's not based on it entirely.
Because of our low expectation, we feel extremely high when we heard other groups' names announced round by round. Final 5, Final 4, Final 3, Final 2, one more one more! And the second prize went to E011 White Light LED! Yes! We were the champion! None of us expected this and perhaps none of the participants expected this. We were the black horses. Haha. So sorry for the LED group. Technically, they were a lot better than us. Why the judges preferred our project more than theirs? Maybe because of the 7-years to recover the cost made them failed. The reason still remained a mystery. But anyway we had got the best, thanks to all people. It was an amazing experience thorougly and certainly it was one of the most excited moments in our life.
We really started from nothing, went all along the way ourselves towards the fantastic end. I knowed other groups may had put in a lot of hardwork in their projects as well but certainly all of our members feel we were deserved to be champion just by the great efforts that we had put in. But anyway, that was just what we feeled. Still, it was just a name. A fictitious name of "champion". Just like the fictitious name of "leader". After a shortwhile, everyone will forget about it. What still keeped inside memory were all the processes and experiences. What people couldn't take off from you are what you had learned. Needless to be boastful and we should be more careful about our words when we are in this situation.
Someone said:"Haha too bad ah cho didn't join us. If he joined us he would be part of the champion team." That certainly wasn't the truth. I remembered that he couldn't join us because he promised his other team earlier. And I believed he enjoyed his experience pretty much. We shouldn't judge someone's action by the outcome. If we don't had the luck, could we win? And if we failed, would people said the same thing to our project? Perhaps not. I could imagine at that time our project maybe viewed as a rubbish. But it doesn't matter. It's the process and the experience that matter. What we should do and can do is to judge ourselves. We couldn't judge others properly as we weren't them. Vice-versa.
Thank you all. Thanks our superb nice and friendly prof Goh, ming-yian (the co-leader that is even more persevere and resilient than me), all subgroup leaders who did a brilliant job (royston, lee kim, chak hon, eddie, agnes, chi, yean ching), our great presentor trio (agnes, royston and hongyap), musician hong yap, programming god vinh, semi-god chi & boonkeat, editors christopher & wenkeat, graphic designers cher huat & choy kien, lively castle drawer ah bee, the hammer and sheep couple litting and lilian, flash king chee how, maple king chee voon , hard-working music group, score sheets group, tempo group and all the very good lab assitants.
Thorough the project, I had really learned a lot of things and gained many insights. And I would keep all the compliments as my future motivation.
Steady! Ha ha!
