Facebook’s Not So Smart “Smart List”

I don't want this many lists!

What happens when I try experimenting with Facebook’s account settings? I ended up with 3 duplicate smart lists for my university network.

It seems that each time I add and remove the same network, Facebook decides to create a new smart list for me instead of merging with existing lists. To be fair to the developers, I guess they never anticipated that ordinary users would just randomly and repeatedly add and remove their networks.

If I was a developer for the smart lists feature, I probably have added a “safe-guard” feature for the smart-lists so that no list can be deleted or merged if there’s an existing privacy rule that uses the old list. Otherwise, randomly deleting lists would risk exposing my past posts to the public i.e. no restrictions.

This is probably the most logical explanation for why I still have these 3 duplicate lists: I did these experiments at different times of the year so I probably have some really old posts that still uses the older lists as their privacy setting.

Bad Implementation Decisions

However, if it was really me that developed the smart-list feature, I would’ve given more power to the user. 

The main problem is that Facebook created smart-lists to be full automated so that there’s no user interaction required. However,they implemented the concept quite poorly such that they gave the user absolutely no control over the smart lists. It’s ridiculous that I can’t even manually create and delete smart-lists.

For example, I don’t really need a list for people living in the Waterloo area because everyone on my friend list in this area is already from the same university. Even though I can hide the lists from the sidebar, it’s still annoying to see a giant list of smart-lists when I want to select the privacy settings when making a new post.

What the developers should have done was create smart-filters for lists i.e. let the user choose automatic filters for regular lists. For example, suppose I want to create a list of friends from both the University of Waterloo and currently living in Toronto. It’s a bit tedious to manually do this but this could have been easily accomplished with smart-filters.

One more thing!

However, one important feature for lists is to be able to set a fall-back for privacy when deleting a list. For example, if I delete a list, I want all my past posts, photos, privacy settings – everything – associated with that list to switch to Close Friends, if not already.

I personally haven’t tried doing this because I have enough lists already but who knows, maybe it’s already implemented.

One more thing!

Huh I just noticed while proofreading that I used a lot of “for example” in this blog post.

Lesson Learned: Never Trust cin.eof() in C++

Just spent all of last night debugging my computer science assignment. Turns out that my output strings were all correct but cin.eof() kept returning true in my while loop even though the last standard input was only a blank line.

I can’t believe that I wasted my night using Visual Studio debugger to go through each output string’s ASCII value when all it was was just an extra input.

Sigh, guess it’s also partially my fault for not checking for a blank input by assuming that cin.eof() would automatically terminate at the last blank line.

Why am I at University Again?

It’s been almost two weeks since my second term started at University of Waterloo and I already feel like giving up. There’s just so much trivialities that shouldn’t even exist in the first place.

It’s ridiculous that three out of the six courses that I’m taking is basically useless. I’m paying over $15,000 a year to study at the best mathematics/technology department in Canada yet I’m stuck learning stuff that have no relevance to software engineering.

Sure some of the stuff that I learn are the foundations for my upper year courses but most of it is useless. I mean, why do I need to know how to calculate the electric field due to an infinite plane of charge or know how to write the delta-epsilon proof of a limit? Maybe an electrical engineer or researcher needs to know this but for software? Not really, at least not in web-related companies – so basically every major software company out there.

It makes me wonder if the university is only making me take these mandatory courses just so the extra tuition can offset the recent construction around campus.

Sigh, now that I got my rant out of the way, it’s back to studying electrostatic fields.

Twenty Twelve

Well, that’s the end of another

• long
• difficult
• boring
• lonely
• well-wasted
• amazing
• smexy

year. And I can’t wait to get started on the next! Assuming the world won’t end on December 21st. I don’t really like making New Year Resolutions because they’re just going to get broken anyways; instead, I’ll just make some recommendations for myself to improve on.

1. Continue ranting about life and tech and hopefully end up improving my horrible grammar. Yeah right, without a second opinion *ahem nonexistent readers* I’ll never improve… oh well.
2. Write shorter blog posts because nobody – not even me when I’m proofreading – wants to read a 1300 word post like my last post.
3. Be a smarter consumer and do a bit more research before purchasing anything – especially during Steam’s annual winter sale.

Oh yeah one more thing, I’m also going to start my own 365 Project on my old Tumblr account. Check it out here. Now that I think about it, there’s two resolutions that I want to keep now:

• Post one photo on my Tumblr everyday for the year.
• Finish re-reading the first three Inheritance books so that I can finally start reading the last one. I’m just dying to read how Eragon’s story ends (please no spoilers).

Well, I think I use the world “well” too much. Oh well Happy New Year!

My Disappointing Experiences with Skype and Vbuzzer on my Android

Let’s face it, Phone and SMS plans in Canada are outrageously expensive for even the most basic features. For a casual user like myself who only uses the phone occasionally, Rogers recommends a Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) plan.

Obviously, it’s also their lowest type of monthly payment. The most basic PAYG plan is $0.40 per minute with a minimum monthly deposit of $10.00 to keep your number active. That’s great, only $10 a month right? Ahahaha… That’s the equivalent of 25 minutes a month for $10 dollars. There’s no unlimited evenings, weekends, or any of that other nice stuff that those $40 plans come with. It’s just a flat 25 minutes.

As a co-op student at Waterloo, I’ll be looking for jobs and getting interviews next month. I don’t know about you but I don’t think 25 measly minutes will allow me to talk to all my potential employers and and do phone interviews.

Okay, so why not just get a better plan? Sure, this poor university student – who lives in the province with the most expensive tuition in Canada and who already has over $10,000 student loan – just cough up that extra $30 a month for four months just for an “equal” opportunity for the job hunt.

Note: Maybe “equal” isn’t the best adjective to describe the situation but the fact remains, I’m not a heavy user like some of my classmates but why do I have to pay the same amount to be able to apply to the same jobs?

With the prospect of a dedicated phone plan out of the question and since my entire campus and residence has high speed WiFi, I spent the majority of my afternoon testing out popular VOIP services. The ones that I ended up paying for were:

• Skype
• Vbuzzer

Needless to say, based on the title of this post, they were huge disappointments and waste of my already scarce money.

Read on to learn more about my experience. Then you can leave my blog and completely forget about it and go back to using those services. I’m probably not going to convince anyone to stop using them but at least I can get my story out.

The Realization that I Wasted My Winter Break

WTF I'm level 120 in a week!

Yup… without LoL, I tend to get very bored. Seeing as how MapleStory was the only decent game that I can still run at a solid frame-rate, I decided to take it up again – at least while I’m still in Toronto.

Release: Project365 Theme for Tumblr

Hurray! I finally finished my first public project. Hopefully this will be the first of many new freebies on my blog.

Click for live demo!

As you can tell from the title, this is a Project 365 Theme for Tumblr. I didn’t publish this in the official Tumblr theme gallery was because I wanted this theme to be exclusively for showcasing Project 365.

Steam and Origin – Two Crapware, One Computer

When I heard a few of my friends are going to play Star Wars The Old Republic this winter break, I wanted to check it out and see its system requirements. If it was any other game, it probably would’ve been on Steam but BioWare just have to sell it exclusively on Origin.

Steam is fine as it is so I don’t like the fact that EA created their own game publishing network. Sure Steam may not have a physical copy delivery system and that they just recently got hacked, but EA could have worked an agreement with Steam instead of making their own platform. It’s not like EA can protect themselves against hackers any better than Steam – if the hackers are motivated enough, I have no doubt that they can hack Origin just as easily.

Now, there’s two major gaming platforms out there (whatever happened to Xfire?) and it’s  a pain to have both running at start-up to make sure that my games are updated. It’s bad enough already that I keep one of them up before Origin came but now having two software that does the same thing just stupid.

I understand that if EA were to sell their games on Steam, it probably wouldn’t be as profitable because Steam is the middleman that takes a cut of the revenue but I just wish that those gaming companies would put players first and investors second.

A Thousand Miles

That’s how far I feel my desktop is right now. While everyone else is either outside shopping or inside gaming, I’m doing nothing on a graphic-card-less laptop. I can still play games with low-level-graphics like Bastion and Maple Story,  but I really wish I can play some LoL on my desktop back at my residence at Waterloo.

Oh well, guess the only thing I can think of doing right now is shop on Steam’s winter sale and play some Maple Story while I wait to go back to Waterloo…

Wait, what am I saying? I don’t want to go back to all that studying yet! Sigh, Waterloo is now my double edged sword – I can’t study there but when I’m not there, I can’t play.

From “Dammit I’m not Getting a 100″ to “50 is Good Enough” – My First Impression of University

It’s been awhile since I last posted on my blog – 4 months 7 days to be exact! Well it’s not like anyone cares or even about read this blog so I guess it doesn’t really matter. For those that do care (I pity you for reading this nonsense), I spent the last four months studying at University of Waterloo.

I decided against my lazyness to apply and somehow got accepted into Software Engineering – one of the busiest programs for first-years.