Prejudice and door lock

Which one is more powerful? A door lock or prejudice?

I encountered 2 broken door lock incidents in the past few days, luckily nothing went wrong. 

One of the door usually requires a smartcard to open, as the system was faulty that day, someone disabled the lock to make sure people have access to it. However I still swipe my card every time when I push an unlocked door…

Here’s an image of a classic InfoSec theory (Which is about “CIA”)

From http://www.papershredding.ie/waste-disposal.html

It talks about integrity, availability and confidentially. If you are living in an apartment building in Hong Kong, most of the time if you forgot to lock the door, nothing will happen. The challenge for anyone who’s trying to break in an apartment/system is that there’s a cost for testing each door. Most people will assume a door is “locked”.

How about when we try to share a new idea? Do we assume people will not take it and just drop it? To me, prejudice is much more powerful than a door lock, cause after all, we all assume a door lock can lock the door… but it isn’t always the case.

From http://www.uniquerishta.com/

CSV to XML tool

When working on a small website project, the client sent an excel file for the database. However this time I intended to use pure XML instead of database, so a CSV->XML tool is needed.

http://www.convertcsv.com/csv-to-xml.htm

This website is exactly the tool I wanted. You can simply upload the CSV and it will convert it to XML for you. You can specify the root and record name for the XML file, makes it an even better tool!

Investigation- Identify the requirements of the project

The project brief is simple, come up with some new services and technology that can justify or reinforce the role of library in a school.

Most people started by finding new technologies and new services, to me, it is more important to rethink how education may look like in the future, so that we can easily imagine how the library can evolve to adapt to this new teaching and learning landscape.

“21st century education” is a popular term that coined by many educational scholars and educators. So let’s start by looking at the trend of this education development.

I found this article (http://www.innovationunit.org/knowledge/our-ideas/21st-century-learning) very useful as it points out the role of students, educators and schools in the new era of education. It suggested that students learn through meaningful projects, school as a base camp for enquiry learning, educators regard themselves as learners as well as teachers and Learners collaborate in their learning, rather than ‘consuming’ it.

6. Using Fix-up Options

Application of this strategy on reading the selected text

This strategy focuses mainly on fixing the problems readers encountered during reading. It can also be used to 

5. Determining Main Ideas

Activity related to this reading strategy

1. Describe the main characters and settings in the story. Firstly, list out all the main characters in the story, then choose images from Google image search that will best match the description of the characters.
   For example, choose a doorstep that could potentially be the place where the wet little dog appeared in the story. Here’s an example.
   
   Image from: http://leedawn82.blogspot.hk/2011_10_01_archive.html
2. Choose a word that is not in the text to describe what this story is about.
   Students are required to choose a word that best describe the story. The word should not appear in the text itself, and students will put the chosen words on a piece of sticky memo and put it on the board, or if resource is available, an online tool can be used as a replacement (http://padlet.com/).

Generating a unique sequence of number in PHP

For a project I had to randomize a given sequence of elements. Here’s the code for generate a unique sequence.

 

<?
$originalArray=array();
$randomizedArray=array();
$arraySize=10000;

for ($i=0; $i<$arraySize; $i++){
  array_push($originalArray, $i);
}

//var_dump($originalArray);
for ($i=0; $i<$arraySize; $i++){
$chosenIndex=rand(0, sizeof($originalArray)-1);
echo ‘chosen index: ‘.$chosenIndex.’, Value: ‘;
array_push($randomizedArray, $originalArray[$chosenIndex]);
//unset and update array size
unset($originalArray[$chosenIndex]);
$originalArray=array_values($originalArray);
echo $randomizedArray[$i].'<br>’;
}

?>

Laser Stereolithography 3D printing

I’m excited to see all the 3D tech in the CES 2014! One particularly interesting product is the XFab laser 3D printer which can print soft materials. Instead of the popular Fused deposition modeling (FDM), it uses the Laser Stereolithography process. This vice post has a comprehensive summary of the 3D printing products in CES.