Remember the kids’ drawing competitions?

I remember many kids drawing competition, where the leaders of tomorrow were actually taught by parents that integrity means nothing and that results mean everything from the way the parents actively try to help the kids cheat in such competitions.

Technology has advanced, and I am not surprised that something like this happened.

Young programmers win big
By Tan Weizhen

Celine and Charlene trumped most of the older competitors handily in the contest organised by the Information Technology Standards Committee and supported by the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA). — ST PHOTO: DESMOND WEE
TALK about starting young: Celine Chan, four, took on competitors far older in a national computer programming contest held here recently.

Celine and her sister, Charlene, eight, proved more than a match for the older competitors, trumping most of them handily in the contest, organised by the Information Technology Standards Committee which is supported by the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA).

Called XtremeApps, the competition required those taking part to program computer applications from scratch.

Armed with just the basics in the Squeak programming language, as well as encouragement – but no help – from mum and dad, the Chan sisters came up with an application called Health Fairies.

It is an interactive, educational story with an anti-smoking message: The main protaganist is a beautiful young girl who loses her youth, and good looks, because she puffs away like there’s no tomorrow.

The sisters took the bulk of the June holidays to complete their entry. They had to come up with the storyline, draw the characters, and write programs that animated the characters, among other things.

Their effort paid off: Health Fairies landed a merit award in the junior category of the contest, beating 68 other contestants, mostly 11 and 12 year olds.

The judges were impressed by the interactivity of the application.

One, Mr Robert Chew, chairman of the ITSC, said, ‘It was quite good, and I didn’t realise at all that the creators were just a four-year-old and an eight-year-old when I shortlisted the application. Celine was our youngest contestant ever.’

The sisters, who like online gaming, received lots of encouragement from their parents, both accountants.

‘I feel it was great that they had this chance to explore something out of their range,’said Mr Henry Chan, an avid gamer himself.

Source: Straits Times

Not saying that they are cheating, but I do have my suspicion..

Also, is using Squeak Etoy really programming? Lol. I have seen 12 years old creating (with real industry standard programming languages) unbeatable Connect-X game with built in AI (its called Connect-4, but the program was so flexible it allows you to specify the condition for winning), so I can’t see how a 4 years old and 8 years old pair should win a programming competition.

Additionally, Xtremeapp’s webby can’t seem to work on Chrome. What joke? And seriously, they use a css class called “textbold” just to bold text.

The end is near?

Finally my contract is drawing to an end. Working from 7 to 5 at an inaccessible place where handphone isn’t available is no joke, its extreme boredom. The work aren’t exactly exciting either, but well, its all for the money.

School gonna start soon, and SMU, being the most Wayang uni out there, already has tonnes of redundant rubbish COMPULSORY lined up for us, such as team building camp (which is not the same as the orientation camp), career talk, teach you how to use library, etc etc. What a waste of precious time!

Yesterday I started working on an VB.net 2008 application that can automatically leave messages on people’s tagboard. This is the latest “marketing” trend in Singapore, popular among blog shops and such, and people are actually charging money for doing this spam. Since I have nothing better to do, I’m trying my hand on writing my own version.

Currently I have only a prototype completed with no interface and stuff. It can currently take any URL you give (e.g. http://weikiat.net/slops), and from there it will systematically seek out all links to blogspot.com sites, there the probability of having cbox in there is higher. After reaching a pre-defined number of blogs, it will then proceed to visit each of those blogs, and through a clever html coding and stimulation, automatically post any user customizable message on the tagboards.

Today I will be doing up a client version which could be sold to “advertisers”. I would probably release a free version with some limitations as well to push into the market.

I have decided that the client which i will release will not feature the auto blog-seeking feature. Rather it will connect to my server to download a list of blogshops to tag. I will retain the seeking feature for my own use only.

So if anyone is interested, watch this space. The client would probably be ready by this weekend or early next week.