Friends for... sale?

Just yesterday, during the Facebook Application Seminar, I was introduced to a Facebook app I'd never seen: "Friends For Sale!" I'll have to confess that my initial impression of it was approximately 10% intrigue and 90% what the heck is this for? So in deference to that 10%, I listened on~

Buy people and make them your pets! You can make your pets poke, send gifts, or just show off for you. Make money as a shrewd pet investor or as a hot commodity! Friends for Sale is the bees knees!

Okay let's start with giving credit~ As the group pointed out, the name is probably the most succinct summary I've ever seen of a Facebook application. This app apparently lets you buy and sell your friends as pets, declare your wish to do so, and give gifts to them. While I feel the titular purpose of this app a little disturbing, there seems to be a sizable portion of Facebook users ready to disagree with me, so perhaps this meets some niche desire that I fail to fully empathize with ^^

The group then touched on the Seven Deadly Sins and Maslow's hierachy of needs. Where does Friends For Sale fit into? Probably Greed / Envy / Pride on the Sins, and Self-Esteem and Achievement on Maslow's list. While it might be pushing the definition to call playing such a Facebook game a sin, perhaps some people really do feel a greater sense of self-worth when they are deemed (or deem themselves) to have some form of superiority over others, especially if who they lord over are popular in their own right.

On a more technical note, I feel that the simplicity of the application worked well for them. With a lot of their features leveraging on Facebook's own capabilities, scalability would have been less of an issue during development. Also, starting the user off with some capabilities and value is a good idea, one that our app may have overlooked on our first iteration, as it ensures that the user can explore the game upon registration.

Having said all that, I still do not see the point of this application. What is there to entice me back regularly? Also, while I've not played much of other Facebook games either, I believe applications that offer an alternative life in some way (be it fishing, farming, or some other activity) would be more appealing than buying friends. How many friends are you going to buy to boost your ego anyway? And I would personally be really disturbed if someone "bought" me, even if it's only in a virtual world. Like, get away you control freak.

Alright then~ Time to go back and market penguins~ When you cannot fly, better make sure you're helluva good swimmer.

Lessons from a deployment deadline

This is a really overdue post, but it's the first time in a while i'm properly awake in the day ^^ which brings me to the first lesson i've learnt:

• Sleep is an essential part of life. All repayment of owed sleep often comes with exponential interest.

For the last week, my group of 4 people, Laurence, Carolyn, Eldwin and I, have been doing night shifts of varying lengths. I, for one, can't really do coding marathons over several nights, but I.. managed somewhat. I do believe, though, that there has been at least one night where I failed to respond despite being online... having fell asleep on my keyboard. The full aftermath, however, came in the days after submission. I can't recall sleeping through most of the day for a few days on end in recent years ^^ Now that the first submission is over, I realise it could have been partially averted by observing the next lesson i've learnt:

• Read the manual. Especially the fine print.

Our application was, up till a really short while before submission, hosted on a virtual server within our school. I was not the one who submitted the request, but was told that the space would definitely be sufficient for a collection of text files. That claim turned out... partially wrong.

On the night of our submission, I uploaded one rather essential web script onto the server. After prompting for confirmation to overwrite, it deleted the file, and attempted the write the new one.

It failed. Horribly. And left us staring at a "Disk quota exceeded" message.

Suffice to say, we had a bit of a crisis. However, we couldn't, for the life of us, imagine *how* the total file size could have exceeded what i now knew as 1GB of space! But after a while of frantic digging, we found a rather large file on the server, named error_log. It was... 1.3GB. Apparently, we had forgotten to lower PHP error reporting, and a whole clump of warnings to the tune of "Variable not declared". Exasperated, we proceeded to delete the file, but the quota busted error still remained. We guessed this status was probably refreshed on a periodic basis, and couldn't really do much at that point. Luckily, we managed to find a saviour nearby, and with him came my next lesson~

• Always have a backup plan. Especially so during the last moments

When we realised we couldn't save our server that night, we intended to shift to AWS, which we weren't on initially as we wanted to save the credits for the Final Assignment. While trying to figure out how to connect to it's SQL service (also part of the reason we weren't on AWS), Frank offered to host it on his server. So now the application is running on a third-party host, and we actually had something to show for the submission.

So, thanks to all the help we received in the last hours, we actually managed to submit the alpha version of our as-yet-unnamed application (officially, anyway). We now have a less buggy system, a really good design, and a humongous backlog of features yet to be implemented. So I'm off to sleep a bit more for now, and resume coding very soon~

Wrestled back my Facebook account

So apparently, my account has undergone 4 iterations this year: from Bob on 9th June and Garett on 22nd August to Viviana on 24th September. Wanting to *gasp* finally create a Facebook account, I knew, somehow, that I'd find somebody squatting on my account, waiting for me to activate it. And guess what? I was right! ^^

Unfortunately... I kinda screwed up a little there. You know the link below FB activation emails? The one that goes "Think these notification emails are for someone else? To report this account, go to: (link)"? Well, I went to click that, thinking it'll throw the squatter out.

And... my email got disabled in FB's records. That was 13th December. So I emailed them... and somehow the admin team behind FB sat on it, probably shoving my request to the bottom of the pile, and only re-enabled it on Boxing Day... Does it take 13 days to toggle a single flag?? Oh and what's with addressing the mail to "Garett"? I definitely signed my mails Patrick, and the last squatter's called Viviana... Makes me wonder what records they were looking at.

Interestingly, the squatter was still on my account after all that mess. So I did what I should have done long ago, which was to request a new password, change it to my own, change her name, change her profile, and basically flush all traces of her existence on *my* account. Geez. These people...

Lessons learnt: when flushing squatters, do it the fast way. Change the bleeding password. ^^