Lifeage

I wrote about The Fighting Cocks and how I feel about it.

I have discussed in depth about my album of the year list in episode 5 of Suara Suburbia. My criteria is really simple, album that I can enjoy listening, either actively or passively, from start to finish.

10) Hotelier - Goodness

9) Rejected kids - Home

8) Direct Hit - Wasted Mind

7) Descendents - Hypercaffium Spazzinate

6) Jimmy Eat World - Integrity Blues

5) PUP - The Dream is Over

4) Balance & Composure - The Light We Made

3) Pinegrove - Cardinals

2) Basement - Promise Everything

Had fun last week gigging with mates from Ships Down. For those who played Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2, you should be familiar with this tune!

Announcing Suara Suburbia

Couple weeks back, I had an idea to start a podcast about Indonesian music scene (pop punk to be specific) in bahasa. I pitched this idea to my buddy slash bandmate since highschool, Azis. Numerous chats and two weeks later, we released our first episode.

Why podcast though? I always liked the idea of podcast. It's simple and it's free. Free as in no one controls the platform, not like twitter, tumblr or facebook. I've been listening podcast probably since 2011 and hooked ever since.

Another reason is editing. I don't want to commit to much of time into this idea. Learning cameras and video editing are things that I don't want to get into. Luckily, I know a thing or two on how to edit audio with GarageBand.

Lastly, I just want to chat with my mates on topics that we both interested in. Sometimes I have some ideas or feelings that I want to share but I just don't have the platform. Suara Suburbia are going to be just that, my place to express my feeling towards music that shaped me and mates.

This last two weeks was a bit of a whirlwind for the four of us. After pulled a couple of all-nighters, it is time for us to present our work for public.

Jendela, is an initiative to increase transparency and minimise bribery at public services in Indonesia. The site provides step-by-step information, asks & shows public reviews and creates visualisation based on it.

The site itself built using Facebook's React and Parse. We are both js noobs so we really appreciate for any improvements and advices. We build it in the open so feel free to jump in if you are interested :)

Try it out : http://jende.la

and read the code and watch its discussion : https://github.com/jendela/jendela

Made with lots of ❤️ in Paris, London, Singapore and Nuremberg

Update

It's been quite a while as a (free) user of this service (I don't mind hearing ads). I always prefer Rdio above other alternatives because of its design and experience.

Too bad they are closing soon. Music streaming is hard.

Last month, I had my first Ramadhan as a Londoner. It was challenging for me as a Muslim to fast during the summer. Summer days are generally long and hot (it reached 36.7 °C, hottest since 2006). Fasting starts from dawn (around 3 AM) until sunset (around 9 PM). In total, British Muslims fast for around 17 hours.

I thought British Muslims have the toughest Ramadhan, but apparently, that's not the case. Generally, Scandinavian countries would need to fast for more than 18 hours. Even more, Muslims in Reykjavik, Iceland fast for 21-22 hours!

I follow a lot of developers who attend #WWDC15, and for some extend they somewhat had similar views on the event. Whereas this video presents the perspective of young people who code towards big event like WWDC.

Fireworks / Creepoid / Dave House @ The Fighting Cocks, Kingston

Dave House was neat. Somehow I still remember his line, 'I was born steady..'. Maybe because I feel the same. I prefer (and deliberately chose) my life to be like a sine wave with a low amplitude, not fluctuate too much.

Creepoid, four piece, lot of noise. Noise as in noise from guitar's pedalboard. Chicks who plays bass are cool. I like it when headliners bring openers that are "different".

When Fireworks opened their set with Oh Common Life, I know that this gig will be one of my my highlight in my UK years. Both Gospel and Oh Common Life are included in my Album of the Year list. That two albums were the answer of my fatigue of hearing pop punk bands nowadays. Singing songs that you know all the words by your favorite band that played live in front of you.. is the best feeling ever.

I have been a fan since "we are everywhere" EP. I listen to them throughout college years, work, marriage life and fatherhood times. I talked about them with my bandmates since college. I still regularly play 'bed sores' on weekends to my son.

At some point, hardworking artists and bands need to take a rest. Take time as much as you need, but promise us that you'll be back with another pack of songs filled with feelings, sadness and nostalgia.

Calling it a night

I got the chance to see them for one last time. Thinking back, I always caught them evertyime they played the city that I lived in. Opened Paramore in Jakarta back on 2011, headlined their own tour in Leeds on 2014 and closed their chapter on 2015 in London.

And if everyone else heard this They wouldn't be so sad It was the best I ever had - Best I Ever Had from Good for Me (2011)

Hail for one of the Michigan's finest,

Last Wednesday, I went to my first code dojo. Held in Callcredit's office, this dojo planned to build Skynet to occupy the city of Leeds with cyborgs. What would be the obvious thing that every war-machines have? Digit recognisers, of course! I can't imagine what cyborgs would do without able to read digits? So, instead of making a cyborg in its entirety, we ended up making a crude and simple implementation of digit recogniser as our first step.

Coding in pairs - Leeds Code Dojo (photos by Grant Crofton, taken from Meetup.com's dojo page)

The technique that was used is called k-nearest neighbour (KNN), which is to find k number of things with the most similar features (nearest in distance). I paired with Phil to implement the recogniser using Objective-C. Since both of us are Machine Learning newbies, we simply compared the number of whitespaces for each image. This simplistic approach yields the accuracy of 18.75% (which is better than expected!). Below is the snippet for calculating distance using whitespace comparison.

I went continuing to improve the distance calculator using different techniques and tweaks. Here are the results for each technique with its accuracy and performance (the machine: Macbook 2010, 2.3 GHz Core i5, running Xcode 6.1 GM on OSX 10.9.5):

Calculate Distance Accuracy (%) Time (s) Whitespace comparison 18.75 125.62 Sums of pixel differences 88.75 90.38 Euclidean distance (power=2, k=1) 90.25 106.87 Euclidean distance (power=2, k=3) 86.75 109.14 Euclidean distance (power=3, k=1) 90.25 111.04 Euclidean distance (power=3, k=3) 87.50 115.97

Adding neighbours seemed to be lowering the accuracy. Even after adding mechanism for putting weights for the neighbours (bigger weight for nearer neighbour), bigger value of k still lowers the final accuracy. The table shows us that using euclidean distance with power of two yields the best score in the shortest amount of time. Below is the snippet for calculating distance using euclidean distance (power=2, k=1).

I really enjoyed my first dojo experience. I met new people, got introduced to new languages, ate free pizzas, and learned new techniques. Code dojo made me realise that regardless of our ethnicity, race, text editors, indentation style and programming language, we know that deep down in heart we all developers have one similarity. We all want to make better cyborgs :)

Feel free to check the full code at Leeds Code Dojo's repo.