Why I do not want to help students anymore

Every semester I try my level best to help my students. I was a student before and I always wanted to do well and when I see them looking for help I remember my student time and I help. A lot of times I may not be able to help as much as I wished, but I try.

I do not expect any thank you note for that, but what I got today's mail was a wake up call for me. Here is the mail [minus the names]

=============================================================
From: student 1 <xxxx@yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 2:22 AM
Subject: Urgent.Emergency(unity);
To: avijit.paul@mmu.edu.my

Dear my beloved Sir, We’re having problems with our unity. The submission is due on next Monday. We’re running out of time. We don’t want to fail this course. Please, please, please help us.  We are so desperate. This is not fair, we have tried our best. We give all our heart and soul to this project. Everyone else got interaction. But we don’t even know how to publish our work. Which selection to choose, ya? Is it the OSX standalone? What is OSX? With this email we attach our unity file. Please do the third person controller with hovering, floating effect. Then the user can boost the speed of the character after collecting stuff. Please do all nicely. We don’t have enough time to do this assignment because we want to watch anime and play games. Please ya! You are my only hope. Then put extra FX to make our environment fantastic and beautiful for bonus marks. I really really need this. We know nothing about unity, so please do everything for us, ya! You are the nicest lecturer we know. After you finish, please burn in CD and design the cover for us. Remember to use the thin jewel case. Please remember ya, this is very important! We don’t want to fail this course. We don’t want to waste our parents’ money. Finally, submit the CD to [lecturer 1] on Monday between 2-4pm. Please don’t be late. We can’t go submit on Monday because we will be at Singapore “jalan-jalan cari makan”(please google this) I really really hope you’ll understand our situation. Please don’t tell Mr. Mazlan that you do all our Unity stuff. Keep it secret, till death do us part. Please please, we don’t want to fail this course. That’s all for this sem. We’ll be back to ask you to do our assign for FYP. PS:  Oh btw, how to export Max to Unity? Sincerely, Student 1 and student 2 PSS: Please take this with a bit of sarcasm. Don’t take this seriously. This is the joke of the semester! =======================================================  I replied =======================================================  Thanks for writing this mail, although both of you probably have crossed the line by miles, but it was a good realization mail.  Even though it makes me sad to read this email as I really believed [student 3] needed help on the unity part so I tried to help as much as I could even though I did not get to help much. But after your reading your email I understand my mistake. I was trying too hard to help and most probably I am not going to help anyone ever and will show the email [minus the names] as a reference why I dont want to help.  =======================================================  Anyone who is reading it might think why cant I just take a sarcastic email? After all it is a joke and they have exaggerated a bit too much and it is probably a good fun. The problem is that,  recently I took a lot of criticism from a number of faculty members for helping too much. I digested all of it thinking I am trying to do a greater good as the students probably really need help.  It takes a lot of my time and effort to find ways to solve problems. I spend a good number of hours trying to solve this technical issues that I could have used for my own work. I still did because I believed it will help.  But after this, please dont bother asking for help.  The door has been shut, at least for the rest of my time in MMU.

Underwater effects like island demo in unity3d

A lot of times I get asked how to do the underwater effects like the one we see in island demo - where when you / your camera goes under water level you see blurry atmosphere.

Since most of the questions are asked by Non Programmers, (ex http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=195450 )  here is a "copy paste" style tutorial that you should be able to follow to create your underwater effects.


Level : Beginner heading towards intermediate 


Things you need
1. Underwater script (comes with island demo)
2. Underwater shader (comes with island demo)
3. Blur island script (comes with island demo)
4. Glow Effect Island script (comes with island demo)

Lets get our hands dirty
0. Open your island demo project, create a new scene.
1. Create a terrain.
2. Drag daylight water in the scene.
3. Enlarge it to make it fill your scene / area that you are trying to put water on.
4. Drag first person controller to the scene. Position it where you need it to start walking
5. Click Main camera so that you can now assign scripts to the main camera
6. Go to components > Scripts > Underwater script to add underwater script to the camera.

7. Now you should have underwater effect script on your main camera. However, if you try to go under the water right now, you wont see any effect. For that, you need to add the under water surface first.
8. Go to Game object > Create other > Plane
9. Make the plane to have EXACTLY same X, Y, Z as the daylight water. (You can make the Y of the underwater a little low - just like what I did, but X and Z should be same)

10. Now drag the underwater shader from the water folder from the project window.

11. You can try to play and go underwater now and VOLA!!! You are stuck!! You wanted to see blur and now You cant even get down. That is because your plane has a collider. So remove the collider from the plane and you are good to go down.

12. However, you still cant see any blurriness. That is because your camera dont have any blur script to it. So, select the "main camera" under first person controller prefab and go to
a) Component > Image effect > blur (island)
b) Component > Image effect > Glow (Island)

13. One you assigned all of this, the last thing you need to assign in an audio source. That is because the default script that comes with island demo has audio and your current camera dont have audio. So click the main camera again, and go to
Component > Audio > Audio source

14. Now play it, you should have similar blurry effect.

15. If you want to control the blur, change the iteration or blur speed under blur effect island. (this is under main camera) . Here I changed the iterations from 3 to 1 to have clearer effect.

So hope you can follow this and create your own underwater effects. If you are doing it in a different folder you need to copy the relevant scripts there, but I assume if you can follow this you already know how to copy the scripts needed to your folder.

Drop me a line at avijit.paul   at   mmu.edu.my or avijit.paul.1992     at   gmail.com   or post a comment below if you have any questions.

I get that you were busy. But did you do anything important?

Amazing line from Seth Godin.

I get that you were busy. But did you do anything important?

Many days I just keep doing things that are not important at all. Actually most of the days I do things that are not important. But I just do them. I think I need to print this really BIG and stick in front of my door. 

"Did you do anything important today?"

2 steps to update Twitter, Facebook status and Google buzz same time with one update

Here is what I did to update my facebook startus, twitter and Google buzz by updating only one.

Step 1 : Login to facebook - add http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/ this will ensure when you update your twitter it also updates your facebook status. 

Step 2 : Login to your gmail, go to buzz and click "connected sites" link near your profile picture. Look for twitter, add your username and click done. 

Thats it, now when you update your twitter it will update your facebook status, google buzz and twitter of course. 

Making things better

Abdul Hafiz Abd Jamil	http://hafizvr.wordpress.com
Abdullah	http://abdullahalrawas.blogspot.com/
Adrian Lee Keat Eng	http://giorno-vrdesign.blogspot.com
ahmad faiq azhar	http://vreal-faiqazhar.blogspot.com/
Chong Hwei Teeng	http://zac-vr.blogspot.com/
Khairul Redzi	http://redzi.wordpress.com/
Muhammad Hafiz Hamid	http://apisxp.blogspot.com
LEe Zhi Fei	http://vrd2010.blogspot.com/
Liew Jia Sing	http://rikikiangel.blogspot.com/
mohsen nemati	http://ckamon.blogspot.com/
Muhammad Anas Satriya	http://1051104543.blogspot.com/
Najwa Hussin	http://najuwaju.tumblr.com/
Ooi Edzul	http://virtualrealitygamma.blogspot.com/
Retnowati Nurtanti Astari	http://vr1retno.blogspot.com/
Yong Keen Sen	http://keen89gvr1.blogspot.com

how to make a recession proof career

One of the best career advice ever : 

Recession-Proof Graduate

View more documents from Charlie Hoehn.

Rescuing my stolen laptop with RescueTime - Day 2

I have been checking and waiting for her to log in, but she is not logging in. I kept refreshing the rescuetime dashboard and I can see that the computer is not on yet [last report was 18 hours before].

I went through her friends profile and added quite a few friends. And some of the friends were starting to  confirm my request. Then suddenly I see one of the friend has deleted me and put me in the ignore list. That got me upset because if you are not in the wrong side, why do you  have to do that? And while I was still waiting, I see she is not adding me.

So I logged in back in the dashboard and found that she did go through my profile and liwan's profile too.

But she still did not add me. By then, I was starting to get upset. So I sent her a msg. And interestingly, she replied real quick.

After that one of her friend called and we spoke over phone for a while. I understand her situation as her mom is computer illiterate and did not know the value of it. The guy owed her mom RM 1800 so he traded with the laptop. I told her the laptop cost way more as the current price is close to RM 10,000.

After the discussion we decided to meet up and I will be meeting her soon and hopefully we can come to a solution.

Regardless of what the solution comes up, I am very thankful to rescuetime for not only rescuing my time, but also saving my laptop and my data.

On top of that, I emailed rescueTime and even during the christmas back, Joe Hruska - Founder & CTO RescueTime, Inc emailed me back with the IP address and other details. Just wow.

I am surely buying the pro plan once I pay of my credit card bill to activate my card again. Thanks again rescueTime and liwan for great help.

Update: I have spoken to her again and she will be coming to MMU to return it sometime this week. We will go to police station to report about the guy who stole it. Since they also cant contact the guy anymore we have no choice but to report police. At least police will be able to find out from the phone no he was using.

Update 2: I met up with the girls in midvalley starbucks today (31st December 2009). They are really really nice. They apologized a lot of times for the trouble. I am just very thankful that I got it back. Unfortunately the girl's mom does not want to make report about the guy because she is afraid that since her shop is really small and is in not very city area, the guy's friend might come to disturb them. I wish I could report about the guy, but I understand their situation too. It is easy for me to say go report, but if really that guy's other criminal friends trouble them I would not know what to do. So, I will just go and inform police that I got my things back.

Thanks everyone for your support. Really appreciate it.