Alvin Lai

Hi John!

Here’s a brief roundup of what I have done with Ruby on Rails!

University Economics Research Experiment

Was contracted to create an online economics game for the NUS Economics Department as a research experiment where 88 members belonging to 44 markets (2 members per market) took turns to input pricing strategies. The pricing strategy inputs were then automatically pit against members in the same market and earnings automatically computed according to a pricing table.

The huge pricing table was entered easily via database migrations and svn/capistrano were used to version and automate the process of updating the actual site.

Members admin page can be accessed here:

http://www.alvinlai.com/nusecon/member/list

(admin login: dkam, password: nicecoffee)

A sample member’s page where game status and pricing input would be:

http://www.alvinlai.com/nusecon/member/show/10

Web Scraping

Extracted 3 years of weather data (365 * 3 html static pages) from public domain sites like www.wunderground.com using Ruby.
Exported data to comma delimited CSV files for automated database entry.

http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KAPF/2006/11/11/DailyHistory

Freelance web developer (Ruby on Rails & PHP/MySQL)

• http://www.setec.com.sg (Rails powered)
• http://www.serabel.com (Design)
• http://www.besry.com (Design)
• http://www.icreativelearner.com (Design + PHP)
• http://www.readysnap.com (Design)

Contact Me!

You can reach me at (408) 338 9737
or email me at:
al AT alvinlai.com

After staying in California for slightly more than a month, this is my first blog post in Silicon Valley!

Apologies to all you friends out there who keep asking me to update my blog and post pictures!

Here’s one for starters — my first meal in california: an In-and-Out Burger!

I have been contemplating real hard whether to migrate my blog to a new platform (Mephisto or SimpleLog) and to remove like 8000+ Trackback spam and 14000+ Comment spam. (Which I have just removed)

I’ve finally decided to stick with Typo as I kinda like it’s interface, not to mention the uber-cool integration with Textmate.

2am and I gotta work tomorrow.. stay tuned for updates! =)

Update: Happy Chinese New Year! Finally migrated to the Mephisto blog engine woo! Pictures coming up soon!