improvement on Portfolio, module bidding goes cranky, chilling out

Studies and Customer Portfolio
i missed the workshop for a few days now.... i'm sorry mates. I'm aware of this problem and will need serious work on this attitude of mine.

Kay found a simple bug in my Customer Portfolio application - a simple malicious exploit by entering '&' in my text fields would break it and cause an Error 500 -.-"

so i introduced a simple method to substitute illegal characters such as &, *, <> to legal ones, such as '&'etc.

and then adding exception handling into my processing JSP to gracefully catch Error 500s, then print out a stack trace.

the next and hopefully final bug fix is reducing the success of SQL Injection techniques by using PreparedStatements. These are all nice and good-to-have foundation to be used for CS3214's airline project.



NUS CORS goes crazy for gems
i have no idea why, but students always like jewels from NUS, the GEMs.

GEMs = General Education Modules.

while my batch has a slight edge since we aren't freshies anymore (our funds in our general account are around 1100 points), we have those ultra old birds who show hand by placing their fortunes into the GEM they're after.

most GEMs are oversubscribed by tens to hundreds of places, and the highest bid point across all the GEMs in this round (2A), can be as senseless as 2300 points! And that happened unfortunately to the GEK1531 that i'm bidding for!!!

how to match the bid when i have only 1100 points!? Can freshies even take the heat with measly 350 points in their coffers?

anyway, i got the module. Will only know the exact damage when the next round opens, since all successful bid deductions are based on the lowest successful bid offer. I walloped 1011 points before the bid went into closed mode. Sounds confusing eh? It's alright. Only those in the game will understand the pain.


Chilling out
actually it was just a makan and kopi session. Saw Pasta de Waraku at Marina Square; it is interesting, but i have to try it to know whether it's on par with its sister restaurant.

The BBQ chicken was quite nice, but tasted kinda over marinated

New spinoff from Waraku, the Japanese restaurant you'd die for a meal

The price is might be a shocker to some. But if the standard is equally good.....

went to Millenia Walk's coffeebean for my favourite ice chillies, while doing the 2nd installment of travel planning with HK and Simon. The list is more comprehensive than last week's, but it is also messy. Will have to sort them out later.