Experience – Page 14 – cuteprogramming

Kaizen: Embark on My AI Certification Journey

October 2, 2021 by Chun Lin, posted in Cloud Computing: Microsoft Azure, Event, Experience, Microsoft Certified

Today, I’m finally getting recognised by Microsoft as a Microsoft Certified: Azure Artificial Intelligence (AI) Fundamentals.

Nowadays, in many of the industries, we hear words like AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning. The so-called AI revolution is here to stay and shows no signs of slowing. Hence, it’s getting more and more important to equip ourselves today for the future of tomorrow with relevant knowledge about AI.

In addition, big players in the AI industry such as Microsoft have made AI learning easier for anyone who has an interest in the AI field. In August 2021, Rene Modery, Microsoft MVP, shared on his LinkedIn profile about how to take a Microsoft Certification exam for free and Azure AI Fundamental certification is one of them. Without the discount, we will need to pay USD 106 just to take the Azure AI Fundamental certification exam in Singapore. Hence, this is a good opportunity for us to take the exam now while the discount is still available.

Why Am I Taking Certification Exam?

One word, Kaizen.

Kaizen is the Japanese term for continuous improvement. I first learnt about this concept from Riza Marhaban, who is also my mentor in my current workplace, in one of the Singapore .NET Community meetups last year. In his talk, Riza talked about how continuous improvement helped a developer to grow and to stay relevant in the ever-changing IT industry.

Riza’s sharing about Kaizen in Singapore .NET Developers Community meetup.

Yes, professional working experience is great. However, continuous learning and having the ability to demonstrate one’s skills through personal projects and certifications is great as well. Hence, after taking the online Azure AI training course, I decided to take the Microsoft Certificate exam, a way to verify my skills and unlock opportunities.

My Learning Journey

After I received my 2nd dose of the COVID-19 vaccination, I took a one-week leave to rest. During this period of time, every day I spent about 2-3 hours on average to go through the learning materials on Microsoft Learn.

To help us better prepared for the exam, our friendly Microsoft Learn has offered an online free learning path that we can learn at our own pace. I finished all the relevant modules within 7 days.

In addition, in order to be eligible for the free exam, I also spent another one day of my leave to attend the Microsoft Azure Virtual Training session on AI Fundamentals.

When I was going through the learning materials, I also took down important notes on Notion, which is a great tool for keeping our notes and documents, for future reference. Taking notes doesn’t only help me to learn better but also provide me an easier exam revision.

Studying for exam is a time of great stress. In fact, I was also busy at work at the same time. Hence, in order to destress, everyday I will find some time to login to Genshin Impact to travel in the virtual world and enjoy the nice view.

Feeling burned out, emotionally drained, or mentally exhausted? Play games with friends to destress! (Image Source: Genshin Impact)

The Exam

The certification exam, i.e. AI-900, has five main sections, i.e.

AI workloads and consideration;
Fundamental principles of ML on Azure;
Computer Vision workloads on Azure;
Natural Language Processing (NLP) workloads on Azure;
Conversational AI workloads on Azure.

In total, there are 40+ questions that we must answer within 45 minutes. This makes the exam a little difficult.

Based on my experience, as long as one has common sense and fully understands the learning materials on Microsoft Learn, it’s quite easy to pass the exam, which is to score at least 700 points only.

I choose to take the certification exam at NTUC Learning Hub located at Bras Basah. (Image Source: Wikimedia Commons)

WANNA BE Certified by Microsoft?

If you are new to Microsoft Certification and you’d like to find out more about their exams, feel free to check out the Microsoft Certifications web page.

Together, we learn better.

My Vaccination Journey: 2nd Jab

September 19, 2021 by Chun Lin, posted in Experience, PyQt, Python

On 3rd of September 2021, Singapore announced to offer 3rd COVID-19 shots to senior citizens. Only one day after that, on 4th of September, I went to the vaccination centre to have my 2nd jab of the vaccine.

I took one week leave in the following week to have some rest. I felt tired and thus I slept as much as I could in the first three days after the vaccination. In order to maintain the body hydration level, I also drank about 2 liters of plain water per day. On top of that, since the weather in Singapore was extremely warm in September, starting from three days before my vaccination day, I also bought a cup of coconut water every day.

Fortunately, to me, there was no other major side effects from the vaccine. Hence, I spent my one-week leave to do many things that I didn’t have the time to do in the normal working days.

Activity 1: Microsoft Virtual Training Day

There are many virtual training sessions available currently. The sessions are all offered by Microsoft for free. You can browse the available training sessions on the Training Days website.

On 6th of September, there was a session about Artificial Intelligence (AI) Fundamentals.

AI Fundamental virtual training session.

In the training session, we learnt about concepts such as, AI in Azure, common AI workloads, challenges and risks with AI, and principles of responsible AI.

After that, we learnt how to create predictive models by finding relationships in data using Machine Learning (ML). Using Azure ML Designer, we can visually create a ML pipeline in a drag-and-drop manner.

Creating a predictive pricing model with Azure ML Designer.

Finally, we also learnt how to use Azure Cognitive Services to analyse images, recognise faces, perform OCR.

Activity 2: Learning PyQt

I was asked by our Senior IT Architect to learn how to build a dashboard as a desktop application using Python before my leave. Hence, I also read the tutorials about PyQt5 during my leave.

Using the knowledge I learnt from Azure Virtual Training mentioned above, I built a sample PyQt desktop application to perform face detection in a photo. The source code of the application is currently available on my GitHub repo.

Detecting faces in a photo using the Face API in Azure Cognitive Services.

In this learning exercise, I also found out how to apply Material Design theme to a PyQt5 application using library such as Qt-Material. In addition, I also learnt how to draw charts using PyQtChart. For example, emotions of the faces detected in the screenshot above can be drawn as a chart shown in the following screenshot using the Face API.

One of the faces in the photo above looks a bit sad.

Activity 3: Playing Games

Besides coding, I also took some time to play computer games. Since the version 2.1 of Genshin Impact was released just few days before my leave, I got more time to clear the new story and have fun fishing with my friends as well.

One-Week Leave

Yup, that’s all what I had done during my leave. Now, I am thinking how to clear the remaining annual leave I have brought over from the previous year.

[KOSD] Fixed 0x800B0100 WACK Issue in VS2019 16.10.2 Onwards

August 29, 2021August 29, 2021 by Chun Lin, posted in Experience, Microsoft Store, UWP, Visual Studio, Xamarin

I have been using Visual Studio 2019 to develop desktop and mobile applications using Xamarin. I could successfully deploy my Xamarin UWP app to Microsoft Store until I upgraded my Visual Studio 2019 to 16.10.2.

Normally, before we can publish our UWP app to Microsoft Store, we need to launch WACK (Windows App Certification Kit) to validate our app package. However, in VS2019 16.10.2 (and onwards), there will be an error occurs, as shown in the screenshot below, and the validation cannot be completed.

Error 0x800B0100 in Windows App Certification Kit (WACK).

MSBuild Project Build Output

Since my code is the same, so the first thing that I suspect is that the new updates in Visual Studio 2019 are causing this issue. Hence, I changed the verbosity of the project build output to Diagnostic, as shown below. This will help us understand better about what’s happening during the build.

By comparing the current build output with the one using the previous version of Visual Studio 2019, I realised that there is something new in the current build ouput. The parameter GenerateTemporaryStoreCertificate is set to false while BuildAppxUploadPackageForUap is true, as shown below.

1>Target "_RemoveDisposableSigningCertificate: (TargetId:293)" in file "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Preview\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v16.0\AppxPackage\Microsoft.AppXPackage.Targets" from project "...UWP.csproj" (target "_GenerateAppxPackage" depends on it):
1>Task "RemoveDisposableSigningCertificate" skipped, due to false condition; ('$(GenerateTemporaryStoreCertificate)' == 'true' and '$(BuildAppxUploadPackageForUap)' == 'true') was evaluated as ('false' == 'true' and 'true' == 'true').
1>Done building target "_RemoveDisposableSigningCertificate" in project "...UWP.csproj".: (TargetId:293)

Online Discussions

Meanwhile, there are only two discussion threads online about this issue.

On 22nd of June 2021, Nick Stevens first reported a problem that he encountered in publishing app to Microsoft Store after upgrading his Visual Studio 2019 to 16.10.2. However, his problem is about package family name and publisher name being marked as invalid.

Few days later, on 1st of July 2021, another developer Tautvydas Zilys also reported a similar issue as Nick Stevens’. Interestingly, the same Microsoft engineer, James Parsons, replied to them with the similar answer, i.e. adding the following property in their project file to set GenerateTemporaryStoreCertificate to true.

<GenerateTemporaryStoreCertificate>true</GenerateTemporaryStoreCertificate>

As explained by James, the GenerateTemporaryStoreCertificate will mimic the old behavior of Visual Studio where it will generate a certificate for us that has the publisher name that Microsoft Partner Center expects.

Fixed

Thankfully, after adding this line in the UWP csproject of my Xamarin project as shown below, the WACK works again without the error showing.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project ToolsVersion="14.0" ...>
    ...
    <PropertyGroup>
        ...
        <GenerateTemporaryStoreCertificate>True</GenerateTemporaryStoreCertificate>
        ...
    </PropertyGroup>
</Project>

That’s all to fix the issue. I hope this article, which is also the 3rd in the world discussing about this Visual Studio 2019 problem, is helpful to other Xamarin UWP developers who are running into the same problem.

References

KOSD, or Kopi-O Siew Dai, is a type of Singapore coffee that I enjoy. It is basically a cup of coffee with a little bit of sugar. This series is meant to blog about technical knowledge that I gained while having a small cup of Kopi-O Siew Dai.

[KOSD] How to Fix Internet Connected but No Internet Access

August 7, 2021December 10, 2021 by Chun Lin, posted in Experience

Due to the COVID-19, we have to work from home.

Today, when I was accessing corporate resources remotely from my personal laptop at home via Pulse Secure, I accidentally disconnected myself from the Internet. After that, I could no longer access the Internet with a message saying, “No Internet, secured”, as demonstrated in the screenshot below.

Suddenly losing my Wi-Fi connection with the message “No Internet, secured”. (Image Credit: lifewire.com)

After restarting my laptop, the problem is still there. Hence, there is a chance that Wi-Fi adapter does detect available network, but it does not accept TCP/IP address.

Reset Winsock and TCP/IP Settings

One of the solutions proposed is to reset the Winsock protocol as well as the existing TCP/IP settings for all of the LAN connections to the default settings with the following two commands.

> netsh winsock reset catalog

> netsh int ipv4 reset reset.log

Remember to run the two commands in the Administrator mode of the Command Prompt.

Next, we can proceed to restart our laptop.

Use Google Public DNS

After restarting my laptop, I realised that the message “No Internet, secured” is gone but I still couldn’t surf the Internet. Hence, I decide to configure my network settings to use Google Public DNS, as shown in the screenshot below.

For Windows 11 which has a new UI design, we first need to visit the “Advance network settings” section under the “Network & internet”, as shown below.