Goodbye my love..

No this is not a break up. This year marked my fourth year with the company. I came in with a big ambition, to show them how open source technology can really cut down their OPEX and CAPEX. And i did. 4 systems under my belt. Zero OPEX. Zero CAPEX. I had my glory. Being a corporate programmer is not easy. Software is not an easy thing to built. In my corporate environment,rules of software engineering doesn't really apply. You get crazy project time lines. You push your skills to the limits. And political games matters more than what i think is most important:the system. I don't call the shots. The rigidness and defensiveness of some divisions do give us a hard time.Politics. Red tapes.Hidden agendas. And it cost the decommissioned of one critical system that i built. It has 2 years life span. I know it's for the better. The road map that they have is huge. It's going to take more than 2 seasoned programmers to deploy the system of that magnitude.We need help. And help will arrive in a bunch of vendors helping us to built the system. And vendors cost you lots of 'fulus'. At some point i do feel sad because of my inability to save the system due to conditions that i can't control.Politics.I told myself its for the better.It should be this way. Corporate programmers can't be too attached with their craft. We don't own the system. Have to learn to let go...may you rest in peace.

2 days to road trip 2007

2 days to my road trip to Kuala Kangsar. This time i'm going with my old buddy:Ricky. Few months ago Ricky came out with this idea:Hey let's go back to Koleq (our alma matter as it fondly called by its ex-students) old boys weekend this year. Didn't took me too long to agree. My wife gave her green light. Ricky's wife gave her's and we are set to roll.Tried to recruit the other guys:Krai ,Nyem ,Lab,Errer(where are you man?) but no luck. Everybody have their own plans and somehow they are not as excited as we are.I don't know maybe its because of the journey back that excites me. Like the one four of us had just right before Ricky got married:the trip to Langkawi.We stayed up almost all night all the way from KL to Perlis.
By the way we made no reservation for accommodation. So 'ni memang gamble aje la'..comes to the worst we'll spend the night in my RIO. Hope we are going to have a fun and safe journey.

meetings and me

i hate meetings. meetings suck but without it things cannot be done.decisions must be made.some heads has to be chopped off.some people will have their glory.i hate it.i do love the coffee though.i am a man of action.let's go straight down to the coding stuff..its much more fun!yeah i wish.i do less coding these days.i craved for them.makes me feel itchy all over ouch!call it a vacation?well maybe.lets look from another angle. now i get to do:

1. my pet project.
2. i can play computer games
3. i can read (this year i already finished 2 books..WOW!)
4. i get to play with my little girl.
   

but still i have to attend meetings.i hate meetings.meetings have minutes and what ever you say will be written/recorded and used against you when things go wrong.never swear in meetings.never say i can 100% do it.say i'll try my best but never ever commit when you are unsure.i love meetings when it's quick and achieve it's objective.i love meetings when people work together to find a solution and not blaming each other.i love meetings when people tell you have done a good job and appreciates your work.i love meetings when they serve coffee..black.so do i love or hate meetings. i can't decide.i can't run.i still have to attend. have another one coming tomorrow.wish me luck.

Experimenting with Apache Struts 2

Spent my Sunday fiddling with Apache Struts 2.0.6. I chose to experiment with the distribution targeted for JDK 1.4.2. After going through the samples i must say that migrating our applications from Struts 1.X will take a big effort and lots and lots of patience because we have to rewrite almost 50% of the codes, save the DAOs and Business Delegate classes. It's tempting to have the dependency injection feature in our apps plus other features like Ajax tags, but i always remember the mantra: if the software ain't broke don't fix it. Rewriting the apps might reintroduce the bugs we squashed.
Anyway Struts 2 impressed me. The combined forces of WebWork and Struts indeed gives fruitfull result. To me the best feature in the framework is the ability to intercept your code via interceptor class. Now AOP became a clearer concept for a 3 year Java developer like me. Altering one's perception of the world does take a practical example to make him/her see..in my case theories alone doesn't work...i need practical examples.
Since Struts 2.0.6 is still in GA (General Available) release i'll assume there will be more things to come(especially the plugins) and the framework will get better and better.Till then i'll depend on our current struts 1.2.x.
which has been our team's de facto standard for web based enterprise applications.

m:n table mapping is the way to go

New System Requirement Scenario:

Allow Account Manager(AM) to monitor distributors and dealers sales performance. Distributors shall be assigned specific dealers. These distributors and dealers will be assigned to the AM.

Existing System Scenario:

1. No AM role yet.
2. No relationship between distributor and dealer.

Been thinking of using a classic solution= m:n table mapping. I will have a table called distributor_dealer which has these fields:

1. distributor ID (Primary Key)
2. dealer ID (Primary Key)
3. Account Manager User ID

will code the classes tommorow and test the relationships.

Our Baby

She's 3 months old. Seeing her smile every single day melt our hearts and make our tiredness by the long journey,lack of sleep and the pressures of life as adults goes away.Noorul Jannah was born on 24 December 2005.She is our first daughter, first granddaughter to her grandparents.She'll carry our hopes and dreams.May one day she'll be a great person..a good servant of God.Jangan tidur dulu Jannah..tunggu abah and umi balik ye...

Composite Pattern

I am on a mission of diving deep into the world of Object Oriented Design.It's not that i havent done OOD, it's just that these days due to lack of manpower and tight dateline i had to sacrifice a lot on designing my application upfront.So i began to loose touch on my basics.Now coding straightaway is my design.Well at least i got the applications running on production.And i just found that Composite Pattern is cool like a cup of hot nescafe in the morning!I never cross path with Composite Pattern..not until I was read Professional Java JDK 5 Edition and came across the Design Pattern chapter that discussed Composite Pattern. In my two years stint with Java i used few design patterns like DAO pattern, Service Locator Pattern and Strategy Pattern but not Composite Pattern. Composite Pattern proves useful when you are dealing with Collections. It provides a way for developers to process Collections of objects as a single object which makes operation on the Collection less complicated. I tried developing my own sample for displaying my company organization tree structure. I found that using this pattern leads to a very clean and readable code and not to mention it hides the complexity of recursivley looping through the Collections. I just wish that we did this during our HR System project but that was 2 years ago and i was not even a Java Developer back then. But i guess it's better late than never..just added another weapon in my programming arsenal..heh!

Alamak Power Down Lagi!

It happened twice in one week. Power disruption at our data center, the heart of all our business application servers. Customers bising.The Management lagi la bising. The techies are in a hot seat. During disaster like this is the time where we can see the commitment of everyone involved.Hard times sometimes brings out the best in people.I totally agree with that.One thing for sure i am proud of my team for showing their dedication in ensuring our services are restored 100%.Some of us that can make it stay for as long as it takes, some of us who can't make it keep up with updates, some of us wakes early in the morning and remotes from home to ensure everything is fine.That's real teamwork.Kudos to all the heroes!

Basikal Tua

Gambar ni saje je aku upload sebab nak test photo sharing guna Hello software. Cool gak benda ni.
basikal tua

Hello World!

OK that's it! Aku tak tahan lagi dah.Aku nak blog balik.After few ups and downs in blogging - the recent one was getting my domain shutdown..aku malas sebenarnye nak continue coz i think blogspot is a lot cooler. Things are getting better sekarang although harga minyak dah naik but still boleh survive lagi la. The other day ada bank ni offer gua 2 kredit card which menjadikan jumlah kredit kad saya = 8 keping! Well as long as it's free annual fee aku OK je..bukannya guna banyak pun. Tapi wife aku marah sebab takut kalau ada orang clone..mampus aku nak bayar.Ishh risau dah aku ni terus aku tak active-active kan kad kad tu.Memula ada gak cita-cita nak tuka laptop baru -Toshiba Sattelite baru tu menggoda woo.Kerja agak kurang exciting sebab takde assignment yang mencabar kepala otak aku.So last week sebab takde keje aku go for interview kat satu lagi telco ni..saja-saja je. The next day ada la satu project yg agak sempoi gak la almost the like the one i did before but with a twist. Assignment kali ni jadi experiment aku la nak guna Manta Ray..cooooll!Berbalik kepada cerita interview.it went well except for my english yang err tunggang langgang..fumble abis.Looking back and counting interviews yang aku pernah ambil actually ada 3 je pon including this one.The first two memang successful but yang ni tak tau la. Expected salary pun macam tak logik tapi i deserve to be paid that much if judging based on my skill tapi kalau based on the job scope they specified..hmm i dont think so. Conclusion nye i don't put too much hope on it. Well at least i get to refresh my interview experience and one good thing is i am not nervous anymore.Maybe because i went with knowledge in my head and boleh la nak tepis-tepis kalau soalan-soalan laser kluar.I think i'm going to make it an ocassion to go for interview once in a while just testing the waters see how far i can go.Semua orang dah balik except aku yang menunggu si isteri menghabiskan kerjanya do ofis...

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