Rebirth of T-rex

These few days were terrible as I 'lose the war'- a sudden attack of throat infection. I was alright till Saturday afternoon, my eyes started to feel uneasy and tiredness crept in. Initially I thought it was just exhaustion from my long working hour for the week. However, things don't seem right when I started to get soar throat and having some symptom of fever in the late night- 'under heavy fire'.

The next day I was brought down and I surrendered. I started to take some panadol, hope that I could recover soon as I need to travel down to Segamat, Johor to stay over night at his place before we depart to our work place in Kulai, Johor on Monday morning. Attack become more aggressive and I was in high fever, in which surprisingly I don't feel it myself but by my girl friend.

At last, I retreat as I have been feeling headache and dizzy and have been sleeping the whole day. I went to consult doctor, thus cancel my trip down to Segamat and claim for MC on Monday. I was pretty shock when doctor told me that my body temperature was 39 degree Celcius. When my girl friend told the doctor that my body temperature was higher earlier on, doctor answered with a smile, telling us that it could have went up to 40 degree Celcius.

After taking the medication, fever ceased, however, throat irritation still persist. I took a good rest on early half of Monday and went down to Kulai in the evening. I continued working on Tuesday, however, was attacked by insomnia for two consecutive nights although exhaustion from sickness crept in very early of the night. One of the reason could have due to the nose block and throat irritation as I can hardly breathe and swallow. Pretty suffering.

Just pray hard that I will recover soon.

I managed to have a tea break session with my company's Sales and Marketing Director-Mr. Siao. He was telling me about the new project the company is pursuing and the solution they came up with is pretty impressive and convincing. I managed to realize some good points from the conversation, in which I summarized in the following:

He highlighted that when we are selling solution, "We are selling idea and solution, however, it must be beneficial to the general public so that they feel that it's a need but not only what they want'... besides it should be something that change, help and improve the society.

He also mentioned that 'Always put yourself on the shoe of a customer/user when generating the idea or solution because the goal is to make their life simpler but not miserable'.

'If you would like to do something, do it really good and make it the best but not partially, otherwise as well not to do it at all. Generate a complete solution, not only abstract/high level; come up with product that covers the business logic and entire flow... because we are not selling insurance policy.'

When I suggested to him that it may be a good solution to take part in Asia Pacific IT Award, he told me that 'it's not the monetary/award, but acknowledgement/gratitute from love ones that gives him the most satisfaction for the achievement/accomplishment'

'Life may be changed entirely by a single opportunity'

Yesterday was an interesting day as I had a chance to meet with a CEO of a growing company. It was an hour of discussion and I have learnt a lot from him. Salute to the CEO- Mr Kor.

There are a few points that he mentioned to me leaves a big impact in my mind and I will never forget it. He created a definition of R.E.A.L. Success, in which R.E.A.L. Success is formed from the following elements:

R: Relationships
E: Equipting
A: Attitude
L: Leadership

I heard from his associates that the CEO emphasis a lot on relationships among the members of the company. The CEO also highlighted to me that when we are saying 'we want to climb up the corporate ladder', it means how well you manage your relationship with other members of the company to support, assist and bring you up the ladder but not 'climbing up' by killing other people.

Besides, I also discussed with him about the working culture for the company, in which the dress code, working hours, Internet facilities and usage policy. The first thing he told me is 'Just look at how I am dress up?' (He was wearing in a smart casual manner). He told me that he practices 'Discipline Flexibility', which I am very impressed with. He elaborated that 'You are adult, although you may be just a fresh graduate, but you know deep in your heart that you have and able to be responsible on your tasks and works. If you are allowed to surf the Internet, using Yahoo Messenger, please don't use it to surf the porn sites.' He added 'Some come in at 9am, some at 9:15am, as long as you get your job completed (really completed) by due date, I am ok with that.'

From the way he said, 'I provide rooms for my associates to do things using their own way because they are smart people and have their own way of thinking, creative way of doing their work; if one day they feel that they are more capable if sitting on my position, go ahead!' I can see that he is a very understandable person, a real leader.

It was a great experience! Really appreciated! Thanks Mr Kor.

I woke up early in the morning and suddenly wanted to write my first C# Hello World program after Sunday's conversation with my best friend- Boo. He told me that I can just write a simple C# program then compile and run without MS. Visual Studio .Net, but as long as I have the .Net Framework 1.1 installed.Thus, I started to study some sample Hello World over the Internet and so eager to get it run. Opps I got stuck because I don't know how to call the C# compiler. Luckily I met my MMU junior (Teck Kong) who is .Net expert. So, I summarized the basic steps in the following for others to refer.

First need to install the .Net Framework 1.1, in which you can get from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=262d25e3-f589-4842-8157-034d1e7cf3a3&displaylang=en.

Assume the installation for .Net Framework is successful, then you need to add the path into the environment variable 'PATH'.
If you are using Windows XP, you can easily do this by right click on My Computer icon and select Properties from the pop-up menu, then select Advance tab and click Environment Variables button. Locate the variable 'PATH' (by left click on the entry) from the System Variables list and click Edit button.Input ';C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322' (the semicolon is used as delimiter to seperate different values) at the end of content of Variable Value.Then apply the changes.

You can start writing the first code by typing the following in a notepad or any other text editor then save as HelloWorld.cs.

using System;
public class HelloWorld {
public static void Main() {
Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
}
}

Once completed, start a command prompt and navigate to where the C# code is, eg. C:\CSharpTutorial, and type csc HelloWorld.cs to compile it. You will see the following as the output, assuming there is no compilation error:

Microsoft (R) Visual C# .NET Compiler version 7.10.3052.4
for Microsoft (R) .NET Framework version 1.1.4322
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 2001-2002. All rights reserved.

If you observe the folder, there will be a new file created with the name HelloWorld.exe. So we can just execute the file like normal Windows EXE. Just type the following in the command prompt:

HelloWorld

and you should get the following as the output.

Hello World!

Enjoy!

As one of my plan for my leave this time, I attended the Java Technology Forum organized by Sun Microsystem at Hotel Nikko, Kuala Lumpur. Although it was a short afternoon session from 1.40pm till 5.40pm, it was a beneficial session, I have no regret in attending it.

It was not a session that I grab some new technical knowledge, but I also managed to meet up many people, including my ex-juniors from MMU (Alex, Ee Boon, Alvin Goh, Billy Yeo), my ex-course mates from MMU (Bobo, Khai Wei), ex-senior from MMU (Tuan), ex-colleague from industrial training company (Chee Woei). Besides, I managed to have a short chat the Chief Operation Officer of a rapidly growing company (in which not convinient for me to expose its name). In fact the company is in the process of recruiting since they just got grant from MDC. If anyone interested, I am willing to pass you the contact of the person in charge.

Anyway, the real gain was on the technical input from the forum. The focus of the forum was on J2SE 5 (code name Tiger), which is the newly released J2SE; the Web Service and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA); and the Mobile Technology. In conclusion I found that the session on Tiger and Mobile Technology were very attractive and interesting. As for the second session on Web Service and SOA, I was a bit disappointed as I was expecting the speaker to speak more about the SOA but the topic was only briefly introduced.

I was a bit regret and felt sorry for my step sister (Shuen Hui) when I found that J2ME MIDP 2.0 supports SMS transaction via Wireless Messaging API (javax.wireless.messaging). I should have recommended J2ME MIDP 2.0 to her during her Final Year Project proposal, instead I made a bad judgement for telling her that SMS transaction is not supported by J2ME yet, which was a really wrong judgement. J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.2 has already came with a tool to enable developer to send SMS to the emulator and vice versa, in which she would have used it for her project for at least a proof and concept. Sorry Shuen Hui :(.

Lastly, I found that the new features introduced into Tiger were very powerful and useful, such as autoboxing and unboxing of primitive type, enhanced for loop, static imports, typesafe enumeration, variable argument list, generics and annotation. Besides, also the inclusion of JMX and new platform libraries into Tiger and enhanced JVM implementation strengthen its power.

Java Power!

It has been quite a while I didn't go to Mid Valley, however the trip to Mid Valley yesterday gave an insight that impressed me and put me in doubt on what makes them different.
My girl friend and I were having dinner at one of the restaurant that sell Hong Kong delicacies (I guess it's not convinient to expose the name of the parties involved), I realised that the waiter and waitresses were really 'fit', in terms of how well the service they provide!

Firstly, I found that the waiter and waitresses are very energetic. Secondly, they react efficiently and pollitely to customers' orders and requests with full willingness. All these lead me to ponder why they are able to provide such satisfying service. Is it because mostly are youngster who are very energetic and lead by experienced seniors? Or is it due to satisfying reward programme that the company offer? Or is it due to the excellent recruitment/selection process to hire right attitude employee?

Reflecting back to the environment in my company, I keep question myself why such situation doesn't exist in my company. As a team leader, I hope that I will be able to find out the 'key' to achieve what I saw in that restaurant, and practice it in my team.

While I was researching on Object Relational (O/R) Mapping using Hibernate (an open source tool that provide OR persistence and query service), I managed to come across and used Hypersonic SQL (aka HSQL database engine, also an open source product). I found that it's a really useful, lightweight database suitable for small scale application/system. Thus, I would like to share with you all over here.

You can download it via http://hsqldb.sourceforge.net. If you are going to obtain the latest stable version (1.7.3), as what I am using, it's about 2.70MB in size. Once download process is completed, you can start using it by extracting the zip file with WinZip or Windows XP built in archive extractor. Let's assume it's extracted to drive C:\ and thus we refer C:\hsqldb as HSQL_HOME.

You would have to install Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.4.2 in order to proceed in using HSQL. I would recommend you download Java Development Kit (JDK, aka J2SE SDK) 1.4.2 as you may use it for Java file compilation later. Select Download J2SE SDK link from http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html page. Install the JDK, let's assume it's installed at C:\j2sdk1.4.2, again herewith, we refer to this folder as JAVA_HOME.

It is recommended that you add JAVA_HOME/bin into the environment variable 'PATH'. If you are using Windows XP, you can easily do this by right click on My Computer icon and select Properties from the pop-up menu, then select Advance tab and click Environment Variables button. Locate the variable 'PATH' (by left click on the entry) from the System Variables list and click Edit button.Input ';C:\j2sdk1.4.2\bin' (the semicolon is used as delimiter to seperate different values) at the end of content of Variable Value.Then apply the changes.

Once the basic setup is ready, you can start the database server by using the following statement in your command prompt.

java -cp hsqldb.jar org.hsqldb.Server

You can then use the Database Manager (a GUI tool) to manipulate the database, by using the following statement in the command prompt.

java -cp hsqldb.jar org.hsqldb.util.DatabaseManager

When the Database Manager is launched, you can click Ok button on the Connect window, using the default preset values to start playing around with the database.

If you would like to find out more, you can refer to some guide in HSQL_HOME\doc\guide folder.

Hope you enjoy trying it. Probably we can try out other open source databases such as Cloudscape, MySQL, even OneDollarDB (yes, there is such database; I was quite surprise to come across this name :)) besides the more powerful ones, eg Oracle, Sql Server and DB2.

Yes! My first blog is created! Hope that I can expand and maintain relationship through this blog. I also plan to discuss some technical issues via this blog to share some of my experience in Java Web Based Application. :)