Points to Ponder
Try to answer the following question honestly:
Have you ever wonder what will happen if you stop working/can't work anymore from today onwards?
What have you done to prepare yourself for that?
Great Advise
Plan your day as if tomorrow never ends, but act as if tomorrow never comes.
The following are extracted from John Di Lemme on Rejection.
He stated that how we handle rejection is direct propotion to how we maintainpersistent level of action in order to feel fulfilled and find our WHY in life. He also described that rejection is an extremely negative force; however, if we can channel it to produce positive results, then we will benefit from it. 'The most successful people are those who have felt the pains of rejection, but because of their DETERMINATION they pressed onward and won the game.'
EXPECT REJECTION, LOVE REJECTION, LEARN FROM REJECTION AND YOU WILL SUCCEED!
Find your WHY and Fly!
Tips for Success
3 As for excellence (Zig Ziglar):
Attitude
Aggressiveness
Appearance
4 Ls for your success in life (by Founder and President of a company) :
Live
Love
Learn
Legacy
Happy Chinese New Year and Gong Xi Fa Chai. I would like to quote from Daily Dose of Happiness the following interesting point:
What do you see?
OPPORTUNITY IS: N-O-W-H-E-R-E
Did you see "nowhere" or "now here"? It's all in how we look at things.
I have just read a free eBook - Tame Your Brain! by Jan Tincher recently and found that some of the techniques the author shared on helping us to find personal success pretty interesting.
I would like to grab this opportunity to share what I have learnt from the author on Anger Management. As we are aware that anger could ruin our life and health, but how do we manage and control it to lead to disaster? The author has proposed that writing a letter to ourselves is an effective way to achieve that. The author describes that there are 6 levels involved in healing anger, in which each level has 2 feelings associated to it, in particularly the following:
Level Feeling associated to the feeling
------ --------------------------------
Anger ( blame & resentment )
v
Hurt ( sadness & disappointment )
v
Fear ( insecurity & wounds )
v
Regret ( understanding & responsibility )
v
Intention ( solutions & wishes )
v
Love ( forgiveness & appreciation )
In the letter, we write a sentence per feeling. Each will lead to more and we write all of them until we can't write another sentence for that feeling anymore.
For the feeling, you could start with the following but not necessary a must to start it that way:
Blame: I blame you for _______
Resentment: I resent the fact that _______
I resent you for ______
Sadness: You make me sad when you ______
Disappointment: You disappoint me when you ______
Insecure: In feel insecure when you ______
Wound: You wound me when ______
Understand: I understand the situation as ______
Responsible: I feel responsible when _______
Solution: I feel a solution might be ______
Wish: I wish ______
Forgiveness: I forgive you for ______
Appreciation: I appreciate the fact that you ______
Remember to send the letter to YOU AND ONLY YOURSELF, but not other people, otherwise it defeat the purpose.
A new year with a new beginning! Happy new year to you.
The year 2005 ended with positive and negative events. My service to our company's partner ended in the mid of December followed by wedding ceremony of my gf's sister. Soon after that were my dad's brain surgery, my resignation to the company and joining of new company in the new year. It sounds pretty ad hoc and everything happened just within a very short 3 weeks.
However, I personally feel that the greatest achievement is the opportunity to be offered by a worldwidely known MNC. With this, I have achieved and exceeded the goal I have set in year end of 2004 in terms of salary. Besides, as I have promised to my gf, within a year the figures has a 50% increment of what I was acquiring in year end of 2004.
With the entry to the MNC company, the scope has increased tremendously to looking at the world map & looking at millions and billions! The potential to grow has increased tremendously too. The paradigm switch gets me excited and nervous in the beginning, however, time to get into serious business has come too.
After induction/orientation programme I attended yesterday morning, it has gave me a glance of what I shall prepare for the near future with goal setting and planning. At the same time, synchonization of the work's goal and personal's goal is extremely important. Some work has to be done! :)
Anyway, I have came across an interesting writing on "Insight of Success" (by Kamaruddin B. Hassan) which I would like to share with you too. The element of success can be abbreviated into a positive word- GRATEFUL:
Goal
Relationship with others
Attitude
Time Management
Effective & Efficiency
Follow-Up
Under Promise & Over Delivery
Love
Besides, I would like to extract a few of his compilations in his book, which is mainly by Napolean Hill:
"When an opportunity came, it appeared in a different form and from a different direction. That is one of the trick of opportunity. It has a sly habit of slipping in by the back door, and often it goes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat. Perhaps this is why so many fail to recognise opportunity."
"Success comes to those who become success conscious. Failure comes to those who indifferently allow themselves to become failure conscious."
"The longer you work in the right direction, the closer you are to success. Too many men give up when success is within he grasp. They leave it for someone else to capture."
"Wishing will not bring riches. But desering riches with a state of mind that becomes an obsession, then planning definite ways and means to acquire riches, and backing those plans persistence which does not recognise failure, will bring riches."
"... Life's battle don't always go to the stronger or faster man, but sooner or later, the person who wins, is the man who thinks he can!"
"Broadly speaking, there are two types of people in the world. One type is known as leaders, and the others as followers. It is no disgrace to be a follower. On the other hand, it is no credit to remain a follower."
Leadership has always been an important element to achieve success and lately I have read a lot about it. Just to share some interesting points with you here.
John Maxwell has defined 21 laws of leadership, in which the following are the first 4 which I quoted from him:
1) Law of the Lid:
- The leadership ability determines the level of effectiveness.
- Personal success without leadership limits your effectiveness.
- The higher you climb, the more leadership you need.
2) Law of the Influence:
- The major difference of leaders is on the influence.
- Leadership is influence and influencer makes things happen.
- The very essence of all power to influence lies in getting the people to participate.
3) Law of the Process:
- Leadership develop daily but not in a day.
- Everyone has the potential to be leaders.
- Leaders are born but successful leaders are learnt.
- It is the capability to develop and improves their skills to distinguish a leader from his followers.
4) Law of the Navigation:
- Everyone can steer a ship but leaders charge the course.
- Followers need leaders to be able to effectively navigate for them.
- A blueprint to navigate: PLAN AHEAD
- P: Pre-determine a course of action
- L: Lay out your goal
- A: Adjust your priorities
- N: Notify key personnel
- A: Allow time for acceptance
- H: Head off the essence
- E: Expect problems
- A: Always point to the sucesses
- D: Daily review your plan
- Preparations build confidence and trust in people
A saying from Anthony Robbin:
Success is to create pleasure on your life and making yourself to grow; Failure is able to find pain no matter how good it is!
While learning a lot from Anthony Robbins, I just read another great book by Chen An Zhi- "How to successfully be rich?" (translated). I won't drill down into the $$$ part as it's quite sensitive to some people, however, I would like to hightlight some important points about why people fail? Yes, it's true, we have been always searching, learning and practicing how to be successful, but we seldom look at the opposite, which is why we fail? Imagine if you are practicing the rules of success but at the same time committing to actions that lead you to failure, how well will you perform?
There are plenty of factors mentioned by the author, however, I will list down the three main ones, which are:
1) Lack of Goal (No Goal)
- Many people include me wants to be successful, but how? What do we want to achieve? How can we achieve the goal?
- Thus, defining your own goal is important. Try asking yourself, what do you plan to achieve today?
2) Goal is not recorded
- Oftenly, we have a goal but they are not recorded. When we are asked, "Do you have a goal? Where do you record them?"; most of us will just answer "Yes, I have many goals. I just remember them and keep them in my brain." That's in fact the exact answer I have given to my girl friend when she asked the same question. That's funny right? Yes, it's one of the root to our failure
- Besides, the goal should be specific and reasonable/achievable too! You can't say I want to earn more money. But how much is more? RM1 more than current is considered more too! Also, you can't expect to earn 100K in the next month while your current salary is only 3K. Though it might happen, but it's not reasonable.
3) Changing Goal
- Many of us keep on changing our goal after we have set one.
- We need to define short term, medium term and long term goal such that they are in sync and able to assist you to achieve what you have set.
- Set your dreams high, but set your goal reasonably.
I would love to share more in the future. Please feedback.
Today, I have a great time with my friend/leader who helped/trained me to see things differently. He shared with me many insights and we have gone through some motivation materials by Anthony Robbins. Thus, I would share with you some essence I managed to capture (quoted from Anthony Robbins):
1) "The past is not equivalent to the future".
2) In order to change our life, we need to know where we are heading (our goal), make a decision to achieve it (take action), evaluate the result and change our approach if it's not working.
3) Use role models or learn from people who have succeed to help us speed up our pace to achieve success.
4) "Failure and Fear can be your best friend".
5) "Everything we do is driven by need to avoid pain and desire to gain pleasure". Thus, when changing your behavior, focus on how not changing is more painful than changing and how changing brings more pleasure.
6) "Use pain and pleasure instead of pain and pleasure use you"
I am trying something new today- to do my work in Star Bucks, KL Sentral. It's the firs time I spend half the day in Star Bucks doing things I like in a very relaxing mode.
I came to KL Sentral in the morning with my friend. He met up someone for interview while I try to establish the wireless connection in Star Bucks. I was so stupid and didn't read the instruction correctly. I was connected via the WAN, however, didn't know that I just need to key in the given user id and password shown on the login page. I was doing other development work till my friend has finished his interview. We went for lunch and he headed down to Melaka while I stay back in Star Bucks. Too bad my gf wasn't online and can't chat with her.
I spent some time researching for solution while trying them. Besides, also chatting with my friend in Shanghai whom I just met. I like the environment here as it plays Jazz, which is very smoothing. I wish my gf is here with me. I also hope that my house can be designed to provide such environment in the future. After dinner, we can read books, chit chat, yoga, go online or even dance under such environment to relax ourselves, hindering from hypertension. :)
Since last weekend, I have been attached to a new project and will be in customer site for 3 months as Consultant. Time flies, however, the team members are very friendly. We have been able to work as a team very well though only being together for two weeks. We went for lunch together and since the team is quite huge, I take turns to join different gang. My colleagues even join them for lunch together.
Yesterday, I managed to meet up a few secondary school class mates (in particularly, Ing Huei, Kuan Yen and Pek Keen) for dinner. Too bad that a few other class mates couldn't make it. Though it was just a very short session, but we managed to get ourselves updated about each other. Hope to be able to meet them up again in near future.
Three hours more, I will be attending another reunion dinner, but this time is for primary school class mates. My ex-class monitor has arranged the session and managed to invite 3 of our teachers to join us. Hope that it will be an enjoying session.
Many things have kept me busy lately. The main focus was supporting a few prototypes
delivered to the potential customer and trying to improve the performance.
The one that really make our team and company proud is that we managed to convince the customer with a 188 vs 6 server hits figure during the testing. It may not make sense with that figure without understanding what it stands for. Basically, the figure shows the total number of server hits for a booking process in the existing system implemented using JSP/Javascript against the prototype we built. It clearly shows that with JSP/Javascript cause 188 server hits for the entire process, while our prototype only need 6. Therefore, the network traffic has been reduced tremendously (it's 31% of the original). It also means with the same infra-structure, it can supports more concurrent transactions. I can really see the sales and marketing personnel, especially my CEO, are really excited with this figure. They have been using this case studies every where when approaching prospects. I have heard it several times during the Novell Open Source Developers Conference at Sheraton Hotel, Subang Jaya.
I was also busy with the Novell Open Source Developers Conference. The event was held on Tuesday and Wednesday, in which Tuesday was the Conference at Sheraton Hotel, while Workshop was on Wednesday at KMDC, Plaza Sentral. I was sort of coordinating on the preparation for the workshop. I am really glad to have a great team members contributing a lot of effort to make the workshop successful. Though some struggles were met during the process as it is our first time, however, we managed to get through it. Really appreaciate their effort.
On Tuesday, my partner and I went to KMDC to set up the necessary software for the workshop. When we reached the venue, we were shocked with the training room as it's really very conducive and I haven't really seen one like this before. The room is sound proof, there is a special white board which you can't write with normal white board marker, instead, there is special electronic marker and duster. The most impressive part is the electronic marker can act as pointer to drag the mouse pointer on the projected screen, while it also reflects on the computer screen. Cool! Besides, the machines the vendor provided are really elegant!
After the installation process has completed, my partner and I got a call from my VP who was at the conference in Sheraton Hotel. Then, we decided to go over to the conference to attend a session on UML. We took KTM train from KL Sentral then took a book from Subang Jaya KTM station to Subang Jaya Medical Center. It was great as I haven't been taking train for quite a while. The fare is pretty cheap and the journey is smooth. When we reached our company's booth in Sheraton Hotel, I can see that the crowd at our booth really attracted many participants of the conference. That's where and when I heard 188 vs 6 figures several times. :) Really proud of it!
Anyway. starting from Monday, I will be working on a new project, yes, this time is a real project! I was notified on Wednesday that the project might start on Monday and I will be involved. However, the confirmation only came in this evening. In fact, I am really excited and a bit of worry also. Hopefully, everything will go well. As I always have my lovely gf supporting me, I will never give up so easily :)
Welcome back to my blog, it could be a word to myself too since I haven't been updating the blog since my grandma's funeral. In fact, I have been really busy after returning back from Penang.
Concurrently handling multiple tasks of prospects from MNC was really challenging but interesting. Besides, balancing those tasks with the new task I was assigned, which is to take care of product development, increase the challenge level.
For the 1st prospect from Germany, engineer and account manager from partners, sales manager from Singapore, sales executive from Germany paid us a visit to view the demo I was working on and also business opportunity that could be crafted. I was excited over it though some issue arose the night before the demo but thank god everything went well and we got positive feedbacks from the attendees. Follow up activities continue, I just completed the installation cd and user guide for the prototype and they were sent to Germany to be shown to the CEO of the prospect. Later I will set up a server to host this prototype such that other partner or prospect in the world wide can access it. Besides, there is another prospect who is very interested and has asked us to provide the scoping to see whether the project can be started as soon as soon.
Quite a number of exciting news for other prospects of the tasks I was involved, however, they have been escalated to the higher management.
As mention, I am focusing more on the product developent. My senior architect will be going for long vacation in mid of August, so he is doing some handover to me and my colleague so that we are able to manage the product while he is not around. We went through existing training materials and source code to understand how to use the product and how the product works. Besides, I have mixed several bugs and enhance some features in the existing product. Yesterday was only discussing about the design for one important feature in the upcoming release of the product. Hope to be able to produce the deliverables soon.
Things are changing and I will be relocated to Cyberjaya branch as that's the R&D center. It's just opposite the MDC HQ. My colleagues and I who will be relocated to the branch went there for a visit on Thursday. Though the office space is not as big as the current one in KL, however, it's more conducive in terms of the partition/cubicle, so more privacy. I hope it will be a nice place to work.
I believe it has been really a long while that this blog has been very quiet. I was asked when will a new post be posted. You might have guessed it, I was pretty busy for the past few weeks, handling existing project, new project, new assignments, new roles & responsibilities and also personal issues.
With the rapid growth of the company, I am lucky to be assigned as one of the product owner, thus, in charge of over looking the growth of a particular company's product, threating it as my own 'baby'. As myself is really new to the product assigned, I was busy gathering information from the architect, including obtaining source code, demo, documentation, even meeting my CTO and the architect to discuss it in details. Then, I prepared a first draft of a write up for the product strategy. After the first review, I will pump in more detail on planning to the document.
At the same time, I was busy working on the existing task, building new components to simulate the existing functionalities. I have learnt a lot from there but a bit slow, hope to improve the efficiency in this area. New task also came in, thus getting myself to involve in requirements definition meeting.
Last weekend was great as my girl friend came up to KL, I wouldn't want to reveal the details herel, but it was a booster for me during the 'drowning' period.
Anyway, this week is really hard to go through when the sudden news of my grandma shocked me on Tuesday noon. My grandma has been suffering from critical illness for a few months and has been struggling through it. When she was hospitalized end of last week, I started to sort out some of the tasks, completed a few, planning to visit her on this coming Friday. However, after my lunch on Tuesday, I got a call from my mom, informing me the death of my grandma, I was really shocked because on Sunday morning, my relatives who visited her said that she seems like normal. But, it really caught us in surprise.
After the call, all kind of mixture of thoughts went through my mind. Then, I submitted an emergency leave application and discussed with my colleagues and did a handover so that they can help me to rush up 1 urgent task.
My family and I departed at 10pm on Tuesday night. Then I drove till Bukit Gantang with a pit stop at Tapah's R & R. Later, my younger brother took over and drove us till my 2nd auntie's house. We paid our respect to my grandma and have a glance of her sleeping peacefully in the coffin.
Every night we recides prayers for her, serving relatives who came over to pay their respects, guard the nights. My grandma told us not to cry for her leaving. Though it's hard to accept that she left us, because it just seemed that 'I just met her recently and now she is away!' However, fact is fact, I just got to accept it, with our greatest heart, hope she will be enjoying in Heaven.
Today I went to MPH and came across an interesting book written by Christopher Duncan, titled 'The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World'. I briefly read the introduction and found it covers a lot of real situation in the programmer's life, such as tight schedule, demanding customers, ever changing requirements and many others which I have went through before. Then, he suggests the approach we should take to handle them. I found the following useful and quoted here to share with you:
'As programmer, we're not just hired to code. We're hired to deliver great software'.
On Thursday, my colleagues (Azrin, PC and Juliana) and me attended Sun's Java Forum 2005 at Summit Hotel. As usual, I attended this forum to expose myself to more technical knowledge, especially I am a Java savvy, and also some business exposure. Early in the morning my sister dropped me at the Summit Hotel and my colleagues were all in there! Then I met Chee Woei, who is currently working in my company's partner, Niclas from eWarna and also Ser Yee, my junior in MMU during registration before the event starts. A door gift were given, including a magnet bookmark.
In this forum, it started with the introduction of new J2SE 5.0, code name Tiger after the welcome address by the Strategic Initiative Development Director of Sun Microsystems Malaysia. The speaker focused on the new language syntax along with some management tools introduced in the new version of J2SE.
Then, another speaker impressed the participants with the introduction of the Sun Java Studio Creator (covering Java Server Faces). She live demo to us how fast to get a typical web page that has criteria, result in tabular form, pagination and also consumption of web services within 30 min with that tool. It's merely drag and drop and selection in wizard most of the time. I am sure my ex colleague, Chee Tat would love this a lot if he has the tool.
We had a morning break before continue with another interesting live demo by the first speaker during the session on Advanced J2ME Development. He used Netbean 4.1 and Wireless Toolkit to create a simple appointment application for handphone. A lot of the process were drag and drop too! Impressive! I will sure introduce this to my girl friend for her final year project if it was so user friendly last time.
The Education Services Manager from Sun Microsystems Malaysia then brief us the value of Sun's certifications with statistics, including higher wages and demand. Besides, the certification coupon were 25% discounted on that day. I went to Sun's booth to claim a special token for audience who obtained their Sun's certification. Next, I headed for lunch. There were so much food that even I only took a mouthful of each, it made me felt so full till midnight without me taking dinner.
The afternoon session covered SAP Netweaver, a success story from StarSearch Technologies and J2EE (on EJB3) by Java Architect, JTrend. I was impressed with the EJB3 as the new specification ease a lot of job for EJB component developer with the usage of annotation introduced in Tiger. I got a T-shirt for asking a question during Q&A and later a key chain for submitting the evaluation form. So, it was really a day that full of 'input'.
Before we departed home, my colleagues and I discussed on the task distribution for preparing a presentation to share what we have learnt from the forum and also some business value that we could bring to our company and products.
Today I have learnt a new business strategy which is called 'Prosumer', it should be the combination of 'Producer' and 'Consumer'. It is based on the concept of 'corporation' (Koperasi in Malay), in which the 'public wealth' is shared among the so called investor. It was introduced by the Europe economist back in the 19th century to break the monopoly of the rich or higher status community. During that time, the rich or higher status community will remain rich and having comfortable living, while the poor will always be poor. There is no chance for the predecessor to 'over turn' their 'fate', thus revolution or riot was raised to over turn the government, however when the new leader and the community took over, the same situation happened. Thus, the economist proposed 'corporation' to gather very small amount of money from the poor, then these money are used to purchase necessity directly from the provider or producer with lower price and the goods are sold to the contributers of the corporation and the corporation make some income from it, yet the price is much cheaper. At year end, when the profit are shared among the contributors. Thus, sharing the 'public wealth'. In this situation, the consumer 'spend and save' at the same time, thus the concept of 'Prosumer'. In today's world, when it is applied in some businesses, it will produce a great impact to the consumer, rather than selling, the consumer just need to consume the daily products, at the same time earning profit out of it.
Last weekend, I went down to Melaka to visit my lovely gf as usual. It's kind like a routine as if I am going to work everyday, I don't feel any burden or reluctant to do so, any how, because I am meeting my love one mah :P. We went to pray at the temple on Saturday morning (because the next day was Wesak Day) and planned to perform the ritual ceremony to 'bathe the god', but the temple didn't provide that. So, on Sunday afternoon, we went to another temple near my gf's house to perform the ritual ceremony. It was so nice that someone guided us the correct procedure to do so. In fact, as planned, I was supposed to meet up a good friend on Saturday, however, due to some emergency case, he couldn't make it. So, hope to be able to meet him on the coming holiday.
Yesterday, as schedule, one of our company's partner came over for a meeting to discuss about one of the prototype I am working on. When I was trying to show her and my CTO the prototype that I had secreted crafted without my CTO noticing it, both our partner and CTO were impressed. Later, the Vice President came over and took a look too! He advised me on some of the things to be improved and hint me to give another 'surprise'!
While continue to work on the prototype today, my CTO called up to ask me to visit one of our customer to provide some support and consultation on preparing them to perform a testing to compare an existing application with the one we have simulated using our company's product. I met quite a number of obstacle as this is the first time I am working on a real testing tool and scenario. I have consulted my colleagues and even my CTO, however, to no avail, I did't managed to convince them to the testing approach that was expected. Never the less, I managed to learn up a lot of things especially in terms of consultancy, problem solving and 'red alert' on my vision to be 'evengelist'.
Tomorrow I will be attending Java Forum at Subang Summit Hotel, in which we will be celebrating Java 10th anniversary. Hope it will be an interesting event.
Today morning, I was ready and almost going to meet up to discuss with my COO about tomorrow's demo, however, when I checked with my team lead, 
Half way during the work, my CTO came over to checked with me on the code optimization for one of the prototype I have delivered to the partner. He then explained to me the approach to take to optimize the deployed prototype since the partner is doing a benchmarking. I managed to get that up with guidance from my colleague. During the process, we found out that Weblogic Application Server act differently compared to Tomcat Web Server for the code optimization process. However, it's good to learn another new thing today.
During the review session, it seemed that the flow of the enhanced training material is correct and just required some minor modification or addition. Then, we got two new colleagues who just joined to provide feedback on the previous training and gather suggestion for improvements.
Tomorrow I shall compile the list of feedback and discuss with my trainer on the necessary modifications. 
I will be meeting my lovely girl friend and ex-colleague this weekend. Hope to rest more 
I started preparing for the Germany project after my CTO sent me the available resources. I even used Google's translation tool to translate the German written in some document or source code to English. Now I'm able to know that 'Die' (German) stands for 'The' (English) and 'Anzahl' (German) is equivalent to 'Number' (English). Hope to learn up some other common terms. Then, later the partner came over to setup a trial version of the client and server of the existing system. She then run through the software to show me and CTO the basic functionalities.
After going through the resources, I tried to modify the demo program that they passed to us and was so happy to see the program runs. Currently, there are a few issues that hinder me from further progress. Awaiting for some assistance and consultancy from the expert. :)
Early this week, the Vice President and Team Lead had a performance review with me. Since it was the first time I am having the performance review, I wasn't sure how the process would be, so I prepared a simple form/ matrix on the technical skills and soft skills to be evaluated. When I had the section, the VP explained to be the difference of performance review and appraisal. Then, when I passed him the form I prepared, he explained to me that usually this form is used in more formal occasion, in particularly the performance appraisal and both parties will rate each items. We had a two-way discussion for about 1 hour plus as I would like to find out some of the area for improvements. At the end of the session, I was assigned a new tasks to assist my COO for this Friday's demo presentation.
My team lead guided me on some of the preparation for the demo and I am awaiting to coordinate with my COO tomorrow on how should we pursue on Friday.
It has been a long while for this blog to be quiet. In fact, I have been involved in a lot of learning since the past few weeks.
At work, as I was trying to port an existing prototype (that was running on Jakarta Tomcat) into IBM Webphere Portal, I bump into many obstacles as the architecture of Java Portlet is different from Java Servlets though Java Portlet is an extension to Java Servlets. After several attempts of trial and error in order to get the porting work, but to no avail, I decided to get back to the basic to start learning about Java Portlet API (JSR 168). I have found some good articles explaning about the specification, some with tutorial and so forth. From the new knowledge gained, I attempted to modify the prototype to try to reach my goal in porting it successfully in Webpshere Portal. Work continues...
Besides, CEO and the new Vice President, Engineer dropped and had a small discussion with all the senior (as in at least 1-2 years experience) employee they have just hired. We came to know about the new VP's background and introduce ourselves to him. CEO also notify us about the possiblities of changes that will happen in the company, in terms of our role and responsibilities. He also advised us not to be afraid of change, as this change will lead us to a better status.
After the session, I took the initiative to hold a informal online conference with a few of my colleagues to plan out some internal prototype to be done. The main objectives were to think of some new ideas, look and feels and new domain to be covered besides getting some of us start working on some application with our company's product. As I was gathering some opinion and feedbacks from some of my other colleagues, including my trainer and regional channel manager, the discussion became more formal. We decided to had a face to face discussion with our regional channel manager. She proposed us to attempt on either a prototype for domain that the company has not tried before or some internal applications that use our company product. She also agreed to gather feedbacks from Sales colleague on some commonly met issues, such a way we may craft something for them.
On the next day, my team (consulting team) lead called all team members for a discussion. My colleagues and I who were involved in the informal conference started to worry whether we have offended anyone. So we agreed to appologize on our mistake. When the team lead initiated the meeting, he started to brief us on the latest status about the team and some upcoming prototype and project to be worked on. As we are still waiting for the Sales team to get back to us, he told us to bear with him. Later, he praised us for initiating the internal prototype idea but advised us on some common requirements from customer, in which the customer usually wants us to develop a prototype that integrates with their backend, though we may have some domain specific prototype.
Towards the end of the week, I was called in to work with my trainer to improve the training material and process to 'enable' the developer, in such a way that upon the completion of the training, the participants are able to use our company's product to perform the development tasks. After some discussion with my trainer, he assigned me to prepare the sample code for the mini workshop, in which I have to improve the UI, adding more comments and also prepare another J2EE EJB component for data retrieval. I temporary halt my work on the Java Portlet API.
As this is the first time working on EJB and deploying the J2EE application in JBoss
application server, my progress didn't go well as planned as I was coding and deploying it manually. A lot of mistakes in the deployment descriptor consumes most of my time. I should have used tools like Lomboz or JBoss-IDE to assist me. Besides, I also stucked in one of the situation where the Container Managed Persistance (CMP) Entity Bean I developed refers to a table named 'user' in MySQL database always refers to a table named 'xuser' when I run the application. After quite a number of attempt, I only realized that I should not use the name 'user' as my database table name, since it may be referenced as the table that keeps the record of users for database authentication and 'xuser' is reference indeed. Thank god, I managed to task on EJB integration by afternoon today. Upon an informal review session, I
continue to work on the improvement of UI for the sample code.
During the weekend, I was chatting with my CTO over Yahoo Messenger and found that I need to learn up JNI for Java/COM communication. It's meant for one upcoming prototype that I will be working with my CTO for a company in Europe. I was so excited when I got to know the news. Because if things go well, I may stand a chance to go to Europe, but things are not confirmed. So, I will work hard enough to learn up the new technology and hope the company can close the deal.
Besides, I stayed back late yesterday trying to complete my task on the EJB integration for the training mini workshop. The new VP dropped in our office and we had a chat. He advised us some common practice on QA, debugging and testing skill. He also encouraged us to learn and make full us of Unified Modeling Language (UML), as it is not just a graphical 'tool' but it helps in project management too! I wasn't sure whether he mistaken me to someone, but he told me that I should learn this more and he is going to grow me in the new area. As we were walking towards his apartment (I went to my car), he advised me, don't 'over-manage', if there are 100 items in the project and only 10 which are critical or at higher risk, then just focus on that 10, otherwise you will ruin the project. He added, 'project management is like sales, speak the appropriate but not everything; we were consultant, that's why we tend to speak a lot in order to drive people to certain direction'. I agreed with what he said, but really wish to learn more from him.
I told myself, I really gained a lot of new insights in this new company and more to come. If I am growing as how I am growing within these two months, I am sure I will be able to be someone great in 3 years time!
I met up with a few secondary mates at Mid Valley Star Buck yesterday at 10am. Not many turned up. The following are some of the photo taken:
(From left: Me, Sin Boon, Kuan Yen and Chooi Chooi)
(From left: Sin Boon, Kuan Yen, Me, Chooi Chooi and Ing Huei)
(From left: Sin Boon, Kuan Yen, Me, Chooi Chooi and Ing Huei)
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