Worst Weekend Yet
This has definitely been the worst weekend of this year, and probably the worst in a number of years. I've not only spent about Lm50 in trivialities but had a heated clash with my friends over the shit of black cat.
I've realised that I loath and despise conflict, and upon some introspection I realised that I've been trying to avoid conflict throughout my life, even to my own detriment. This has suited me just fine up till now. Unwillingly I'm trying to keep my feet firm this time, even though my internal turbulence is slowly eating me away. I sincerely hope that this will not have a detrimental effect on the forthcoming holiday.
It would also be nice to solve all issues before leaving however things don't seem any better today than they were yesterday and the day before. The greatest pity in all this is that we were scapegoated to avoid another conflict which would have been solved much easier than this. Shit happens all the time and each time it gets stuck on my boots.
The User is King
The user is everything. He is going to spill the bucks and hopefully use the product, so the user is King.
Pre holiday weekend break
Tomorrow I'm off for my pre-holiday weekend break to our beloved sister island. Four days of pure relaxation in the pool clutching my injured arm after yesterday's squash. I'll try to forget the holiday planning panic in the mean time.
Kill that spy
At the moment I am in the process of absorbing information so that's the reason why my posting are infrequent. I'm struggling to juggle between different books on various subjects ranging from Java to Entomology with Malaysia research in between.
This weekend was marked by two things; a puncture and a quest to free a friend's computer from spyware. My first attempt was installing Adware 6.0, which managed to find and fix hundreds of nasties but it was only after the fifth scan that Adware was satisfied that the laptop was ok. Unfortunately it was wrong. A browser hijacking program was resetting Internet Explorer startup page each time IE was started and each time it closed. I tried to scour through processes running in memory and disabling some IE components but it did not work. I really would like how they do these tricks. After trying a multitude of things and installing Spybot S&D my brother decided to install the latest version of Adware. It was only than that the malware was found corrected and restored peace.
Post Dublin
The trip to Dublin was no less painful than expected. Two days constantly hearing my wailing boss is an experience you wouldn't wish on your enemies. She was like Ross after being dumped by his girlfriend. It's amazing on how many things one can grumble about; the bacon is too salty, the dish is too hot (she said this to everybody at least 10 times), the suppliers are horrible at keeping dates, we need a better product, we need a better product, there are no tomatoes with breakfast (even though she explicitly ordered only sausage and bacon), the pizza is a wonder, we must make some visits on e-ticketing (x5) ad nausea. My desperation to all this was reflected in the number of SMS's I've sent, which amounted to 8 Euros worth of messages.
Living outside working hours with somebody provides an opportunity to gain some further insight to their day to day intelligence.
- After 10 years in the airline she tried to board the plan with a scissors in her handbag.
- After noticing that all people were dressed casually for a formal meeting she dressed in a suit for dinner (the others were almost in Hawaii shirts).
- She arrived at dinner with her brief case instead of hand bag.
- Despite being one hour early for breakfast she brought her suitcase to breakfast with her.
The best part of the holiday was the sponsored Thai dinner on Monday. We went to a restaurant called Siam at Malahide. My great finesse at dinners was betrayed at the very start after I choose Guinness as an aperitif. I was quite conscious of my foolishness but my romantic love for black magic in Dublin got the better of me. For starters I had "Crab meat in bean curd" and as a main dish "Duck seafood hangover". Both dishes were great even though the main dish was just almost too hot and had only two pieces of duck. Unfortunately I didn't manage to get the name of the South African wine, but it was a full bodied strong wine.
Today I finished my first real JUnit test for EJB. The main stumbling block was overcoming a whole set of configuration issues which were partly my fault because I was too stubborn to use Cactus instead of JUnit. Nonetheless the tests I wrote helped me identify one fatal error so my time was well spent.
The problems for the Malaysia trip are piling up. Last Sunday we faced the first Mefloquine challenge. There are three different anti-malarial products in the market but the only one effective for the Sabah / Sarawak region is Mefloquine. Unfortunately this product has some very nasty side effects described " visual disturbances and emotional changes such as depressive moods, confusion, states of anxiety, hallucinations, convulsions, paranoid reactions and drowsiness." We spent the whole of last week debating on whether to risk the pills or not, and on Sunday we made the bold step towards the first pill. Apparently my favourite one had some anxiety attacks on Monday, but I am quite unaffected for the time being.
This week we also read about bird flu and haze. According to the news bird flu has manifested itself again in South Asia. The haze problem seems a little bit more serious because apparently the country is covered in haze originating from logging and crop burning in Indonesia. This issue is not really making news in Malaysia as they are used to it but some people on forums even suggested that isn't worth visiting the country because of this. I hope that this is affecting only cities and not the whole country. On a more positive side, today I received a mail from my new Malaysian friend saying that the haze is slowly disappearing.
Off to Dublin
I'm off to Dublin for two days with my boss :(( tomorrow. These will be two very very long days. Off to sleep, maybe I'll manage to arrive before her at the airport hoping to get a different seat from hers.
Friday 13th
7.00am [still asleep] 7.05am Dad: Lupu wake up - we've got an emergency landing 7.05am Me: Shit! 7.20am [Arrived at work]
What a befitting way to wake up on Friday the 13th. This morning one of our planes had to make an emergency landing because of a suspected tyre puncture after tyre debris was found on the runway. Being the programmer of our Crisis Management System I was notified immediately to activate the system. This is also the same reason why I almost shit in my pants as soon as I got to know about the emergency, since the program is far from ready and has been on my to-do list for about a year. I consider myself to be a programmer driven by users, and until today I never had any 'real' users for a crises management system.
Thank havens the aircraft landed safely, the program was not used, our job is still intact and our holiday is not yet spoilt. It's amazing how many things can rush through your head at the moment you hear something so catastrophic. I spent the rest of the day trying to compile my first J2EE JUnit test. I had to sort of implement an EJB client for this which involves fiddling with classpaths and execution settings quite a lot. Tomorrow I'll have to go to work in order to prepare for next Monday's trip to Dublin - with my boss .. Friday 13th !!!!
Dry Links 2:-
Securing a new Linux Installation
Why Work?
Why am I working at work instead of writing my blog? Why am I searching work at home instead of dedicating more time to my blog? Why did I go to work yesterday on my birthday? Am I'm programming?
Dry Links:-
I'm Back
This has been the longest no blogging span since the beginning of the blog which means I'm getting a life. Today I intend to make up for it though, sparing any details about work and other disturbing events of the week.
Last Friday I spent most of the day battling with my girlfriend's n-gage because I couldn't get it to read the MMC card through the USB port. After reading the few forums that were not blocked at work I came to the conclusion that the card is corrupted and can only be accessed with an MMC card reader. The card got corrupted with some strange magnetic field which was freaking out monitors about a month ago at work.
The last two hours of the week aged me by ten years, but as soon as they passed our joy to life was restored. We lost no time and went for a game of squash which I won 2-1 after my two last defeats in last weeks. Playing squash at a temperature of 35 degrees Celsius is an arduous experience to say the least and a very sweaty one also. To cool ourselves we went to the north coast of the island for a late evening swim. Any fat lost at squash was regained with a bottle of African wine which tasted like Vermouth.
Saturday started with a struggle between going to go to work on overtime or staying at home to tidy my room, risking having to paint our front gates. I opted for staying at home avoiding dad as much as possible. I remember that the last time I ordered my room I had just started blogging (April) and since then the room became comparable to aftermath of the matrix shootout scene hall. The final outcome consisted of four bagfuls of garbage and about a kilo of dust. At least the room is now fit for human habitation again. After this we went for the Saturday volleyball match and won 6 sets to 0 (we had a very unbalanced strong team though). We finished the day couching in front of TV hoping for something decent which never materialised.
Sunday was an ultra hyper day and considering that my mate woke up before 1pm is an event in itself. We planned a day at a remote beach with my ex-work pal and his girlfriend. The beach is actually a grotto about a kilometre away from a famous crowded beach, and is accessible only by swimming to it. In order to get the bags inside the grotto, you have to hang the bags from a rope. Walking for a kilometre on a rocky path in the scorching heat is a great deterrent for normal humans. The whole day was one of the best in months, the water was crystal clear making swimming wonderful, and the whole ambient was very peaceful.
Enough of my ranting now. Take a look at these shots from National Geographic, they make great desktops too.
Some Links worth noting
- i laff in de face of evil...then i run & hide 'til it goes away!!!
- There are two things that are difficult to integrate into a web page, music and images. Cindy's site is the only site I ever managed to endure with the sound on and her image selection is the main driver behind my adding her to my top 15 links in the toolbar. The day to day accounts are also getting interesting as time goes by.
- Defective Yeti
- Matthew Baldwin's site has become a daily click. If you've never been there go there and read today's post. If you've already been there, go there and read today's post.
- Word Count
- Word Count is an experiment to rank the most 86,800 most frequently used words from a corpus of 100 million word collection. The simplistic yet appealing flash display is extremely effective and addictive. My name ranks at 2303.
- Disturbing Auctions Snap Club
- Two sites highlighting the stupidity of humans. God forbid aliens ever get access to the internet or we'd be doomed forever.
- Twiz TV Awesome film
- Ever wanted to impress your friends with your movie/TV premonitions?
I got two new words which have been scribbled on the whiteboard for quite some time now:-
Word: fickle Meaning:
- Characterized by erratic changeableness or instability, especially with regard to affections or attachments; capricious (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language)
- Not fixed or firm; liable to change; unstable; of a changeable mind; not firm in opinion or purpose; inconstant; capricious (Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary)
Word: guano Meaning:
- A substance composed chiefly of the dung of sea birds or bats, accumulated along certain coastal areas or in caves and used as fertilizer
- Any of various similar substances, such as a fertilizer prepared from ground fish parts.
Failure Notification
Work is too busy to blog at the moment so that's why my posts are less frequent than usual. At home I'm either very tired after work, or else I'll have Malaysia homework to do which leaves less time for words.
This week I decided to refactor my automatic download / extraction programs to make them more robust and less susceptible to un-notified errors. This need came from the fact that I realised the stupidity of users, most of which don't bother to notify you when there is a download error. People do not realise that if they don't notify me I would not know what is going on with my automatic programs. At last I decided that I had to make the programs themselves notify me if they decide to take a day off.
Now I've filled batch files with ERRORLEVEL trapping and added job failure notification in my scheduling program Automize. From experience it's much better to get e-mailed when the program is not working rather than when it is, because as time passes you start to unconsciously disregard success emails. The problem with this approach is that if the job is not run in the first place then you're not notified. It would be a great idea if a daily report can be sent at the end of the day so that at a glance you can identify the status of each job.
Hand in hand with this issue, this weekend I got interested in testing programs and frameworks. This whole testing thing is an integral part of extreme programming. It seems that the most common Java testing framework is Junit. JUnit is an open source unit testing framework, but it is extended to different variants of Java programming (like Cactus for JSP and Servlets and JUnitPerf for testing performance and scalability)
As a last note on computing, there is a good article about passwords or their lack of, in this new blog.
Yesterday we watched Gothika (review) starring Halle Berry and Penelope Cruz. At least the film proved slightly better than the newspaper articles. The first part could have been much more interesting but at the end of the second part the story gets interesting. 2.5 Stars.
Herta Muller vs Matthew Perry
While waiting for the next book on Ceausescu's Romania I've just finished reading The land of green plums an autobiographic account by Romanian born Herta Muller (1953) translated from German by Michael Hofman.
The story sees a group of university students living during the reign of the dictator in a nation ruled by suspicion, fear and hatred. Muller kicks off by describing Lola, a student whose liberal sexual desires attract a member of the party. As soon as he's fed up with Lola she is found hanged in her little cubic dormitory that hosts another 6 girls one of which is the narrator. The author then meets three friends who are "looking for someone who shared Lola's room", as the reality of the suicide is put to doubt. The group starts meeting regularly, singing folk songs, writing poetry and reading German books. This behaviour in turn attracts the attention of Romanian's big brother the Securitate.
The hardships and traumatic experiences the young quartet face are amazing. They go to great effort to avoid the tentacles of omnipresent prying Securitate with the ultimate goal of emigrating from Romania, at the risk of death.
The style of the prose takes some time to get used to. With no clearly defined story line the narrator moves through her psychological evolution which is transmitted through a series of events. The book probably explains why people are so diffident of strangers in their country. Anybody living during the reign of the dictator has suspicion and fear carved deeply inside him to the point of making suspicion a reflex emotion. 4 Stars.
Last Friday's wedding was a lesson in solidrinking (solitude drinking). After we nodded our way through the crowed we stuck to the bar like leeches and disregarded the entire reception. The only thing worth noting about the event was the simplicity of a civil wedding. The food was quite scarce although our location was not a favourite with waiters. We managed to leave before the final celebrations and the night end in the best idiom for the day my mate vomiting!
We've just been to the movies and watched the sequel of the whole nine yards, which was very originally called The whole ten yards (review) starring Bruce Willis (Jimmy Tedeski) and Matthew Perry (Oz). The original film was by far better than this strained comedy which was only saved by Matthew Perry (but I happen to like him). Some of the humour like the nanny farting every second and the dozen burps with a bottle of beer could only make primates giggle. The story is about a gang of Hungarian killers who want to kill hitman Bruce Willis, who's lost all the dignity of his glory days and turned into a wimp crying more often than a toddler. One can easily imagine what happens next. 2 Stars.
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