Steven Yong's Weblog

Another techie left Sun (Oracle)

nospam@example.com (Steven Yong) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:00:00 +0800

Many good technical people like James Gosling and Bryan Cantrill left not long after the acquisition. Why is that?

I don't know, of course. But I'd like to make a guess.

"Can I have it done in 2 days?"
"Not with good quality"
"It's fine, time to market is more important"

No right and wrong, in many cases, slow to market do mean no market. But real good technical people just don't do something entirely for business purpose. If they do, we wouldn't have a chance to use good quality software. This might explain why Sun still managed to create great stuffs while suffering good amount of business losses. I guess in Oracle, too many decisions are being made from business perspective, which certain people simply just couldn't stand it.

Same prediction with Paul

nospam@example.com (Steven Yong) — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0800

So I was wrong to say that Argentina would be winning the cup for sure. It turns out that Higuaín and Tevez weren't performing as good as I though, and there seems to be no midfielders in the team as Veron didn't get much chance to show his skill. Of course, an early goal from Germany was the key.

Like Paul, I will be taking Spain in the final tonight.

World Cup in South Africa

nospam@example.com (Steven Yong) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 18:00:00 +0800

First time in Africa, no advantage for either Europe or South America teams. Kicking off this weekend, as always, I am going to put all my bet on Argentina, not only because of Messi but also Maradona. How on earth can they possible not win the cup with players like Messi, Tevez, Veron and Higuaín?

Looking forward to a month of excitement.

Distracting thoughts

nospam@example.com (Steven Yong) — Tue, 11 May 2010 14:00:00 +0800

So James Gosling is still taking his break before making the next move, while he doesn't think the iPad is as useful as most iPad's fans think. And I am in the middle of suffering my first mid-life crisis as I've told a few friends of mine. This is the first time in my life that I have no idea what would I want to achieve in the future and even what my interest is. What I am doing now is something that I must do in order to make a living, sad to say that, isn't it?

Not everything is bad though.

I think I am interested in learning Wing Chun martial art, isn't it cool?

In just 20 years

nospam@example.com (Steven Yong) — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:59:00 +0800

In 1990

1) You don't get invited to any event if they hate you

2) Nobody will care what are you up to if you are a bad person

3) Your boyfriend asks you out telling you that you are not the one

4) You talk about your travelling experience over a coffee session with your buddies

5) You flip through your photo album with your parents

6) You discuss about best route to places with your father while watching TV

7) You bring along your lovely girlfriend introducing her some nice guys

8) You play tennis on the court with your friend

9) You don't go out because you don't feel like talking

In 2010

1) You don't get invited to any event if you are not on Facebook

2) Nobody will care what are you up to if you don't logon to MSN

3) Your boyfriend text you on the phone and never reply

4) You tell them to read your blog

5) You show your parents on how to view photos online

6) You use Google Maps in your room

7) You click on the "Suggest friends" link

8) You wave your iPhone

9) You don't go out because you feel like talking, on the net

I created a website that might solve my own problem

nospam@example.com (Steven Yong) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:28:00 +0800

Every now and then when people want me to recommend places to eat, or drink, my answers are always "cincai", which in English means "anything will do."

I see it as a serious personal problem for myself especially when comes to dating girls. I tried to search the Web for things like "nice hokkien mee in Serdang" but most I got was rubbish. Or I could choose to read a few blog posts or articles after google for "nice hokkien mee in Serdang" before I get back to the person boringly waiting at the other side.

So I created this website called klasz.com, a social classified website.

It is now barely good enough for people to use, still lots of features in my list pending to be implemented. I need feedbacks from you, I'm also looking for development partner who is interested and willing to contribute. Source code will be moved to free code hosting site soon as I am still evaluating which one is good for project like this.

This is your website too, every visitor who sincerely would like to use the site is my boss. So drop me feedback (there is a "send feedback" link on the homepage"), if you want some nice features that I am able to do, I will do it.

Software. Hardware. Complete.

nospam@example.com (Steven Yong) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:00:00 +0800

It is kind of sad when the browser gets redirected to oracle.com after I enter sun.com at the address bar. It is sad not because I don't think the deal will do any good to Sun, it is because the site that I've been visiting for years gets a totally strange homepage.

If the word "Yahoo" can appear at the very bottom on delicious.com and the copyright of youtube.com can still belong to YouTube, LLC, why can't Oracle keep the original sun.com, which is familiar to regular visitors like me?

View EPL schedule on Google Calendar

nospam@example.com (Steven Yong) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:14:00 +0800

Just noticed there is a link "New: Sports calendars" on the top of Google Calendar where you can pick your favorite kind of sport and your favorite team in order to view their match schedule on your calendar.

It is so cool.

Birthday. Why.

nospam@example.com (Steven Yong) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 23:59:00 +0800

"Come on, blow the candle and eat the cake!" and you are getting closer to the end of your life.

Yeap, I just got closer. Why do people celebrate birthday?

I also wonder how people got happy on their birthday when all they got are line after line of texts that read "Happy Birthday" on their computer screens or cellphones. Reading the word "happy" makes us happy?

Don't wish me happy birthday, wish me happy everyday.

Businessman

nospam@example.com (Steven Yong) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 23:59:00 +0800

A lot of people who claim themselves businessman told me that in order to do business in Malaysia, it is not about what you know but who you know.

Although I never seriously involve in doing business, I do agree with them with full heart.

However, although I never seriously involve in doing business, I know that when comes to do business in right way, it would go back to what you know. Local businessman are trying very hard to improve their socializing, communicating and entertaining skills, which in short they call it marketing skill. They truly believe that with those skills, they will get to know whom they desire to know, even before they realize what kind of business could be done by knowing those people.

I don't know what am I writing as I don't know what are they doing. After all, I am not a businessman.

Taking Java certification, or not?

nospam@example.com (Steven Yong) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 23:59:00 +0800

Everyone knows that certification on resume is nothing. But funny enough there are still employers care about that, and even funnier that there are still exam takers. Read this interview.

Don't get fooled into thinking that taking the Java certification exam will make you a better developer. Instead, take that time and join an open-source project and look at how others develop code, and learn from their choices.

Football season is back

nospam@example.com (Steven Yong) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 08:00:00 +0800

English football season is back, again I have something to kill time on weekends. ManU, Chelsea, ManC and Arsenal start with winning, and as of now Tottenham is leading Liverpool 1-0 in the first half, Grrrrr.

API Design Flaw - Utility Garbage Cans

nospam@example.com (Steven Yong) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:59:00 +0800

API Design guideline by Jakob Jenkov.

Almost every application I have built in my career has had a "utility" class or package. This utility package contains small methods that are used from different components inside the application. Often utility methods are so small that they are just gathered inside the same utility class as static methods.

Indeed I've seen that kind of "utility classes" in every project I worked on or which I got chance looking into the source code. The class name usually ends with "Util", for example, DateUtil, StringUtil or simply CommonUtil.

Such utility libraries have a tendency to end up as "garbage cans" of all kinds of unrelated utility methods. As the utility library grows, your applications each tends to only use a small percentage of the total utility methods.

Don't forget that as soon as any one of those small method is called, the whole class will be loaded into memory.

Tips on reading technical article

nospam@example.com (Steven Yong) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:59:00 +0800

Reading technical article is my hobby. Over the past years, one of the most interesting skills I've obtained in reading technical article is to tell whether an article is written by technical or marketing people, instantly.

Came across an article about JBoss Cloud this morning:

JBoss Cloud provides a preconfigured cloud of JBoss Application Servers and supporting technologies out-of-the-box. All you need to do is deploy your application and start using it.

Most of the times, wait, actually, everytime you see something like this,

All you need to do is just this ONE thing...

then the article is written by marketing people who is not able to describe more in details other than that "ONE" thing. If the article tell you about something which a lot of thing you need to do and you find the subject very hard, then that's from technical people.

The thing I've been doing for the last 18 months

nospam@example.com (Steven Yong) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:18:00 +0800

Promised to myself not to talk about it here until it's gained certain number of users, and now, it's the time.

A Total Information Management System (TIMS).

Lots of problems, obstacles and arguments which I even forget how did I manage to overcome all those. The outcome? A promising product that I can sell and other people can use.

Take a look at this website www.e-chambers.net if you can only understand marketing terms. Sorry, I'm a practical guy, if you want me to try to tell something that might sell the product, here you are:

If you are a boss, use it to save cost; If you are not, use it to reduce your workload.

Furthermore, a very affordable one.

Just a call to the number stated on the website, someone with a laptop will be sent to your office and give you a demo. That's all I'd like to say for now.