RiC#Code

Trip to Hon Kawagoe

2010-05-03T21:14:00.001+09:00

We are in the middle of the Golden week, here in Japan, so I had some time to visit 本川越.

HonKawaGoe (本川越) is the last stop on the Seibu Shinjuku line 西武新宿線.

It is supposed to be a part of old Japan which still resists modernization.

The town of HonKawagoe is full of beautiful old relic like buildings.

If you like old cities and culture, its really a nice place to visit.

When the buildings aren’t antiquated, they are in the very least, picturesque.

Maybe because this is Golden week, but at the time there was also a Matsuri 祭り. (Traditional festivities)

Click on the image above for a short video of the Matsuri.

Now back to studying and working on my games :)

Freedom buy choice

2010-04-08T19:48:00.000+09:00

1844

Soul and body, mind and matter, intellect and sense, reason and emotion, reality and appearance, unity and plurality, perfection and imperfection, immortal and mortal, permanence and change, eternal and temporal, divine and human, heaven and earth.

As Socrates is sentenced to death, he reassures his followers that his soul will not die and that he will be able to pursue his love for philosophy in the after life.

The soul is life and the body is a corruption of the soul.

Ah but you see, Socrates is very dead in the world of today, to witness his demise, fast forward and rewind, until you get to the industrial revolution J

Today, we all agree:

A person’s main function in life is to work for money, the only quality we have as people is to be working, to be a worker in an occupation that permits us to continue to conserve (sustain) our physical body, and it is only as a physical subject (one who follows orders) that we continue to work.

We live for the paycheck and we are not paid to think.

Workers (you and me buddy) are driven away from their potential and tasks become mindless.

Working class

We don’t know anything anymore. We certainly don’t know how to produce things; we cannot produce most of the things we consume daily.

For most people, that doesn’t matter, since we can’t even afford to cook “real” food, let alone produce any other sort of goods...the only commodity we can understand enough to sell is our time.

(And we sell it cheap)

When it comes to trying to be self sufficient, start a business, sell a product, it has become nearly impossible to compete with corporations, the assembly line made sure of that.

All we can do is try to call some attention and sell our business soonish, we want be assimilated!

An alternative is to invoke a sense of identity, to bring some importance to art, some nostalgia in the idealistic notion that there is value in the time, effort, knowledge and human experience poured into the making of the commodity presented.

A return to the old sense of real individuality is always being invoked as a sales pitch for something like sweet drinks.

Still, the need for artisanship has become void in most western societies as fake individuality is as good as the real deal, the idea is the product; the cool you is actually, someone else.

Alienation

With scarce productivity capabilities, (one man, one tool, one finished product per a certain amount of time) we had to come up with a need before wanting to acquire something, opposed to the current status quo:

Plenty of products, not enough people who can afford them.

The current solution to economic woes which comes from this double whammy of too much produce and dwindling resources in our ever increasingly overpopulated little planet is this:

“We don’t care if you need it or not, if you can afford it or not; just buy stuff to save the economy!”

Enter pop culture, forcing commodity fetishism down our throats, making the copy and the artificial be at the same level as the hand made art, where the item, the product and the money it represents, is definitely more important than the people buying it, blurring the lines, between propaganda, commercial interest, rhetoric and design.

We are accustomed now, to being in that assembly line, to be given tiny repetitive tasks, all we do, is done in ways that alienates us from whatever the complete product may become.

We are taught to want everything and anything that is paraded in front of us, where having some people smiling, holding a can, replaces having the description of the product you’re being pushed to buy.

The future of mankind seemed set on factory work for us all, until the computer came along, and replaced us in the assembly lines, created a new age of even more time to spend, being busy doing nothing.

We don’t even have time to sell these days.

Altair 8800

But that’s not all; computers are bringing back the power to the people, or at the very least, getting people together again.

Twitter, facebook, blogging in general, love it or hate it, the truth is, mankind has never been this close to being one race.

We now have the ability to not only exchange ideas, but to also feel connected enough to relate with people who are physically living in places we will never set foot on.

We can once again, have an understanding of the product we produce and the people we share the world with.

Yes, there are always some abstraction levels to take into consideration when it comes to understanding what we do, but all in all, we have, once again, the ability to sell something we create;

As insignificant as these things seem at first look, almost everyone now can create and distribute: movies, music, computer games, books, news stories or even industry application based software.

It was all kind of ugly, big and difficult to use in the beginning of our new modern age, compared to the current machines we call computers today.

The current age of personal computers started with a simple toolkit you could have ordered by mail and build it yourself.

Assembling personal computers isn’t hard to do, even today, I still assemble my desktops at home; it’s just like playing LEGO.

The people who first consumed this product, (the personal computer), when it first came out as a DIY utility, these people are now the big players in the computer industry related business world of today.

IT geniuses spend their time changing our lives, when they are not getting themselves in trouble with the law.
Self in Exile

Computers are an interesting tool, but a tool none the less.

What makes a computer different from most tools and machines is that it can evaluate the status of a task, it can be told to stop itself when it’s done...

When computers first came out, they were already quite powerful machines; enough to help mankind finally start space exploration.

I like to think of machines as our first non human cognitive partners; they brought us a step forward in human evolution.

So much so, computers are currently helping us with a reversal of our existential dilemmas.

Computers are more than a work tool; they are used to augment our reality.

My point being, they are also a socially evolutionary and revolutionary tool.

Not just being used as a medium for getting things done, getting your point across, or breaking geographical borders, we are now making computers a part of our life.

What is interesting to see, is the human world changing once again towards a practice of skill, of craftsmanship, of easy deliverability of products being introduced by individuals to individuals, of trade, cooperation, of a return to our humanity, no longer just droning in to work for someone else.

No words against the corporations in general, they also have a part to play, most are playing their cards very well and owe their success to the respect they have for and from their workers; from their success, it’s not hard to understand that which is desirable:

Understanding, collaboration, respect and real freedom of choice will bring back the Socrates in all of us.

The Marx programmers

2010-04-02T21:37:00.000+09:00

El estupido: Nothing to say, jump straight to my tip: to work with this kind of person, you have to lower yourself to their level, lower the level of every element on your team and also the expectations of your combined work, once you do that, things may go on without that many problems, if not, even the best plans will fail at his hands and it will be someone else’s fault.

The copycat: there is a famous saying “don’t reinvent the wheel” which makes perfect sense, but is poorly understood by many developers and more often by management people, who, think it means: just copy someone else’s code, no point in thinking or understanding what is really going on, as long as it works.

Well sometimes it just may happen that coding something your self can be much faster than fishing for the code online. (But then you would have to be someone who knows how to program in the first place)

In the best cases, this kind of programmer will create bad code out of good one, in the worst cases, he or she will make a career out of search engine driven copy paste code development.

The work produced by such a person, will be iteratively demonstrated to an audience to find out if its “ok”, until the number of fails possible or the patience of the clients is exhausted.

This kind of guy, will, unfortunately at times, be considered productive enough; in some badly managed institutions, they may even be given a certain amount of power and credibility, which more often than not also results in poor decision making.

(they often end up googling for decisions online, which is quite different from performing research on a subject, the first hit they get on a topic becomes gospel)

My tip: get pragmatic with this guy, don’t try to make sense of this person, enlightenment has to come from within or from a higher power, if you are not this guy’s boss, and your boss actually values the work of a lemming, then basically you either become one, continue to insult yourself by being made an equal to someone who does not value the gift for creative process, or you move on to work somewhere more appropriate for humans…

Lastly the “Who are you?” Character

Funny enough, I always see one of these, in every office, the quiet guys who often “seem busy” enough, but are never really doing anything, its almost like they don’t really exist; you even forget who they are and what they were hired for…they usually don’t have an opinion, no input, may seem nice and respectful, but ultimately, aren’t doing any work and have no work done to show… still, they are always there, often arriving before you get in the office and lingering on after you leave.

My tip: of all types these are the ones to avoid at all cost, they make for formidable foes when provoked, are extremely good at sabotage and make everyone else seem quite annoying compared to how quiet they are:

If you do ask them to do something for you, they will make sure it’s the last time you’ve ever asked them to do anything at all.

Since there isn’t a board responsible for evaluating IT professionals, it’s the employer’s responsibility to train and increase the professional level of workmanship of their employees.

Competent and competitive companies do this, Microsoft, Google, IBM, etc these are all successful companies setting themselves as a good example to follow.

Being an optimist, I believe evolution will make it so one day all companies will see the benefit of enforcing best practices and avoid the cowboy approach to software development, improving the work conditions of us programmers (and hopefully the end products we produce)

Me, I see myself more like a Jerry Lewis kind of guy, easily distracted, but always trying to learn or researching on what the most appropriate/productive way of doing things is, trying to code as often as I can (sometimes just for fun), sometimes blog reading and on the increasingly rarer idle times, browsing for the latest cat meme…to avoid getting bored.

Which is funny…since here in Japan, people are seen sleeping pretty much anywhere:

So actually, in this culture, it’s better to be seen sleeping at your desk rather than to be seen actively performing a task which isn’t strictly work related (like reading twitter posts)

Japan’s people problems

2010-03-29T19:34:00.000+09:00

One interesting thing about Japan:

Japan is the 10th most populated country in the world…which is nothing compared to China and India

(both countries make up 40% of mankind!)

Still, Japan is able to bring nice enough imagery when the thought of world overpopulation comes to mind

Regardless of this, the Japanese people are constantly being urged to increase the country’s birth rate!

yes we can!

Some of the "grow and multiply" encouragement packages include:

Endorsing studies in ways to make prospective parents interested in building a family.
Giving away cash for kids

Which I find interesting, I mean: have a payback per child of about 300,000 yen or 2,400 euros, when most hospitals in Japan will charge a new mom, an amount of around 1000,000 yen per delivered baby, which equals to about 8,000 euros…

So how does a nation with scenes like this:

Encourages an increase in birth rate?

The reasoning seems to be:

Japan’s birth rate is amongst the lowest in the world
Japan’s life expectancy is the highest in the world
Japan's labor force is projected to shrink 33 percent by 2050

Points to consider (besides the obvious elephant in the room: the country is already overpopulated)

Japanese are like human pandas in the bedroom
Raising a family is so expensive, Japanese often opt for abortion
- the abortion rate is well above child birth rate
  - rate of 13 abortions vs 7 successful childbirths per 1000
When abortion isn't an option, the child may end up being abandoned
- On a happy note, the Jikei Hospital, has come up with a novel way for allowing parents to “drop” unwanted babies anonymously:

My 2 cents on all of this:

I find it very difficult to believe that the decreasing birth rate is the real problem (or the right problem), or that the solution can be found in increasing the birth rate…

Actual births in 2009 were in the range of 970,000 as opposed to 920,000 in 2008, this means that the actual number of births is increasing, even if the rate decreased between 2008 and 2009!

There seems to be a paradox here:

The worry is that, people live too long nowadays, (or so the message from the government seems to point out), and therefore require even more young people to pay the cost, on the other hand, people are dying in greater numbers than they are being born, which is the root cause of the c.b.r. deficit…

Does this mean most people dying comes from the productive demographic group? That’s a whole different problem isn’t it?

Try adding the number of suicides in Japan (30,000/year) to that thought and we just might be on to something.

I would personally prefer to have people not kill themselves rather than try to convince them to have more babies…

In sum:

Yes, the ratio between the number of births, (people who will be paying taxes in the future), versus the ones who will stop paying taxes at the same time, will be negatively disproportionate, and that will be a problem, with the current economic system.

But that just means the current economic system, doesn’t work

Point is, pensioners aren’t freeloaders, they paid their taxes too, and that should account for something.

The real problem is the fact governments keep spending everything people pay on taxes as soon as the money comes in…why not use the novel idea of actually keeping “some” capital (real money) in the coffers huh?

I was going to say, why not do as banks do, where value of the money we put in, increases with time, but recent economic events prove that wrong...

How does the financial system work

Add that to teaching people what money is, how to use it, in school!

I mean, it should be part of school curriculums, to teach people how money works, a little education could be what’s needed to put a positive spin on the average person’s general crazy unrealistic overspending.

Once that’s done, we should also set boundaries relating (realistically) the price of a product, against the cost of manufacturing it. yay

If this can be done without going too much on to the so called dark side of socialism, which we all agree would end up depriving us of our so called freedoms (including the freedom to buy useless junk until we go bankrupt--and bring the economy down with us) then I’m all up for it!

Funny enough, even in Japan where people like to follow the leader, most will respect public announcements and requests from officials, there isn't a great number of people wanting to pay attention to government pleas for help in increasing the birth rate; I wonder why.

Some people end up in government (read "management people") because they they have risen to their level of incompetence

Front Fell OFf

Other interesting and related cultural issues in Japan:

Gokon and other artificial forms of “arranging” blind dates
Tanshin funin (stay away parents)
Nisetai jutaku (stay at home grandparents)

On a tangent, a decrease in the number of Japanese people wanting to have babies, makes for an increase (in the ratio) of children, born to foreign parents in Japan (1 in 30)

Obsessive compulsive disorders

OCD

An average of only 5% of samples of the Japanese population under study show themselves NOT to have OCD

Japanese crazes which are a form of OCD:

Actually, in Japan, OCD is well accepted in Japanese culture, usually the cleaning mania type:

toilet song

This song is about a girl, who is recollecting on her best childhood memories, the time she spent cleaning the toilet, for her grandma while she was growing up.

The song is a real tear jerker and a huge hit here in Japan as you can imagine.

There are games and game items for OCD people in Japan:

There are more of these interesting issues, but these ones really do seem to stand out the most.

In contrast, there is a little country called Pitcairn, population: 50

And you can fit an entire population of a country in one single photo :) awesome!

Meiji Jingu

2010-03-27T22:19:00.001+09:00

There is a cool temple located near the Harajuku Station (原宿駅), was there last week and enjoyed the scenery, the place is called Meiji Jingu.

One of the things I like the most is the old fashioned lanterns you can find in the shrine.

One thing that stands out is the sake in display

Recently, wine has also been put on display on the opposite side

I prefer the way the sake in display looks like

There is a nice bridge where I took some video footage of a small river.

No post about a Japanese shrine should be finished without a picture of the typical shrine gates.

And that was pretty much it for that trip :)

loved it.

I’m thinking of posting something about 新宿 next time

Trip to 代々木 (Yoyogi)

2010-03-21T20:37:00.001+09:00

I will use this post as a way to share some of the pictures I took on my last trip to 代々木.

Starts off with a nice lunch in a small Indian restaurant in front of the station:

Typical in Tokyo, a building with a different restaurant on each floor.

Then walking after lunch, I found this box interesting, the fact that graffiti art tends to drive itself so well into any shape and form is really interesting to me.

A fuller picture of where this box can be found below:

The sign reads “Yoyogi station”, the same box below:

The famous 自動販売機 (vending machines) of Japan, you can find them anywhere and buy from cold drinks to hot soup.

On the way to 原宿 (Harajuku) and as we get close to 代々木公園 Yoyogi park, we already start to see a clean well organized part of the area.

I like the signs on the floor to guide us as to what to do, like.. stop here! This is the graphic use of information to a degree I have only found in Japan.

The sign reads: “Stop here!”

Entering the Yoyogi park, you find it guarded by a guard house that actually fits in with the surrounding area.

Entering Yoyogi kouen.

(Yoyogi park)

Cool guard dude in Totoro style guard dude house (probably) doing sudoku

and then.. that’s it, Yoyogi park

(maybe I will post about it another time)

Exploitation Driven Software Development

2010-03-08T22:00:00.001+09:00

Join me in a quick journey into the world of Exploitation Driven Software Development (EDSD) methodologies.

The word criminal may pop up, here and there, as I describe my personal experience in the world of software development in a company that had no sense of smell, when handling the developers they had and their customer base

What is EDSD? When a company doesn't respect its workers and customers, its exploiting them, unfortunately, this still happens in this day and age...

When I say exploitation, sadly in this case, I don’t just mean the hiring of cheap labor and have them work over 20 hours a day, which unfortunately I did see happen at a previous company (more about it below), but I want to focus on the exploitation of both the work force and the good will of the customers.

In order to have a sustainable, maintainable business, and not have both your employees (the ones good enough to be able to go somewhere else) and customers, not stop renewing their contracts, first treat them both.. with respect. (Should be obvious, no?)

Respect goes far beyond the niceties of saying hello and please, I talk of respecting the work people do, to you, as an employer, and the work you present to a buyer, as a retailer.

Work right(s)

Something that is very well established in developed countries (at least legally) is:

People work for you, the work they do, should be based on what they have specialized themselves in.
Work should be done to meet a requirement, this requirement is to be detailed, specified
The results of their work are to be measured against clearly marked deliverables
The deliverables are to be measured with real metrics, (something besides pub talk).

Take all that away, and we're all back to slave camps, where people just do as they are told and only stop working when they are "sent" home.

After what should have been considered to be a full 9 to 5 work day (one that ends up going into the late evening hours), calling an employee at around 3 am (without prior consent) is not only unprofessional, its disrespectful and criminal.

When the only objective of the management team is to have the customer buy something rushed into existence without any thought of quality, usability or general presentation, with no regards to coherence and competence, the end result is a work force made of bad apples (spoiled by the abuse) and a very disgruntled customer base.

Always take a step back to remember: as important as shipping is;

Shipping should never be the ONLY factor to consider.

Ship now
Develop the product later at the customer's expense
Have the same customer pay for all the work done
Rinse & repeat

The EDSD process detailed above, may work once or twice, but its criminal and obviously not a long term, sustainable business plan:

How to have your application developed with EDSD:

Pay the development of the software completely at the customer’s expense, by selling vaporware

Have the same customer find
all of the bugs while using the product in production

Have the customer report these bugs in detail, because you never even tested the thing in the first place, so you really need some pointers

Get the customer to pay (extra on top of support) for fixing these bugs.

This is not only a recipe for disaster; it is also to be considered as a criminal offense to the customer in question and the community at large.

Not to mention the damage this does to all software companies and professionals all around the world.

So I am honestly and naively amazed at having seen this as common practice at a previous work place.

An S.A.P. derived startup delving into the world of “real” software development, thinks:

Software development is easy, because with Visual Studio you can have a lemming program just about anything in under 5 minutes.

You may be a good salesman, but there are limits to how far you can get away with this kind of abuse, so sure enough, the ONE paying customer this sad company had, stopped renewing the contract that was paying for this madness.

It’s almost laughable to remember the management team, at the time the contract was cancelled, wondering why the customer drops them like a sack of rotten potatoes after the third run of the same EDSD process.

Quite frankly they dumped them once they had a good hard look at the source code, some of which, the developers had to key in, by having a non developer management person dictate insanely non engineered code sitting behind them. Yes, Wimp management and EDSD go together hand in hand.

Sadly, there was logic to their madness (via a complete lack of ethics) as that company now intends to re-sell the same product developed with EDSD methodologies to other customers for a reduced price. (after simply changing variable names, since the IP rights actually are supposed to belong to the previous customer…)

I wonder how many such cases exist, of parasitical survival, due to this kind of immoral corruption of the theory of evolution in business. (Plenty, I would imagine).

As successful as the companies using this kind of work practices may be, I am just happy to have the luxury to keep my moral high ground and back away to do something else with my time.

Please don't get me wrong, I like the business world, look around, everything we see, seems to have the purpose of making us buy something else.

Also I send my sympathies to everyone and anyone who "doesn't have a choice" and keeps having to put up with working in a place they don’t feel happy in, but here I have to make the argument for refusing to work for the "wrong people"

Chill

2009-12-16T10:50:00.001+09:00

A Natureza procura sempre o equilibrio, parece me ser um bom exemplo a seguir.

Os extremos parecem muitas vezes ser o unico caminho disponivel, ou interessante, mas quando se entende o metodo intermedio, a evitar a vida de ou 8 ou 80, encontra-se uma compensacao directa, se nao imediata.

Ha um entender e habituar ao estado de equilibrio, que aprendi: requer treino. Hoje em dia as pessoas associam “paz de espirito” com “tedio”.

Na busca de uma fuga ao tedio muitas vezes se acha a razao de querer fugir de novo do que se encontrou ou atingiu ao evitar esse tedio inicial.

A vida de um constante evitar isto ou aquilo eh um ciclo vicioso e cansativo. estar sempre muito contente ou muito triste: cansa.

Nao se precisa estar feliz ou triste, eh bem normal estar apenas, sem qualificacao emocional .. simplesmente estar.

Deste tipo de ideia deriva a frase: "curb your enthusiasm".

Muitas vezes so nos apercebemos, depois da euforia, que a nossa excitacao sobre algo que gostamos ou desgostamos eh exagerada e como um bom vinho, um bom queijo, um bom dia.. eh bom deixar o gosto ou sabor ou a ideia de algo que se experienciou, se estender por um tempo..

Esperar ate (quem sabe) dias ou meses, ate o evento se tornar nada mais que a memoria, e entao tirar, ter e talvez dar uma apreciacao sincera.

Onde nao eh a apreciacao que importa, mas o estar se bem (equilibrado).

…Now for the human condition, add marketing to the problems: when most of what you (think you) want is what someone else wants you to buy (from them).

The whole idea of searching for the one true happy state, that when you’re alone you’re not enough (complete), we are told that enough is not enough: this is a sales pitch.

It’s when you stop consuming, when time stops, that’s when your natural state falls into being “satisfied”, but propaganda everywhere teaches you that satisfactory is not enough.

Want to be happy? Stop trying to aim for happy, and give value to satisfactory states of mind, euphoria is overrated.

Nothing beats peace of mind.

Happy December..man

2009-11-24T14:47:00.001+09:00

'tis the season to buy ear plugs, lalalala lala lalalala ...

I know one day isn't enough to buy so much whiskey, chocolates and postcards, sexy underwear, video game consoles, etc..so it grew to a whole month of shopping excuses.

"lets bankrupt daddy day"

becomes:

"lets put everyone in deep financial and emotional stress month"

Last year, I made the mistake of attending a choir night at a Baptist church, and the only thing I remember, is the priest going on about how people keep saying: "merry Christmas", here in Tokyo and haven't a clue that:

“this is the time Christians celebrate the birth of Christ” ..

..so lets all stop saying that then :)

Since Christmas now takes the whole month of December hostage anyway, we should say:

"happy December"

"December man" or “December girl”, instead of “Santa Claus”

..That would be awesome too.

Now all we need are some songs for that and you’re done!

Weird in Japan

2009-09-17T13:01:00.001+09:00

I decided to talk about weird things in Japan, some are not so weird, but I haven’t seen or noticed them elsewhere.

Probably not the weirdest thing, today’s topic, is the Yakult lady!

Yakult ladies in Japan will visit your office and ask you if you would like to buy a bottle to stay healthy.

They are given bicycles or motorbikes to drive around town to do their daily rounds, its both weird and enchanting to see them, and you can bet your life they will always have a smile and a wonderful attitude whenever they see you.

Japan is a country of extremes, sometimes contradictive, this is one of them, where the sexism is so strong that we have a job description with lady on it.

Having lived here for almost three years, I have slowly and painfully finally understood how hard it can be for women to pursue a career, with the hopes of progressing upwards within a company to say a managerial position or an executive post.

Usually women are seen as wives, either as in effect or prospective, which means they either don’t get promoted much or they are given jobs where they will not hold much responsibility (not officially, but in practice they actually will inherit the responsibility of quite serious tasks, just not awarded or recognized for it).

The excuse to refuse women in responsible, high grade jobs is so that they can go home early and look after their families. Its funny because having said that, women are in fact given the choice of pursuing a career in an office or a responsible managerial position in Japanese society, but the chances are, they will give up with utter frustration because what tends to happen is that their male counterparts will give them all the work to do while they slack off and perform complicated political dances and dinner parties.

These drinking parties, where the use of hostesses are the norm, are usually compulsory, paid by the company and will help men promote themselves without doing any “real” work. Here is a very good link to Salaryman night out.

Another reason women avoid the office work is because most male co-workers (salaryman) will tend to look like this

Yep, this is a typical young male office worker in Japan (maybe I will be like this if I stay here too long), now add body odor and air-sucking noises and you can sense the full experience of office work here.

The older male co-workers will look more like this:

I am talking from my personal experience, and from listening to anecdotal evidence from friends, but the stories are quite usually the same, where women will have to constantly be proving themselves working until late, and crying themselves to tears to family and friends and most men, here in Japan that go up the career ladder, do so through nepotism and unrelated reasons like (real example) becoming the Head Manager of the Weapons Importing Department because of having been the captain of the baseball team in high school.

Then to close it off, there are the frequent news reports of women feeling incredibly happy when they surrender to the status quo, like this one from the Japan times.

No summary here, I went off on a tangent about political repression on women in Japanese society, but all I wanted to say is that I think the image of the Yakult lady is cute and nice!

Something I have only seen in Japan and was surprised by it when I first saw it.

Hope to post some more on oddities I find here and there later.

Weekend movie review

2009-08-10T15:53:00.001+09:00

Since I haven't been able to do any coding that I can even hint at posting here because of IP rights and confidentiality agreements, I decided to post some movie reviews:

"GI JOE"

Its a teen summer block buster movie, nuff said: explosions, pop music and nice looking people doing expensive cosplay with guns, which of course, enabled the women to show off some teenage-crush-inducing oversized breast shapes.

(the super hero costumes were even more generous than usual this time round)

All that, plus the usual product placement and that’s a rap.

Story? oh.. yes, it actually had one to be honest.. if only I could remember it, I could tell you how good it was.

No need for score points here.

"How to lose friends and alienate people"

or “Watch my movie because Megan Fox is in it”

If you know the main actor, Simon Pegg, you know what to expect: him being a dumb brit with a masters degree insulting the Americans until submitting himself to brown nosing because it produces results.

The movie does go beyond the typical easy fish and chips comedies he’s done in the past with the help of a full-hand of Hollywood names who seem to be enjoying themselves too much to be wanting to throw any convincing acting in the mix.

Without thinking of the genre, this movie gets a 2/10 but as a comedy, it can go as far as a 4/10, because I think brainless comedies can get some slack and because it may just work for you if you’re in a good mood to start with.

The long review above and below actually means I did have some fun watching it, but I must think twice when reviewing it to others:

Starts off with almost-toilet-humor-like “funny”, but not as bad as what we usually get this time of the year.
Then it turns to watchable but predictable semi-romcom with hints of being OK at times.
Ends abruptly when its about time.

To sum it all up:

You can enjoy it if you just want something light to go with the wine and the woman/man/person/creature sitting next to you, not something you buy/download go to see on purpose.

I personally saw it because I read 3 pages on a book with the same title and this actually seemed really funny.

Just think about it

2009-06-17T10:54:00.001+09:00

yes, think about it..

What computers do mostly, is to replace a person's effort and time in tasks that are repetitive, boring and non-related to actual thinking.

Like the industrial revolution replaced many factory workers with machines, SOME operators are always necessary, the same happens with the computer based productivity improvements in non-labor intensive work, office work and the like.

It is a bit of a case of us versus them, us IT folk, versus them, non IT folk, and our place in business.

Our work is to make some [people] more productive and many more unnecessary.

Both the blog post here from Phil Haack, and the comments in it, talk about valid points, but somehow I would like to go a bit more sci-fi here, a bit more over the edge and make this crazy observation:

Subconsciously, the replaceable business folk are gradually becoming resentful of this and want to keep hold of their jobs by striking back at the programmers with evil thoughts such as this:

"well, they are replacing me, the businessman for a machine soon.. How about we, the businessmen replace the (programmers) people making the replacements with one of their own inventions?"

Evolution dictates that the programmers will have to become more and more businesslike, (as is already the case for so many already) and one day, there will be no business people as we know them today, but IT people who know the business.

Non human and business friendly programmers will still be around, because they are actually needed and will continue to be irreplaceable, the same as we need non business oriented scientists and engineers.

Until machines can think, someone will always have to program them with logic that a businessman cannot make, when that happens, then you will still need educators, a programmer is nothing but someone who turns your fuzzy driveling into something calculated but sensible, so you cannot get rid of the people that make sense.

I would or could make a similar rant about the anti-software poster picture from SalesForce’s adds, but I think you get the gist of it.

Ask stupid questions to win

2009-05-13T10:33:00.001+09:00

When projects fail, people often think:

we didnt have enough resources
we didnt have enough time
we didnt have the right tools/technical knowledge

This is the real reason why I think most IT projects fail:

Why? Because clients usually don’t know what they are asking for, and need to see the possible end-result before they know something about what it is they are talking about.

If you continuously show the customers, what it is that they are asking for, they will work WITH you to get what they want, no need to be over protective and patronizing about the fact clients don’t know about technology, their job is to want something, its a collaborative work to learn together, both developer and client, how to write down the client’s wishes in a way that will produce a happy ending.

Main point being:

In requirements gathering: ask ~~stupid~~ questions.
- Ask WHY
Prototype, refactor, show & tell, repeat

Should seem common sense, but you would be surprised how many times people don’t ask “WHY?”, because it would seem silly!

Asking what would appear to be stupid questions (or even embarrassing questions to some) is the number one priority in any project as far as I can tell!!

Its learning to walk before you can run, and FIND OUT if you really need to do x,y or z, it also helps you keep an eye on the end result!

Some people will start a project just to have something to do.. don’t be too surprised to see that its those people who greatly contribute with the 60% or so margin of project failures in software development.

Do something for a reason, other than avoiding to be idle!!

I you do engage yourself in doing something (for someone) and you don’t ask WHY, congratulations! You are like some project managers I have had to work with in the past, who, when the project fails, would then quite happily use the initial 3 bullet points as the reasons for the failure of their projects.

Projects that may succeed even under a no “why” questions asked mentality:

self serviced
- you don’t have to ask because you are feeding yourself, these CAN be successful, but if you think about it, even in this case you would greatly benefit from asking yourself those same questions before you start going on a D. Quixote mode to self servicing idiocy, performing tasks that could be avoided or addressing needs more efficiently.
projects without a success metric put against them
- These can succeed even when they fail, because no one can actually tell what’s going on. These projects not only exist, they thrive!

How can asking WHY help with saving a project?

If you know why something is being done, its easier to work defensively and preempt caveats, suggest alternatives to the ideas given etc etc

There is another huge failure benefactor:

Once the ill conceived requirements gathered from a “lets not ask stupid questions” mentality is finalized and written in stone, that same kind of project manager will try to push on and move a project forward JUST to meet the requirements which in fact are non satisfactory (or worse, not necessary).

Its exactly because different wishes need to be written differently, that the process of requirements gathering becomes too elusive to even the most experienced project manager.

Pushing on in trying to implement wrong requirements, without paying attention to the CURRENT needs of the end customers (something that should be done continuously) means wasting good ~~time~~ money after bad.

There is absolutely no point in saying the “that’s what the spec says” , yes you have to follow some pointers, but these need recalibrating, readjusting and rethinking continuously!!

The customer is always right! right? They pay the bills, or the bills are paid thanks to having someone happy with what you have to offer!

If the product does not do what the customer wants, they will not use it..If they don’t use it.. you get my point. (I hope)

There is a related thought process currently named: Agile, its all about keeping in touch with your customers, and being ready to change. (and being quick about returning something for evaluation)

If I understand it correctly: Agile is about having you have the customers change the requirements AS YOU GO, and do this with you, not against you.

But I want to keep the focus on the importance of asking questions:

“There are no stupid questions, just inquisitive idiots.” Ask away.

mobile and iphone development

2009-05-11T09:51:00.001+09:00

Started working with projects for mobile phones like the iphone and imob.

downloaded winchain with cygwin which enables me to make applications for the iphone from a Windows XP machine, looks great, but will continue to pursue other ways also.

trying to find ways to develop and test websites for the phone industry.

currently:

testing web site result inside an iphone emulators.

(firefox extension here)

ASP.NET MVC tips for phone related web development.
having the web designers use the phone screen resolution to produce new pages
mobile best practices
reading how to target the iphone safari browser
checking demos
wtf is wurfl
just for fun, if ever I find something useful in PHP, will use phalanger

see you in the funny pages.

New Job, old me

2009-04-29T00:39:00.001+09:00

I am proud of that fact that I did it:

I made the difficult decision of choosing to go away from a laid back, but not-so-challenging position to something more demanding, but hopefully more rewarding also.

Where I was, I was not doing so much development work, but really trying to prepare myself to try to become a Project Manager.

the process of turning me into a PM was starting to drag as the company’s objectives got out of focus from the recession and all..

I was half of the development team, so it was a straight forward job, without much pressure to be honest.

I have moved away from that, and decided to join a more challenging but more development related position where people around me may understand how I feel when I want to keep improving myself and expand my knowledge and experience beyond the norm.

I am now working closer to what I would call a real coding environment: with real development needs, ~~source code checks~~, peer reviews and the occasional wtf metric as per xkcd’s famous cartoon

I’m serious, today I felt like this could be an enjoyable challenge.

Take this assignment, for instance, the simplest thing in the world right?

Add some icons on to a TreeView:

Seems like a piece of cake, well it was, but it took me some time to get my act together..

1. First, the PostBack on index changed was not returning the ViewState properly

2. It was part of the request that we have different icons per item, I needed to come up with a solution, without having to learn all the new code in a day

(it calls some methods on Item change and the moment I would start trying to copy code to the control, all hell would break loose)

3 The icon setup should be done in a way where it doesn’t have the attributes hardcoded.

4. I am a C# /SQL Server coder by choice, this is a VB.NET house with mostly use of Oracle over SQL Server

On top of that, I am not yet fully understanding the current source control mechanism, if there is one, so if this was me some 2 years ago, there I would be worrying about every single code change….(commented code ville), so its been fun.

At first I thought that the reason the PostBack was screwy had to do with Ajax not supporting TreeView as per the documentation

I was extremely happy to be proven wrong on that one when I read and followed the steps in Scott On Writing’s blog! What a mind opener.. it really turned my day into something good in so many ways.

Then it was easy, I just created a custom control, with a TreeView inside it, and an event with a delegate sent to the TreeView sending the event back to where it was originally in the old code.. its was really easy and I didn’t have to learn too much of their current code, because I didn’t change anything really.

So that was that, but then well, the best way I could think of (under tight schedule) to get the configuration setup was to have an XML file, basically it was like this, every department can have several IDs and each department will have an icon.

my approach:

<department_name>
    <id>1</id>
    <id>2</id>
    <img>imageURL</img>
</department_name>

xpath was designed specially to make me able to forget how to use it!

XPath Tutorial (w3c)

XPath Tool

I was able to do a simple foreach on all ids and find them on the xml file, retrieving the image path to the node image setting.. so simple.. but felt great.

I am a happy C# Developer, C# feels natural to me, so having to code in VB.NET will take some time getting used to..

I could have probably just used SharpDevelop or Reflector to switch between one language and the other, but I am very happy with developerfusion’s take on things with their .net code converter. I used it extensively today, and though I must say, I have never seen it work out of the box, there are always some tweaks to do, it sure makes the journey much more pain free.

Oh… I didn’t forget my previous comment, how did I get round the fact that I am currently working disassociated from a centralized versioning control system? As always: Git

I don’t know how much my life has improved since starting to use Git on all my versioning needs, when I was done and ready with the code, I pulled out TortoiseGit to help me do a diff between my end result, and the code as I initially received it to make a nice update log sheet and send to my peers.

So far, so good, happy to be put to the test, but happier still to have a day off tomorrow:

If you are in Japan, please enjoy your Shōwa no hi, I know I will!

Google Analytics gets new API

2009-04-23T09:57:00.001+09:00

While working at Piedmont Quraz, we were using Google Analytics and WebAntenna for general site statistics.

readwriteweb has a nice post on the new API from Google Analytics.

The coolest thing I liked on the post was the mention of the real time application woopra

I hope to have this implemented and tested sometime soon with a site I may be involved in.

Adding Media Content to SharePoint

2009-04-16T06:19:00.002+09:00

Media Point is an easy, follow the wizard way of adding new content capabilities to a SharePoint Server, media includes wmv movies and so on.

Check it out

SharePoint is now called SharePoint

2009-04-16T06:08:00.006+09:00

SharePoint Developer Group Blog points out the new name for WSS after MOSS:

SharePoint 2010.

Goes well with:

Exchange 2010
Visual Studio 2010

and so on.. It all sounds very exciting, me, I'm still watching tutorials for the
soon-to-be-old MOSS

HTML HTML HTML

2009-04-03T17:33:00.003+09:00

As my job becomes increasingly more and more related to developing and maintaining quraz.com, my interest in making validation easy has gone up a notch.

The trick is to make it so easy, you do it in a few seconds AND can delegate it to someone who is not as technical as yourself.

With this in mind, I found a cool way to help things a bit:

Add a bookmark to this code:

javascript:void(document.location='http://validator.w3.org/check?uri='+document.location);

That will validate the current page you are visiting.

As reccomended by Scott Hanselman here, a nice HTML validation Module

The rest is just up to the usual suspects: w3c

My current sync choice

2009-03-31T09:00:00.002+09:00

Unison is an rsync solution you can use with a no longer supported Windows client.

That's what I have been using for my syncing so far, but plan to use the new Web Deployment Toos for IIS7

Walkthrough here

git pull & push

2009-03-26T17:44:00.005+09:00

Now that I finally got the time to have local and remote repositories with ssh daemons in Windows..

It helps to just be able to push and pull with a right click ;)

this is where I say that: Tortoise Git is cool

I hear alot of people, specially on StackOverflow say its not ready yet..

Well 80% of every tool I use (that I like) these days is not ready yet..

gmail is still beta..
ASP.NET MVC is still not a full product ..
Git in Windows is "not ready yet"

The list goes on..

What I do now, when I want to make a local repository:

mkdir codedir

git init

git gui

git remote add <name> <location>

and finally:

git pull <branch>

You can add these lines to the .git/config file on that folder:

[branch "master"]
remote = realdeal
merge =
refs/heads/master

Then you can go about:

git pull
git push

without thinking about branch names.

With Git Tortoise, you can even do it with right clicks

cygwin sshd

2009-03-26T13:30:00.004+09:00

I always forget these simple steps..and ALWAYS end up googling for it..

here goes:
1. On installing Cygwin, make sure to choose “Install for Everyone”, then, after choosing a mirror, go to the NET group and find OpenSSL and OpenSSH, tick once to install.

2. Copy Paste all of the below:

chmod +r /etc/passwd
chmod +r /etc/group
chmod 755 /var

ssh-host-config –y

above has a –y at the end, this means it will default to answering everything with a “yes”.

from my experience, you can do this only when you are sure your environment makes sense, its usually better to say “yes” manually and follow every step carefully.

export CYGWIN=ntsec tty
cygrunsrv --start sshd

Now.. on some machines, like some company based ones, you may have a default home profile which doesn’t go well with CygWin, in that case, you may change the passwd file under /etc/passwd to provide a more helpful location.

Another point to take into account, when using this in conjunction with Git for instance, is that Git should be installed with the safest option, where it doesn’t interfere with the Windows PATH or anything like that.

This makes sure CygWin will listen to Git’s requests when pulling and pushing.

Even when taking all of that into account, this may not work too well in Windows 2003 .. I remember having to hammer this a bit to get it working sometimes..

This alone validates my previous managers’ comments on why they dont want to have sshd..its sad.. and I wish the cygwin folks would make it more click friendly..

Anyway, it works for me and I love it!

Good job!

SEO

2009-03-18T00:17:00.002+09:00

I haven't had any time to post recently, thus the huge gap in sends.

I have moved my company's main site from Arizona to Tokyo.

トランクルーム

I hope to make it very SEO friendly by sorting all the legacy XHTML 1.0 compliance issues.

Also in the works is me trying out ASP.NET MVC and implementing it on the site.

Fun Stuff

art

2009-01-20T15:42:00.002+09:00

Art is the elusive shape of interest made object

first of many links to contemporary geeky art

Happy 2009

2009-01-01T19:41:00.002+09:00

I have been quite busy lately, studying MOSS.

Recently I have found a neat CMS called SiteCore.

of the site, this link was extremely important...SharePoint Modules enabling the CMS to interact with SharePoint and MOSS Sites.

elearning

2008-11-11T18:30:00.001+09:00

I should do some elearning here
(had some issues with it to start with, it seems it needs all of Microsofts browser plugins enabled to run hehe..

cubing

2008-11-11T17:34:00.001+09:00

Found an interesting tutorial as to how to create cubes.

recently I rediscovered an interest in Perl

2008-11-11T16:59:00.004+09:00

So since most of my work nowadays consists of SharePoint Stuff, I decided to review and play with some related Perl Code I found under:

Tech Systems (links to Mason)

My interest was spiked by the need of a script that would turn iLO Machines Off.
Found one at: HP Lights Out XML Scripting Samle

Shop Assistant

2008-11-11T16:20:00.014+09:00

...has been heavily updated:

1. New Pie Chart Displays Shop Unit Activity Ratio

2. Drill Down Statistics:

2.1 Number of Individual Units Reporting Activity (Grouped by Shop and Floor)

2.2 Pie Chart Updates on Shop and Floor Selection, showing the Unit Activity ratio

3. Added Lights Statistics (Excel)

4. Faster and more accurate with all sorts of IT buzzwords in the code:

5. Easy to See assumed Open/Close Times per Unit

Current Limitations:

1. The Shop Assistant Application only reports Light Usage on Floors that also had Unit Activity.

2. Only Reporting Time Calculated on Zone 1 of a Floor

(Some Reports will show a slightly lower Light Usage Reading than the Unit Activity Hours)

The Shop Assistant is a Building Automation Windows Application Tool I have developed that links to a TAC Continuum (Andover) DataBase System to display with a fully customized Graphical User Interface; its a reporting tool, with easy to use navigation and CSV (Excel) exports.

cool sdk

2008-10-28T17:31:00.000+09:00

play with this touchless sdk

visual studio IDE

2008-10-24T11:33:00.006+09:00

wow this was interesting..

My Visual Studio 2008 kept crashing on my dual monitor desktop environment.

Steps:

Maximize VSIDE2008 on Monitor 1
Restore Size of VSIDE2008
Move VSIDE2008 to Monitor 2
Maximize VSIDE2008 on Monitor 2

*crash*

Fix:

Start/Run

regsvr32 C:\windows\system32\actxprxy.dll

Apparently, this gets (wrongly) unregistered by Office 2007 Installs and uninstalls..

helped by post from Coding Hillbilly

auto enrollment

2008-10-24T08:40:00.001+09:00

turn it off

office project manager 2007

2008-10-23T17:17:00.001+09:00

doesnt install well first time round:

Hanselman has an article on it

heartsong

2008-10-23T09:50:00.000+09:00

letting you go
never to be free
of what I know
wont let me be

telling you this
all that I miss
is the time we spent
and what it meant

wake up someplace
with my mind in your face
see if the lights are on
notice you are gone

telling you this
of all the things i miss
giving my love to you
and hoping its all true

all the while
i wanted your smile
getting warmer still
if we had time to kill

and I'm glad to be sad
for what I had and lost
and how you used to see me
just wont let me be

tell you this:
its only you I miss
hoping this is true
my heart remembers you

Metabo fun

2008-10-22T08:36:00.001+09:00

I should get a Metabo wife!

disk space

2008-10-21T17:06:00.003+09:00

Hanselman has a great post on saving diskspace.

One of his great suggestions is the WinDirStat

Cool!

Trust Issues

2008-10-21T16:50:00.002+09:00

The problems I was having with InfoPath were Certificate Related... by not trusting the publisher, it was taking ages to come up with the box that asks you if you trust it...

InfoPath and SharePoint

2008-10-21T15:48:00.002+09:00

I have a horrible time openning InfoPath forms.. (slow, sluggish, resource consuming...)

if all this was implemented, maybe I would be better off..

force the opening on a browser

an infopath viewer webpart

WinForms InfoPath Viewer

troubleshoot with SharePoint 2007

more help with MOSS InfoPath

but opening an infopath form in a wss 3.0 doesnt seem possible.
we need InfoPath Forms Service only available in MOSS..

SharePoint Governance

2008-10-21T10:34:00.004+09:00

Saw this link to CodePlex Sharepoint Governance by Bamboo Team Joel Oleson

Have to find the time to research it propperly.. seems useful

Periodic Table

2008-10-21T10:20:00.000+09:00

Found this on my Ubuntu release the other day: gperiodic

Now thinking of making something like it on dotNet
(and make it more interactive, like q Quizz perhaps?)

life on the wire

2008-10-21T09:21:00.000+09:00

There are so many "community" based sites..

I vowed to remove myself from all of that madness sometime ago.
..well, I was reading SharePoint blogs today when whilst doing a small research on a name of a person that came up, I bumped into plurk.

Joined with this account

... Dont think my interest will last long but.. what a heck..seems fun

ARF from the kid

2008-10-21T08:49:00.000+09:00

This: ARF For SharePoint Seems really interesting.

Supposed to help with customizing SharePoint sites.

download page

Cool Tool

2008-10-21T08:36:00.000+09:00

This is in its Beta 1, and it seems great:

Research-Output Repository Platform

Impact Assessment Tool

2008-10-20T16:32:00.000+09:00

Added MSAGL functionality to my Impact Assessment Tool:

Blog Parser

2008-10-20T16:28:00.000+09:00

There are probably better ways of doing blog parsing, but I currently use this site:

http://www.blogcrowds.com/resources/parse_html.php

2008-10-20T15:22:00.001+09:00

with a custom built field, one can extend the SharePoint List functionality to allow for hiding and showing a field based on a choice from a dropdown:

The idea is that, in this list, we have c_hide and Special columns attributed to special types I developed in C#.

c_hide is a column that we can hide, the column itself does not have meaningful data for an end user.

but when the SharePoint List Designer builds the SharePoint List, he or she would place the following XML on c_hide's description:

<options>
<add name="IT" >
<add field="ITField" visible="true" />
<add field="CCField" visible="true" />
</add>
<add name="Call Center" >
<add field="ITField" visible="false" />
<add field="CCField" visible="true" />
</add>
<add name="Finance" >
<add field="ITField" visible="false" />
<add field="CCField" visible="false" />
</add>
</options>

The XML above builds the Drop Down List in the Column "Special" and assigns the behaviours for hiding and showing the fields "CCField" and "ITField" accordingly to their visibility attributes.

The Field "ITField" disappears if the "Call Center" Option is selected:

game adds

2008-10-15T22:40:00.002+09:00

games with real ads

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/10/15/gaming-gets-political-obama-ads-appear-in-ea-games/

google is good for your brain

2008-10-15T22:40:00.001+09:00

googling helps you get smarter

http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/007931.html

another great blog

2008-10-03T11:17:00.001+09:00

hanselman on deepzoom with c#

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheWeeklySourceCode18DeepZoomSeadragonSilverlight2MultiScaleImageMouseWheelZoomingAndPanningEdition.aspx

Downloads

2008-10-02T15:04:00.000+09:00

Downloaded lots of stuff lately

SP1 for Visual Studio..

currently testing *from today I hope*
http://www.devexpress.com/Downloads/Visual_Studio_Add-in/DXCore/

hope to test soon:
http://www.codeplex.com/quickgraph/
http://www.postsharp.org/ (hope to understand and then test http://www.codeproject.com/KB/viewstate/PostSharp4ViewState.aspx also)
http://www.nunit.org/index.php

wfc

2008-10-02T15:03:00.001+09:00

this is my first wfc link/attempt at understanding what all the fuss is about.

http://blah.winsmarts.com/2008-4-Writing_the_WCF_Hello_World_App.aspx

will try this asap and see how it goes...

(some) cool sharepoint sites for development

2008-10-02T14:50:00.000+09:00

Super COooOooL:

help with deploy:
http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/ACs-VS-SharePoint-Project-Utility-Tool-Window-for-SharePoint-Developers.aspx

another help with deploy (by hand)
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/sharepoint/WebParticles.aspx?display=Print

list of stuff:
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/pedia/Pages/ContentDetails.aspx?ContentID=73

template help:
http://blogs.msdn.com/gderun/archive/2008/01/11/sharepoint-visual-studio-project-and-deployment-templates.aspx

toolkit help for deployment:
http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2008/09/29/my-current-sharepoint-development-toolkit.aspx

SilverLight WebPart:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc627341.aspx

Resource Dictionary

2008-09-19T10:16:00.001+09:00

My latest app at work:

Currently looking forward to having people test this internally.
still thinking of what to call it..
the end project should be:
"Impact Assessment Tool"

This:

1. Adds a list of resources.

2. Make one resource dependant on the other

3. vice-versa

4. Uses Nhibernate to talk to the DB (SQLServer2005)

OCR character recognition

2008-09-19T10:16:00.000+09:00

I am in the middle of developing something in the lines of character recognition.

not all from scratch, I plan to use Microsoft Office Document Imaging libraries to achieve this.

one idea would be to get text from a pdf where the text was in an image.

this works, with normal english, would like to have it working with 日本語。

nhibernate

2008-09-18T10:13:00.002+09:00

learned to use nhibernate..

it seems to be a huge overkill while we are learning this..
I mean.. create the XML, the class definition.. the database tables...all in sync.. just to have a persisntent object oriented approach to database connectivity and use..

but as soon as its done, it just feels good!
now I can say "User u = new User(); u.Name = "Ric"; u.Save(); transaction.Commit();" or something like that..

feels just like coding, which is all I wanna do..

thinking

2008-09-18T10:13:00.001+09:00

installed microsoft CLIP.

this shows a pop up with a translation to a word you are hovering over..

its cool I think.

thinking to modify it to support Japanese Language.

fun stuff I did

2008-09-18T10:13:00.000+09:00

JeAssis:

with use of JDIC and ALC, constructed an Outlook Add-on that helps translate emails.

it can traslate (also with google translating tools) and read the emails.
Reading doesnt work on Vista (different API to use)

Also did a Kanji Reader, this uses jisyo's page, removes all the crap around the tool and just shows the kanji card reader. (Doesnt work on My Vista machine, I think its to do with Flash Objects being used on the original page)

cool tool nhibernate

2008-08-18T12:16:00.000+09:00

nhibernate is supposed to facilitate access to databases from JAVA or .NET

found here:
http://www.hibernate.org/343.html

Hate another Monday

2008-08-18T11:30:00.001+09:00

Checked out ONEIL's API for RSSQL
Adding a user to an account (permissions)
This API was designed to link to C++ libraries, the code isn't that likeable from a C# Developer point of view, but it works.

When/If the project related to this gets revived, I will dig into this code more accordingly.