Kit Kai's Tech Blog

Ha ha... Just came back from lunch, and my colleauges and I were talking about the new ERP gantries at Orchard Road.

He made a comment, which I'm going to paraphase and expand.

Wonder when the authorities are going to put two gantries, one at linkway between Orchard MRT and Wisma, another at Taka and Wisma, since the traffic has slowed to a crawl (literally, especially when raining). It won't penalise genuine shoppers of Wisma, since they would only pass one of the gantries, and not both. This way, people will not use the walk way when they want to go to taka.

This is taken from my church's bulletin, something that spoken to my heart even before the powerful service starts. I won't comment much, but let the Holy Spirit speak directly into your heart as only He can speak.

[Update:] Click here to listen to the service's message

God Bless.

----------

Famed preacher-poet Edwin Markham captured the essence of Christ-like living and giving in relating the story of Conrad the Cobbler. In his classic work “The Shoes of Happiness,” Markham states that saintly Conrad had a vivid dream in which he was told Christ would visit his humble cobbler shop on a certain day. The dream was so real that Conrad was certain Jesus would indeed come. So he decorated his simple shop with boughs of green and prepared breads and cakes to serve the Master.

Early on the morning that Jesus was to visit, two of Conrad’s friends came by, and Conrad shared the dramatic dream with them. They wanted to wait for the Master with him because they knew that if anyone in the village would ever have visit from Jesus, it would be kindly Conrad. However, Conrad told them the Lord had said specifically that He wanted to visit with the cobbler alone.

Markham wrote:
“His friends went home; and his face grew still
As he watched for the shadow across the sill;
He lived all the moments over and over,
When the Lord should enter the lowly door.
The knock, the call, the latch pulled up,
The lighted face, the offered cup.
He would wash the feet where the spikes had been;
He would kiss the hands where the nails went in;
And then at last he would sit with Him
And break the bread as the day grew dim.

But the Master did not come. Instead, a beggar knocked on the door and asked for a pair of shoes. Conrad was irritated by the interruption, but his kindly heart would not let him ignore the need of the old man. He hurriedly made the shoes and gave them to the poor beggar, rushing him off so he would not interrupt or prevent the visit of the Great Guest.

A little later, another knock sounded, and Conrad was sure this was the Master. But it was only a hungry old woman carrying a heavy load of sticks. She asked for food, which Conrad reluctantly gave her. The only food he had was what he had prepared for the Master. With each bite, Conrad’s heart sank. He feared he would have nothing left for his Lord, and he secretly hoped she would leave a little. However, she devoured every crumb. Then the old woman asked if Conrad would help her to the edge of the village because her load was heavy. He did not want to leave the shop, but again the cobbler could not turn down the frail old woman. He wrote a hasty note and put it on the door, hoping the Master would not miss it and leave.

When Conrad returned, the note was still there, undisturbed, so he knew the Master had not yet come. Late in the evening, there was a final knock on the cobbler’s door. Conrad’s heart leapt within him, knowing at last this would be the Master. But when he opened the door, he found a lost and crying child.

“Mister, I’m lost,” the little lad cried. “Will you please help me find my home?”

Conrad sighed, gathered the little tot in his arms, retrieved his note from the wastebasket and again placed it on his shop door. He took the lost lad far across the village to his worried mother. Rushing back, he hoped he had not missed the Master and then saw the well-used note still unmoved. Conrad knew Jesus had not yet made His visit.

As the midnight hour approached, Conrad knew now the Master would not appear at his door. It really had only been a dream. The kind cobbler’s heart was broken, and in his crushing sadness, Conrad fell to his knees crying:

“Why is it, Lord, that Your feet delay?
“Did You forget that this was the day?”

Then, soft in the silence, a voice he heard:
“Lift up your heart, for I have kept My word.
“Three times I came to your friendly door;
Three times my shadow was on your floor.
“I was the beggar with the bruised feet;
“I was the woman you gave to eat;
“I was the child on the homeless street.”

Enterprise Template Booklet

I was able to attend the SDAasia.Net 2005 Conference at the last minute because I was given VIP pass, one of the privileges of being a council member of SGDotNet. Learn many things there like…

Updated Design Patterns

Neal Ford looks at the updated design patterns that was inked initially by the Gang of Four.

The updated singleton in .net allows you to return singleton instances via properties instead of method, though I do not understand what is the significance of returning via properties.

He introduces memento, a pattern that standardise undo feature

Observer pattern, which was basically events

Visitor pattern, which was upside down of the observer pattern

Model (data) - View (UI) - Controller (Workflow) pattern, which makes implementation a bit more complex, but ease maintenance.

Ingo Rammer touched on tuning, profiling and troubleshooting distributed application. Basically, his approach in improving distributed applications that he did not create by first looking at the network packet via network sniffing. After which, he will conduct sql profiling, and last but not least memory profiling. He also discourage security policy makers from disallowing network sniffing, as doing so will make developers complacent and sent passwords in clear text. The black hat hackers do not obey corporate policies anyway. Another thing I take away from his session is, by default, http only open two concurrent connection to the same server. Therefore if you separate your architecture into different layers physically, with a web server serving the internet audience, and submit request to the backend server on their behalf, it is very likely that the backend server is idle, as the frontend server will open only two concurrent connection to the backend server, hence servicing only two requests, and queuing the rest. How to overcome? Too bad, who ask you don't attend the conference? ;p

There are other useful sessions, but these have the deepest impression in my mind.

Netscape will break IE's xml rendering, more specifically, the XSL handling.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/

I heard Stephen was promoting Paladin at one of the pre-conference session. I don't know the exact details, something like he mentioned to the audience that Paladin can do this (something which I'm not sure. I heard it from someone else), and he basically went on to describe what paladin is.

Another comment I heard is... "What this Paladin thing. Seems like everyone is using it now..."

Here is an app that I used to convert the time. It's called Time Zone, written in .net framework.

Today, I attended my cell leader's wedding. As its always a "tradition" that cell members help out with each other's wedding, I was there early... You know what, their guest-of-honor was even earlier... His presence was tangible. The wedding was simple, but I know God was there...

When it is my turn, next year, I pray, God will accept my invitation to be my guest-of-honor too. :)

The update software for msdn harddisk is upgraded... Now it is more responsive, and doesn't hang (yet) when updating the harddisk content, and it remembers the subscription number :)

Cool! Now the harddisk is more usable :)

Hi Jason, if you are reading my blog, please note that your thumb drive is waiting for you to pick it up at Boon Lay Bus Interchange or is it MRT? A guy called me, saying that your thumbdrive is found, and inside contains my handphone number.

BTW, why is my resume in your thumbdrive??

Today, the building I'm in is conducting a fire drill. Well, you know the usual yada yada... But my company has her own procedures for fire drills...

Step 1: Off the lights.

Step 2: Lock the door.

Step 3: Stay out of sight!

Something that capture my attention, though I haven't met this problem yet...

[quote user="Daniel Larson"]

"That is a bug that SP2 (part of Windows Server 2003 Release 2) will address,
and something I've seen in my config at www.portalbuilder.org. I am running
SSL on a specific virtual directory that binds it to an IP address with
normal http on another port, and this confuses SharePoint like crazy. Does
this sound like your problem?

The MS recommended workaround is to GAC deploy your dlls... although this
MAY or MAY NOT solve your problem...

[/quote]

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5712784.html?tag=nl.e589

Microsoft released some details about office 12. Office 12 will be focusing on improving collaboration.

Here is another link to the pre-press release of CEO summit.

Man, I wonder whats the plan for Sharepoint...

Just wanted to put this down so I can find it easily. Basically, this is copied from SharePoint's javascript. Say you have a function that generates a menu.

function AddDocLibMenuItems()
{
//Whatever things you want to do.
}

Yet, you want to allow people to add additional functionalities. so what do you do? Let them override the javascipt files? Not a good way huh, especially when you are building a product. What you can do is,

function AddDocLibMenuItems()
{
   if (typeof(COL_AddDocLibMenuItems) != "undefined")
   {
      //Call the function
   }
//Whatever things you want to do
}

This way, the person can add functionality in a variety of ways, as long as he implements COL_AddDocLibMenuItems, his custom features will be in.