Steven Yong's Weblog

The other day, I had a short conversation with the consultant:

She: "Steven, do you think we should provide this feature?"

I: "Yes, absolutely. So can you update your use case specs so that I can start working on it?"

She: "OMG, is there such a need? I'm kind of busy right now, can you start first and I will update once I got free up a bit"

I: "No, I won't do anything more than what is specified, and I'm just trying to make your specs more important"

She: "OK then"

Maintain your specs whenever required, otherwise you're just writing specs for nobody.

Just got a reminder of coming get-together from Yahoo! Calendar.

I'm wondering what does this instalment ads has to do with my appointment, or it's just for the sake of advertising. I would be rather happy to see those ads which tell me where can I find good food. This might explains why Google gets high profit with its advertising strategy.

I got a bug reported saying the system kept on giving "delete failed" message even though the record had actually been deleted. Therefore I look into the code and found this:

deleted = SomeManager.delete(id);
if (!deleted) msg = "Failed to delete record";

It looks OK to me at the first sight, but after went into the delete() method, I felt like killing the one who wrote the code of SomeManager.

public boolean delete(String id) {
  // ... code to establish db connection
  PreparedStatement ps = ...
  boolean deleted = ps.execute();
  return deleted;
}

According to the documentation of PreparedStatement.execute:

Executes the SQL statement in this PreparedStatement object, which may be any kind of SQL statement. Some prepared statements return multiple results; the execute method handles these complex statements as well as the simpler form of statements handled by the methods executeQuery and executeUpdate.

The execute method returns a boolean to indicate the form of the first result. You must call either the method getResultSet or getUpdateCount to retrieve the result; you must call getMoreResults to move to any subsequent result(s).

Returns:
true if the first result is a ResultSet object; false if the first result is an update count or there is no result

It tells me obviously that the programmer didn't read the doc at all and was assuming the operation fails if he gets a false.

On one occasion my former colleague asked me which company I'm dreaming to join and I answered "Sun Microsystems". I didn't tell him exactly why and I think he got a misperception that it's purely because Sun is pushing Java so hard and I like Java. It's actually only partially true, the real reason is I always have the impression that Sun is the kind of company which allows you to contribute your creativity and innovation without having to worry about the revenue. And I wholeheartedly believe that innovation will eventually bring good revenue, it is just a matter of time. For no reason I felt a bit dull by knowing Scott McNealy is stepping down from Sun's CEO, however, since the next CEO Jonathan highly impressed with Scott's direction, I'm sure Sun will grow better.

During a dinner session about two weeks ago, I and another two friends had a little debate on the Java IDE, let's call them E and K accordingly:

K: "IntelliJ is the most efficient one, you can literally complete most tasks without using a mouse"

Me: "In Netbeans, you can configure as many shortcuts as you want too"

E: "JBuilder is also darn good, I'm still using JBuilder X now"

Me: "Netbeans is free and almost every features are plug-ins, you can customize the IDE based on your needs. And bla-bla-bla..."

E: "Hey how much they paid you to promote Netbeans?"

This morning, E messaged me via MSN saying "Hey you know what, I find the latest version of Netbeans is better than JBuilder, check it out!". At that moment, I totally had no idea what to reply. Don't get me wrong, of course Netbeans is (still) far from the best, my whole point has already been stated at the post's title.

Evaluating a few UML modeling tools for the past few days has forced myself to learn XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) and it allows me to share my UML diagrams among design tools. Fortunately, the sharing process is almost seamless, presumably you draw your diagrams with standard UML notations.

My mother has had diabetes for more than 15 years. This morning I handed her a bottle of green tea and said:

"Mum, I want you to try this and no worry it's absolutely sugar-free"

"Is it? Pass me the glasses, let me first read the ingredients", she replied.

I: "Why can't you just trust me right away?"

She then just smiled embarrassedly.

Imagine you're damn tired but you really would like to give valuable comment to your friend. After typing few lines of text, you still have to deal with those hard-to-recognize characters. How would you feel?
Despite the fact that I understand why the word for verification must be displayed as an image, I'm yet trying to figure out why the characters must be hard to recognize. Perhaps you could give me an answer.

As the author of the blog, I think I'm the one who should be responsible for getting rid of spam comments, not the readers. What do you think?