Steven Yong's Weblog

Not as hard as you might imagine.

Do you find yourself asking the question - What should I do today?

Due to the Internet connection problem today, a colleague of mine said that without the Internet, working's become boring.

That reminds me how I worked on my first project.

I remember altogether 3 of us, all fresh, took a long journey to Malacca on the first day we joined. We're warned that we shouldn't tell the customers we were new to IT and we must make ourselves look like have been working for a couple of years. That was a really big client - an oil and gas company, as a vendor stationing there for a project, we're not allowed to have Internet access. During that period, we're literally working with no Internet, no search engine, no email communication, no instant chatting, and yet we're required to complete the project in six months.

I was handling the Java portion of the project, all I can remember is I did buy some books on related subjects. And I forget about the rest. How I solved problems when I was facing some? There's no peer that I can ask for guidance; and there's no search engine. I think I totally forget about the details.

I do remember how I learn skills from my second job onwards, but somehow I forget about this in my first job, how sad.

Lastime we talked about the comparison of mainstream game consoles Nintendo, Xbox and PlayStation from technical point of view, and now let's compare them from designer's perspective.

Which IDE is the best?
With plugins, both Eclipse and NetBeans can compile and run Java programs, can draw diagrams, can be used as a database client, can hook up a server, and can even building C++ or PHP programs.
Which C++ programmer would use NetBeans for compiling their codes? Which architect or designer would use Eclipse for drawing their model diagrams?
Which programming language is the best?
Who can afford to take the risk to build a better Office suite in Java just to compete with Microsoft Office?
Which enterprise framework is better?
with existing Windows infrastructure available, who would actually get some free Linux just to try out LAMP?

"Why then do we, as software engineers, have to work so hard to reduce our toolbox to the ultimate tool?" - Adding Simplicity - An Engineering Mantra

Came to think of it, why do we work so hard to increase the flexibility and extensiblity of our frameworks? Why should we make our hammers capable for turning a screw?

If you're working on .NET and find it too far to get help from US, try getting helps from a group of .NET geeks at Microsoft Malaysia.

During the company briefing, some of the employees pointed out that our office is too quiet. Amusingly, those who raised that concern are those who talk the less in the office.
The article by Steve Yegge about practical programming inspired me for writing this entry, he said:

Unlike the NFL, programming is a profession for which practicing is usually most effective if you do it alone, or at most with one other person. It requires quiet concentration and deep thinking, and you absolutely must solve the problems yourself, rather than just seeing the solution done for you. So even if we wanted to set up organized daily practice, most of it would be spent reading or programming quietly

I like the statements "requires quiet concentration" and "must solve the problems yourself" a lot.

Back to the silent office topic, personally I think a tranquil work space is especially important for software development. In contrast, the places which requires noises are meeting room, discussion table, pantry and so on.

On Windows, when we open the Task Manager, there are always multiple processes named "svchost.exe" running (sort the processes by Image Name), why?

I used to ignore this ever since I know Windows, until recently after I got this question from a colleague I started looking for what's going on.
In fact it is just some kind of "mother" process to host some services.
If you view your computer services via Control Panel -> Services, you will see a lot of running services, if they all are running as an individual process, eventually there will be awful lot of processes running at the same time. That's where the svchost.exe comes from, where each Svchost.exe session can contain a grouping of services. If you want to know which services are hosted by which svchost.exe, just type "Tasklist /SVC" in the command processor (i.e. cmd.exe if Windows 2000/XP).

For more technical details on this topic, check out the Microsoft Knowledge Base article.