Steven Yong's Weblog

Microsoft Surface, the new computing platform which changes the way we interact with digital information is hitting the buzz. I got really impressed with the introductory demo, it looks like the scenes in Sci-Fi movies would become reality in very near future.

What strategy you normaly use if you don't want to do something but you are asked to do or you might be asked to do?

The first rule of thumb which works: Make everyone believe that you don't know how to do it.

I remember at one point of time in the project I was working on entered into a very critical situation. Everyone in the team were working on many late nights, we're seriously lack of programmer resources and behind schedule. One of those days, one of the programmers was trying to refuse to take up more work and eventually went into an argument with the team lead. I can't recall exactly how's the conversation going, the only statement I didn't forget is the statement came out from the mouth of the team lead: "If I know how to do, I rather do it by myself!"

Yes, thanks for the kindness, If you know how to do.

Not long ago, I heard similar thing again: "We need help seriously, I sincerely wish to take over some part of it, unfortunately I don't know Java"

Again, thanks for the kindness.

If you failed to make everyone believe that you can't do it, here I offer the second rule of thumb.

Second rule of thumb, which will always work: Be at a higher position.

When you are in a high position, nobody (including those higher than you) would ask you to to do something that you don't like to do even they know that you are able to do it.

Conclusion, if you really don't know how to do something that assigned to you and you are not at a high position, good luck learning up yourself and don't argue, please.

A nice article about putting full-text search capabilities into our applications, which data are mostly stored in Relational DB. The author uses Lucene, an open source Java-based full-text search engine library and Compass, a framework for Java search engine which buillt on top of Lucene to illustrate the points.

If you have kids or some members in your team code like a kid, maybe you should consider send him or her a copy of Java programming for kids, parents and grandparents.

Finally and surprisingly, I managed to get my wireless network to work for Fedora Core 6 on my Dell D620 laptop. The setup procedures have been long and tedious somewhat, which includes installing drivers, daemon as well as configuring the wireless profile. For the sake of making a note so that I won't have to google again whenever I have to repeat the task, here's the steps I've taken:

1) Download (you can get them all from this website) and install the Intel® PRO/Wireless 3945 network adaptor RPMS packages for Zod(*1) (yes! packages, alltogether 3 modules), which are ipw3945d (the daemon), ipw3945-firmware (the firmware of the adaptor) and dkms-ipw3945 (the driver) respectively. Note that the order is very important as they are actually depending on each other in sequence, where the order is kind of weird though. Installing RPMS is easy, just double click it on your Gnome desktop(*2).

2) Restart the machine, by then you should see the driver is automatically listed under the Hardware tab at Network Configuration (you can launch this by selecting System -> Administration -> Network from the gnome application panel with root access). Then you can add the wireless profile under the Devices tab, unlike Windows, there is no wireless network auto-detection therefore we have to put in the wireless parameters such as SSID, channel and so on by hand. If you are not lucky enough to see the driver appears under the Hardware tab, don't be panic. I came across that too, just issue the command (in console of course) "modprobe ipw3945" and you will probably see it right away. In case modprobe command is not in your path, it is under /sbin directory.

3) Well, almost done, what we need to do now is just activating the device (under Devides tab), and here you go.

*1 - Zod is the codename of Fedora Core 6
*2 - Assuming you've chosen Gnome as your desktop, though I believe it won't be having much different on KDE

Given this simple function:

  static int max(int first, int second) {
      return Math.max(first, second);
  }

It works fine, at least until someone passes in something like that:

int bigger = max(2147483646 + 2, 1);

The value returned is somewhat not expected, bigger will be 1, this is because of overflow of integral types, which is specified in Java Language Spec. When we're coding simple functions, bare in mind that bugs might occur even in a single line function.

Sun Microsystems just launched a nice website with Computing Laboratory at the University of Kent which contains lots of cool applets like games, simulations and things like that. It's really good place for the community to share those kind of small programs. Go check it out, I like this piano applet, now I don't have to buy a physical one to learn playing piano.