Steven Yong's Weblog

Just noticed there is a link "New: Sports calendars" on the top of Google Calendar where you can pick your favorite kind of sport and your favorite team in order to view their match schedule on your calendar.

It is so cool.

"Come on, blow the candle and eat the cake!" and you are getting closer to the end of your life.

Yeap, I just got closer. Why do people celebrate birthday?

I also wonder how people got happy on their birthday when all they got are line after line of texts that read "Happy Birthday" on their computer screens or cellphones. Reading the word "happy" makes us happy?

Don't wish me happy birthday, wish me happy everyday.

A lot of people who claim themselves businessman told me that in order to do business in Malaysia, it is not about what you know but who you know.

Although I never seriously involve in doing business, I do agree with them with full heart.

However, although I never seriously involve in doing business, I know that when comes to do business in right way, it would go back to what you know. Local businessman are trying very hard to improve their socializing, communicating and entertaining skills, which in short they call it marketing skill. They truly believe that with those skills, they will get to know whom they desire to know, even before they realize what kind of business could be done by knowing those people.

I don't know what am I writing as I don't know what are they doing. After all, I am not a businessman.

Everyone knows that certification on resume is nothing. But funny enough there are still employers care about that, and even funnier that there are still exam takers. Read this interview.

Don't get fooled into thinking that taking the Java certification exam will make you a better developer. Instead, take that time and join an open-source project and look at how others develop code, and learn from their choices.

English football season is back, again I have something to kill time on weekends. ManU, Chelsea, ManC and Arsenal start with winning, and as of now Tottenham is leading Liverpool 1-0 in the first half, Grrrrr.

API Design guideline by Jakob Jenkov.

Almost every application I have built in my career has had a "utility" class or package. This utility package contains small methods that are used from different components inside the application. Often utility methods are so small that they are just gathered inside the same utility class as static methods.

Indeed I've seen that kind of "utility classes" in every project I worked on or which I got chance looking into the source code. The class name usually ends with "Util", for example, DateUtil, StringUtil or simply CommonUtil.

Such utility libraries have a tendency to end up as "garbage cans" of all kinds of unrelated utility methods. As the utility library grows, your applications each tends to only use a small percentage of the total utility methods.

Don't forget that as soon as any one of those small method is called, the whole class will be loaded into memory.

Reading technical article is my hobby. Over the past years, one of the most interesting skills I've obtained in reading technical article is to tell whether an article is written by technical or marketing people, instantly.

Came across an article about JBoss Cloud this morning:

JBoss Cloud provides a preconfigured cloud of JBoss Application Servers and supporting technologies out-of-the-box. All you need to do is deploy your application and start using it.

Most of the times, wait, actually, everytime you see something like this,

All you need to do is just this ONE thing...

then the article is written by marketing people who is not able to describe more in details other than that "ONE" thing. If the article tell you about something which a lot of thing you need to do and you find the subject very hard, then that's from technical people.

Promised to myself not to talk about it here until it's gained certain number of users, and now, it's the time.

A Total Information Management System (TIMS).

Lots of problems, obstacles and arguments which I even forget how did I manage to overcome all those. The outcome? A promising product that I can sell and other people can use.

Take a look at this website www.e-chambers.net if you can only understand marketing terms. Sorry, I'm a practical guy, if you want me to try to tell something that might sell the product, here you are:

If you are a boss, use it to save cost; If you are not, use it to reduce your workload.

Furthermore, a very affordable one.

Just a call to the number stated on the website, someone with a laptop will be sent to your office and give you a demo. That's all I'd like to say for now.