Steven Yong's Weblog

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.

Not really mine. Almost all the code is written by the project lead, Dickson.

It is bascially a Java-based reminder software that allows us to create as many reminders as we want, and makes use of the latest Java Desktop feature like system tray notification and so on.

We just decided to open-source it right after we've got the first version done and we are now looking for Java programmers out there to add features as well as fix bugs. The source code are under Subversion control, so if you want to checkout the source code, just do:

svn co http://jvege-reminder.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ jvege-reminder-read-only

No write access for non-member for the moment, however, highly appreciate if you send patches, please do.



For those who are only interested in using the software, just one click and you are there.

A colleague of mine shared me some idea days ago which may bring benefit to the company. When I asked why did he tell this to everyone but the boss, he said he'd probably be the one being expected to implement the idea if he proposed it.

Again, a common one.

Is there anyone to blame for this kind of culture in an organization? The employee, who always worry too much or the boss, who always get the wrong person to do the job?

Good ideas do often get buried this way, what a waste.

Just learned that Liverpool's been remaining unbeaten since the start of this season when Gerrard and Torres are both playing. No doubt, it is the best season for Liverpool since the establishment of EPL, whereby the team is still in the title race after 2/3 of the season. However, as Stephen Chow mentioned in the film Shaolin Soccer, "A team can never rely on any particular individual." Totally agree, Argentina in year 1986 is an exception.

Just got an email saying that Yahoo! Briefcase is closing on 30th March. It was once my favorite service to keep files on the web, I'm gonna miss it. Remember back in college days I lost all my files stored on then famous e-circle social site due to similar closing, so this time I'm not gonna lose any files again.
The original note:

Dear Yahoo! Briefcase user,

We will be officially closing Yahoo! Briefcase on March 30, 2009. Until then, we are offering you the opportunity to download your files back to your computer. You will need to take action before we close, after which any files remaining on Yahoo! Briefcase will be deleted and no longer accessible.

The "offering me the opportunity" part doesn't sound right to me.

When comes to presentation of business application, ease-of-use is the last thing you should worry about.

Unlike consumer application, if business application appears to be very easy to use, it simply means lack of functionalities. I once wondered why big companies with lots of competent software engineers like IBM and Oracle could come up with server applications which are so complicated and hard to use. I thought they are not that smart after all, but it turns out that I'm the one who is dumb.

Of course it has a lot to do with the audience you present to when you are trying to sell your software. Those are businessman and IT managers, who do everything but use the software.

I once had a blog titiled "Steven on Software" with a summary of "about OO, Design Patterns, especially in Java", which I purposely created to write something about programming. But every now and then, some of my friends complained that I wrote something they don't understand, and claimed that they feel bored reading it.

Eventually, I moved my blog here with no particular theme. They can now have other things like sports, politics, smoking/drinking and funny stories.

It's like someone picking up a copy of Playboy and says "It's all unhealthy stuff in here!"

I wish there would be some technical stuff appears in Playboy, just for me.