Entries by Steven Yong

Every now and then when people want me to recommend places to eat, or drink, my answers are always "cincai", which in English means "anything will do."

I see it as a serious personal problem for myself especially when comes to dating girls. I tried to search the Web for things like "nice hokkien mee in Serdang" but most I got was rubbish. Or I could choose to read a few blog posts or articles after google for "nice hokkien mee in Serdang" before I get back to the person boringly waiting at the other side.

So I created this website called klasz.com, a social classified website.

It is now barely good enough for people to use, still lots of features in my list pending to be implemented. I need feedbacks from you, I'm also looking for development partner who is interested and willing to contribute. Source code will be moved to free code hosting site soon as I am still evaluating which one is good for project like this.

This is your website too, every visitor who sincerely would like to use the site is my boss. So drop me feedback (there is a "send feedback" link on the homepage"), if you want some nice features that I am able to do, I will do it.

It is kind of sad when the browser gets redirected to oracle.com after I enter sun.com at the address bar. It is sad not because I don't think the deal will do any good to Sun, it is because the site that I've been visiting for years gets a totally strange homepage.

If the word "Yahoo" can appear at the very bottom on delicious.com and the copyright of youtube.com can still belong to YouTube, LLC, why can't Oracle keep the original sun.com, which is familiar to regular visitors like me?

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.