I rank No 1 and No 2 on Google

See ?















I am so proud !!

Newbies coming in to work

Haha.. I see some dumb new graduates joining my company of a sweatshop. They are so full of energy, full of wonder. I was like them once. Little do they know the perils of work that lays ahead of them. They don't know about the evil youth sucking energy this work industry has on young programmers. I pity them. Maybe tomorrow I will get close to them and share with them what I know about this evil sweatshop.

PHP 4 is dead!

Wow just read from PHP.net first page and also from LiewCF.com website.

PHP4 is dead! Long live PHP5 and PHP6!!

I'm still struggling to learn the object oriented features of PHP5. I hate it that Java also has this feature but I don't know how similiar it is from PHP OOP.

Forced to do Java

Damned!!

My boss just pushed me to do Java. Just because I did well in finishing a PHP project fast and now free of other projects he orders me to join a Java team to do some java work.

I hate that. I was working hard so that I'd have the extra time to pick up PHP frameworks like CakePHP and Zend frameworks.

Come on man... my title on my name card is PHP developer. What to do? No choice unless I'm brave enough to go out and look for some other PHP job. Still, I have jobstreet window open while I'm blogging this :)

Bosses with lousy timing

Really a black Monday today. Got hit by lots of bug fixing right after sitting at my desk.

After the weekend my mind was slow but I manage to clear up the crud after some perseverence just in time to go for lunch.

While walking out the door to go for my favourite cap fan shop, the boss stops me!

Got some 'ideas' to run thru me since I finished my work way in advance. Of course since this is the big boss I cannot say "later boss, need to eat first".

When he was finished it was already 2.30pm and my stomach was growling something fierce. Pleased with himself he let me go. Of course the boss already had eaten before he came to lay his 'ideas' on me. Liaaa ma!! I wanted to shout. But just smiled and walked out to Mc D since all the vege from the cap fan shop is finished already. And by the way, his ideas were totally stupid and impractical. I'd like to see the programmers face when he presents his ideas to them :) Luckily that's not my department.

The Dumb Web Programmer is Back!

Wow my last blog post was 6 months ago. I've been dead to the online world for that long!!

Well, I'm back and I will chronicle my battle with the biggest injustice in life known as full time job tyranny. :)

technorati tags:Dumb, Web, Programmer, Back, Again

What happened to LiewCF.com?

 

 

That was the old liewcf website. (really old :)) 

This is what I saw today (8 may 2006). What happened? The problogger forgot to pay his webhosting charges? Domain name expired?  It's been replaced with some generic page.

Yahoo supports PHP!

This is the link to http://developer.yahoo.net/php/

You can find useful links to implement PHP calls to Yahoo services!! and then some...

Ideas in Adsense placement

I visited LiewCF.com and find that his idea for Adsense placement ingenius.

He highlights two of his "hottest" articles and continues it with the Adsense ads.

The effect is that it blends into one big block of text link which has the top half linking to the real contents of LiewCF own site and the other half which is actually Google Ads. It almost fooled me into clicking the other Adsense links thinking it was LiewCF content.

Will implement it in my other websites. I'm sure the click-thru rates are pretty high for ads like this.

USD100 notebook

Speed: 500MHz

OS :a 'light' version of Linux

Screen : two-modes color or black-and-white display for

view in bright sunlight at four times normal resolution,

Power: AC adapter or via a wind-up crank

10-to-1 crank rate- one minute gets ten minutes of power.


The laptops will be rugged and probably made of rubber.

4 USB ports

Wi-Fi

cell phone

1GB of memory

Internet
Each laptop will act as a node in a mesh peer-to-peer ad hoc network
allowing internet sharing on a single online connection.

Man I wish they will make this a reality soon. It will surely close the 'digital divide'. Imagine our kampung kids using USD100 notebooks !!!

More info from PC World Article and developer MIT Media Labs

Oracle - List all tables

Ok I'm using Oracle databases with PHP scripts for the first time. I'll start posting my 'personal notes' on Oracle + PHP.

List all the tables used in the current database that is open:

select table_name from user_tables

Still using DOS

Here's one of my DOS batch scripts that I still use to backup my source code

Can't imagine after all these years I'm still using DOS batch file and DOS Rar to help me with my daily backup.

useful because it compresses all the files in a folder using RAR and names the compressed file according to the date (yyyy-mm-dd).

@echo off
cls
echo Backing Up RHB Fin files
echo =============================
rar a -m5 -r c:\backup\rhbbackup%year%-%month%-%day% c:\www\rhbproj1

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
:GetDate yy mm dd
::
:: By:   Ritchie Lawrence, 2002-06-15. Version 1.0
::
:: Func: Loads local system date components into args 1 to 3. For NT4/2K/XP
::
:: Args: %1 var to receive year, 4 digits (by ref)
::       %2 var to receive month, 2 digits, 01 to 12 (by ref)
::       %3 Var to receive day of month, 2 digits, 01 to 31 (by ref)
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
setlocal ENABLEEXTENSIONS
set t=2&if "%date%z" LSS "A" set t=1
for /f "skip=1 tokens=2-4 delims=(-)" %%a in ('echo/^|date') do (
  for /f "tokens=%t%-4 delims=.-/ " %%d in ('date/t') do (
    set %%a=%%d&set %%b=%%e&set %%c=%%f))
endlocal&set %1=%yy%&set %2=%mm%&set %3=%dd%&goto :EOF
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Firefox quietl first birthday

It's PC Mag no. 1 tech product of the year and of course many techies favourite browser.

I love FireFox!!!

They celebrated their very first birthday rather quietly.

Firefox quietly celebrates first birthday

Ingrid Marson
ZDNet UK
November 09, 2005, 12:00 GMT


'I don't think there will be a big party, as we are all very busy putting the finishing touches to Firefox 1.5,' says the president of Mozilla Europe


The open source Firefox browser was launched a year ago today, but the celebrations are expected to be low-key.

Here's a funny conversation I had with one of our company's customer.

Customer: "Your program got error la in IE".

Me: "Huh?? You still use IE ah ?? That Spyware magnet??"

Custommer: "Here in office everybody use IE. Boss don't like to use funny browser like FireFox. IE is defacto browser - industry standard".

Me: "Ok. Your funeral. Let me fix the error and send back to you .."

Dumb Web Programmer under Dumb Project Manager

I used to write code that is template based
where programming code is separated from html.
My favourite templating engine is Smarty.

Hey that's how web programmers like me keep my sanity.

Mixing PHP+HTML is ok for small projects but really
is stupid for a large system we are developing.

But lately since we got a new project manager that has
no idea on good software engineering principles (things
that you learn in first year of a computer course
whether at diploma or degree level).

Heck, I'm a DUMB web programmer and even I know that.

This dumber than dumb project manager just wants things
fast. We realised even showing him our code one day that he
doesn't care about code maintainability - either that
or he is just ignorant of the fact.

But I don't care now since we are being pushed with tight
and impossible deadlines to meet. Staying past midnite
on a Friday night is not my idea of fun.

So from now onwards I've been writing rojak coding mixing
PHP with HTML in one file. I don't care.
And it is effective!! I seem to be churning out code twice
as fast and my project manager is impressed.

My project manager don't care as long as deadlines are
met. Of course the system will be a pain in the ass to
maintain later on.

Why do I care?? I will be gone in oh.. say 6 months time.

LiewCF and Kah Soon, I'll be joining you guys problogging by
then hopefully.

Whatever happened to LiewCF

It's been a solid 48 hours since the problogger Liew CF posted a blog entry?? Usually he will post a few articles per day.

Note: I noticed that 10 seconds after posting this I got a spam post on my comments.
Somebody wrote some API hook to Blogger to spam comments. Sheesh!

Opera Mobile on USB

By now everybody would have known opera 8 is totally free (no ads).

This website www.Opera-USB.com tells you how to put Opera into a thumb drive.

All you need is a thumbdrive min 32Mb - but nowadays tell me where can you find a USB drive LESS than that??.

Super cool as I can take my personal preferences wherever I go. Oh yeah can throw stupid IE away :)

PHP is alive!!

It's so depressing to think that the programming language I specialise in, PHP, is rare and little used in Malaysia.

However all that changed last week. I got two calls from head hunters looking for PHP programmer.

I will most probably leave my current job which have banned internet from the office. I don't mind getting any other PHP programming job as long as they give me internet access to do my R&D.

Programming- It's a dog's life

After being a programmer for several years I really feel old, tired and plain fed up
with this life.

Don't get me wrong. I love programming and have a good pay but the company I
work for is just too money minded. Heh! What am I saying ? Of course companies
have to money minded to survive in this cut throat business.

But lately I'm seeing more projects being brought in and me being overburdened. It's
like a cheap sweatshop here - just like a factory workers - we churn out code after code.

Finish one project and another comes in. Long briefings on what to do. Tons of documentation to go
thru. Hundreds of bug-list to fix when the final code is launched for testing.



To add to the burden, all programmers' Internet access has been revoked.

The bosses and share holders don't care about reputation as they get in more and more new projects
while the rush for completion results in more errors and bugs in the final production codes.

All my superhuman efforts in meeting deadlines is not really appreciated. Some of the codes
that I thought were ingenious just go unnoticed.

Our present customers are getting angry but they don't care... as long as they can get new customers.

Man, I know this is definitely the way to long term corporate death. So just waiting for the day
this company keels over.

However, from the profits so far collected I think this company may outlast me. It's a dog's life...

Test Blog

Test blog message sent from email.

No Internet access.

That's what the company said today.
Man how am I going to do any work without any internet access?
Sure, HR have a point that Internet is the big time waster as
many employees just browse aimlessly at company's expense.



But what about a web programmer like me? I've lost access to my
favourite Guru on the net - "Mr Google".



I've brought up my predicament to my bosses and they say that
I can do my R&D later at lunch or after work using our
pathethic "public PC".



I am seriously thinking of leaving the company now..



And oh, I'm blogging this from my handphone at my own cost.