But now there’s a need to send a lot of data (as much as possible) in one transaction. A single record is at least 500 bytes of data (with all the XML markups), I tried to test by sending an incremental amount of data (starting with 50 records) and worked my way up there, trying to get its limit.

The data is sent back and forth using ajax, when I get a 500 error, I knew it was caused by the amount of data that have to be put in a SOAP envelope.

With 1GB of RAM, I couldn’t even reach 100 records. I tore apart an unused PC in the office and got it up to 2GB and managed to reach 140 records (actually it is 150-160 but, I chose the average limit). Went off to the local pc hardware store and bought a 2GB ram stick. With a total of 3.24GB RAM, I tried it..

I tried sending 200 in one fell swoop and it works. Hopefully tomorrow I can test it more and see how it goes. In the quest to know more about Web Services, here’s some links that I have read.

• High Performance Web Services: Tackling Scalability & Speed
• Large Data Strategies
• Web Services Performance Consideration - Best Practices
• Discover SOAP encoding’s impact on Web service performance
• Improving Web Services Performance (patterns & practices)
• Checklist: Web Services Performance
• Best Practices for Web Service: Part 7, web services infrastructure

Changing jobs. Never ever, change a job in 24 hours. Especially for an unknown company whose office you have never seen. You could think that they’re being lenient and all for meeting at a restaurant for a chat (which actually is an interview), but there’s always “udang disebalik mee”.

Think for a while (in my case I didn’t), if you had an office that you’re proud of, why the hell wouldn’t you invite a potential employee to come over for an interview? This should raise a flag (+5 suspicion).

One of my other mistake is asking a developer who is a good friend of the technical manager for an opinion on the working environment. Obviously it will be biased. Should have waited for a whole month before jumping the ship to investigate further.

There’s also other bunch of mistakes that I made:

• I did not ask about the environment in detail
• I did not ask about developer level documentation
• I did not ask about version control in detail (they used it, but there’s no comments in the commits, you’d have to diff the file to see what have been done)
• I did not ask if there’s any code review being done
• I agreed on the odd working hours (there’s no amount of money that could substitute for this, ok maybe RM10,000. You’d miss a lot in socializing with friends, cats and other stuffs). Burning out by spending too much time on work is certainly not worth it
• I got sucked into a promise of a ‘family environment’ when in reality every company is govern by a market norm (no exceptions, unless you’re one of the founders of the company, then yes it is like a family)
• I was promised that the transition will be fully paid by the company from the old one when in reality their policy only allows them to pay half.

Well that certainly was depressing to think about. Always take your time to dig deeper for more understanding on the environment and work being done at the company that you’re going to.

That’s why the more experienced people usually says it easier and young college grads use its antonym instead.

A well thought out solution for a problem that could drive an engineer insane (or maybe just bald) trying to fix the quirks on these browsers (IE6, IE7, IE8), but is wrapped around words that doesn’t offend anyone.

Good thinking.
Google Wave in Internet Explorer

There was one time, where theres an ISO document for the development process, after it has been reviewed by the ISO department it was kept and never to be seen again (that’s what usually happens when its too formal and nobody wants anything to do with it, oh yeah, and no enforcement).

I agree that, having a clear development process is on of the aspects to deliver great software (short-term and long-term), but how?

It shouldn’t be long, one or two page of text explaining with simple yet casual language. It all depends on the environment that you’re on and incrementally improve on it.

An example from my observation,
- make changes based on the current task and project (duh)
- compare the changes that I made with the one on the server
- merge it
- overwrite it
- inform everyone involved in the project of the changes made using the developer mailing list
- at the end of the week, present what I have done to the management (heh)

If you noticed, the process is full of pitfalls. To understand why it is the way it is, you’d have to understand its context (which I wouldn’t explain it here). Even though the process is flawed, it is still good to have it clearly for everyone to see instead of passing it through word of mouth.

So, if you or anyone else go to a company and the process is still passed with word of mouth, write it down and see if it makes sense (or just pry it out of your colleague’s/boss brain, ref cartoon).

It is suggested that, it helps to write down tasks as though you’re delegating them to someone you know in order to write succinct but complete tasks.

The secret to all this is that, when you are writing down your deferred tasks “normally,” in truth you’re actually delegating but you just don’t realize it. You are simply delegating to your future self. The problem is that, in our present-self state of mind when planning tasks, we are filling in the gaps in our writing with present-knowledge.
This knowledge fades quickly and by the time our future-self picks up the work, the mortar of that transient information has dissolved, turning what seemed to be a solid, actionable task into an unclear jumble of words.

So, I guess, instead of “Do this..”, I should write “Do this … so that .. etc”.

Source
Write Specific Yet Concise To-Dos for Your Future Self

One of the interesting thing is about long-term memory can be characterized by two components, storage strength and retrieval strength.

• Retrieval strength measures how likely you are to recall something right now, how close it is to the surface of your mind.
• Storage strength measures how deeply the memory is rooted.

Some memories may have high storage strength but low retrieval strength.
Take an old address or phone number. Try to think of it; you may feel that it’s gone. But a single reminder could be enough to restore it for months or years.

Conversely, some memories have high retrieval strength but low storage strength.
Perhaps you’ve recently been told the names of the children of a new acquaintance. At this moment they may be easily accessible, but they are likely to be utterly forgotten in a few days, and a single repetition a month from now won’t do much to strengthen them at all.

For this, I’m going to give SpicyElephant a try (I went there before and couldn’t understand what its suppose to do, now I got the picture) and see how it goes.

I need to refresh my desktop. Open up task manager, go to the processes tab, search for ‘explorer’ and end it. After the desktop is blank, no icons, just the wallpaper and the task manager, click on the File menu, new task (Run) and type in explorer.

And the desktop is restored!

I spent like 3-4 hours just trying to configure the application at work today. Assisted by a colleague, and after two hours, assisted by another colleague. A total of 3 people on a supposedly initial setup of the main company’s product. It still ain’t running. Hopefully tomorrow I can make it to run.

This is what happens when there’s nobody dedicated to address this sort of thing, look at the process and improve it incrementally, starting with the setup process, version control, code review, all the quality control stuffs, etc.

It was one of my objective to do it about 4 years ago, to streamline the process, from setup (one click install, or maybe multiple clicks) to development to handling issues. After I left, my plan was abandoned.

This also happens when everyone is too focused on getting projects without allocating time for research & development. The application is still running on outdated technologies and any attempt to upgrade a part of its components to use a newer technology, we’re stuck with the errors that it spews out.

Technical debt is catching up and the interest is SKY HIGH.

I am not really into dotproject, sure it got all the bells and whistles to do awesome stuffs but its not what I need.

Project level involves scheduling, resource allocation, team coordination, and planning.

dotproject is more complicated as it tries to deliver a project management solution. The learning curve and the UI is not to my liking (hey, everyone have their preferences and I’m more of a minimalistic kind of guy) but makes a great selling point.

Projectlog is more simplistic as it records the tasks and just gives an overview of the progress of the project using a dashboard. So I’m gonna try and continue on developing projectlog and see if there’s any audience for it.

Here’s a list of screenshots for projectlog.