tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-110365882024-09-02T01:58:41.788-07:00A blog on the nature of our existence... or something silly like that.Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.comBlogger37125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-54981816325705649912008-01-09T23:51:00.000-08:002008-01-10T00:40:27.094-08:00

I am taking the "Getting Things Done" training class taught by Kelly Forrister, a consultant from the David Allen Company. One of the tools can be used for GTD is gmail, and she wrote a nice article to explain how it's done. It basically involves creating a bunch of "@" labels for your action lists, a bunch of project labels for your projects, and corresponding filters and contacts and such.The

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-69805577090733892662007-06-18T12:25:00.000-07:002007-06-18T12:31:26.422-07:00

Here is how to play:Go to http://www.google.com/alerts and set up an alert for, say, "facebook". You can choose "comprehensive" or "blogs" only.Once you start getting your google alert emails, find the blogger or news reporter who complains "what's the point of facebook? I don't get it."Search for their name in facebook.Poke them!Have fun playing! :-)

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-24942619968806615492007-04-13T14:25:00.000-07:002007-04-13T14:30:03.651-07:00

Our area used to be where the Google Earth team sits. Yesterday someone came by, popped his head in our cube, and asked, "so this is not Earth any more?"To which I could only reply, "no, this is Mars now."

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1164282740274729562006-11-23T03:34:00.000-08:002006-11-23T04:13:04.813-08:00

I was constantly annoyed by firefox 2.0 hanging on my otherwise sweet mac book pro. Apparently I wasn't the only one having this problem. I finally bit the bullet and uninstalled the whole thing, which involved dragging the application itself and ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox to trash, and started over. And all was well. I haven't had any hangs so far, even after installing a gazillion

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1162432744921141322006-11-01T17:19:00.000-08:002006-11-01T17:59:05.126-08:00

My flickr pro account expired a few weeks ago. All my neatly arranged sets were gone except one. Each one of my big-ass photos were reduced to a paltry 1024x768. My thousands upon thousands of photos are cut down to 200. I guess I could have continued paying for the $24.95 per year pro account, but having recently moved to the Bay Area and saving for down payment on one of those million dollar

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1161198504037318722006-10-18T12:02:00.000-07:002006-10-18T12:08:24.053-07:00

A few pictures are worth a thousand words:Via http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1004217.

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1152840392816643322006-07-13T18:23:00.000-07:002006-07-13T18:27:18.480-07:00

Kent Beck, father of XP and JUnit, talks about being at ease with your inner geekiness. You can watch the video here:http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=kent+beck&page=1&so=2Very insightful. Enjoy!

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1147382561046104382006-05-11T13:33:00.000-07:002006-05-11T14:22:41.093-07:00

As many of my dear readers have come to known (yes, I am talking to both of you), I recently started at Google, and my blog postings will probably be even less frequent than they are now. For two reasons: one, there is just so much to do at Google, I won't have time to put up my random thoughts any more; two, Google is very strict on what can and cannot be talked about outside the company, so the

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1141852193690594652006-03-08T13:06:00.000-08:002006-03-13T10:18:28.140-08:00

If you've been doing XP/Agile development for a while, chances are you've run into the "holy trinity" of acceptance testing: Fit/FitNesse/FitLibrary. In a nutshell, Fit allows customers and testers to write tests as HTML tables, which are hooked to your code through "fixtures"; FitNesse builds on top of Fit, providing a wiki server so you can write tests as wiki pages and run them directly from

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1138221639385792602006-01-25T11:22:00.000-08:002006-01-25T12:40:39.400-08:00

Thanks to the gazillions of iPods sold, iTunes is arguably the world's most popular organizer for music, among other things. That's just fine, as iTunes has a fairly intuitive and polished interface, and handles most organizing tasks with ease. But sometimes iTunes behaves like a toddler throwing a tantrum that makes you want to pull all your hair out.Case in point. I have a bunch of mp3 files I

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1134749223160024592005-12-16T07:55:00.000-08:002005-12-16T08:07:03.170-08:00

When I was playing with the wireless internet on my new razr, the only big thing missing seemed to be gmail. Out of the box cingular has support for yahoo mail and a few other providers, but gmail is noticeably missing. I looked around a little there were some open source and commercial solutions, but none of them seemed good enough.Now google finally got their act together and released Gmail

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1133388737082683132005-11-30T11:33:00.000-08:002005-12-01T09:43:10.236-08:00

I must be the last person on this planet to get a java-enabled cell phone. After years struggling with my "roaming" Sprint phone (bad reception both at work and at our house), I finally gave it up and got a black Motorola Razr v3 from Cingular. The phone itself is ok, some would say fashionable, but I am more interested in playing with its J2ME capabilities.Armed with nothing more than the razr,

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1125612409373504252005-09-01T14:01:00.000-07:002005-09-01T15:06:49.380-07:00

Hibernate supports three inheritance mapping strategies:table per class hierarchytable per subclasstable per concrete classThe first two are pretty straightforward. Basically the first strategy maps the whole class hierarchy into one table, and classes are differentiated by a discriminator column. The second strategy maps the base class into one table, and additional attributes in subclasses are

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1125003811449048612005-08-25T13:29:00.000-07:002005-08-25T14:03:31.463-07:00

I am still in training, but the last few days' material and lab work has been heavier than the first day's, so I didn't have any time to blog. We are deep in hibernate territory now, and I have to say, hibernate report query is pretty impressive stuff.I've been using ORM tools for a while, first with JDO, then hibernate. Every time I try to tell some seasoned JDBC developer to use hibernate,

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1124746912178506442005-08-22T14:31:00.000-07:002005-08-22T14:43:16.573-07:00

RTFDTDFor an open source project, spring has pretty good documentation. Their reference manual is in both HTML and PDF format, and is updated frequently for new releases. But still, sometimes the reference manual lags behind the rather active development process, and it doesn't cover every last bit of information.For xml context files, surprisingly, everything you want to know is in the DTD. The

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1124745228580683362005-08-22T13:56:00.000-07:002005-08-22T14:14:57.016-07:00

A simpler way to define propertiesThe spirng xml context files are, well, xml, so they can be verbose at times. One of the worst offenders is for defining properties:<properties name="myProperties"> <props> <prop key="myFirstKey">myFirstValue</prop> <prop key="mySecondKey">mySecondValue</prop> </props></properties>The same properties can be

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1124743320560346102005-08-22T12:44:00.000-07:002005-08-22T13:53:46.910-07:00

Five ways to wire up collaboratorsThis must be in the spring manual somewhere. But, well, who reads manuals? So here are the five ways to inject dependencies (and some of my thoughts):First, via constructors. This would make an oject purist happy, as the objects would be in a consistent state after construction. The drawback is if you have more than one constructor argument, even just two or

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1124738896053500272005-08-22T12:12:00.000-07:002005-08-22T13:48:50.853-07:00

This week I am at a week-long on-site Spring/Hibernate training class taught by Richard Hightower. Now, I've been doing this stuff for a while, so most of the material is not new to me. But still, I am finding bits of interesting information here and there. So here is my "real time" blog on the stuff that other people might also find useful.Id vs. nameIn spring context files, bean definitions can

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1122313666564669202005-07-25T10:23:00.000-07:002005-07-25T12:24:31.523-07:00

Found this floating on the net somewhere. Saving it here for posterity. I am not exactly young any more, so these catetories don't really fit me :). I only hope my son doesn't grow up to be a twinkie.What Kind Of Asian Are You?Young Asians in America come in many forms. Below are the major categories. Most Asians fit into multiple groups. For example, Rice-boys can also be Fobs and many Tabs are

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1122093097179079312005-07-22T21:16:00.000-07:002005-07-22T22:05:06.876-07:00

As I stated in my previous post, Verizon is scheduled to come light the fiber to our house on Tuesday. Yesterday when I got home I found a flyer on the door handle, telling me that Housley Communications, LTD — a subcontractor I suppose — will be "placing telephone cable for Verizon at your home. Work will be done in the front utility easement. If you have any questions or concerns, please

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1121991397866098882005-07-21T16:13:00.000-07:002005-07-21T18:51:53.013-07:00

I am not an economist; in fact, I don't even play one on the web; so I won't pretend to understand the first thing about international finance or currency evaluation. What I do have is common sense, and a logical mind —— at least I hope so, as my livelihood depends on it. When I heard some people complaining on NPR that today China's adjustment of her currency, renminbi yuan, is too little, not

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1121806239070699842005-07-19T13:06:00.000-07:002005-07-19T16:52:11.560-07:00

When we bought our house in this sleepy suburban town, full of subdivisions bordered with gentle rolling hills and grazing cattle, you'd never have thought it as a technology hotbed. Apparently someone thought differently. About a month ago these men drove into our neighborhood with utility trucks (my two-year-old had a blast saying "u-ti-li-li truck") and Ditch Witch trenchers, started digging

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1121439851754955232005-07-15T07:28:00.000-07:002005-07-15T08:04:11.760-07:00

It's been a while since my last entry. It's not that I am too lazy to write anything; it's just that my daily grind has become so mundane and mind-numbing I hardly ever had any idea for a new entry. Maybe that's a sure sign telling me to start looking for a new job.Anyway, we are building this diff tool that compares airline schedule files. It's quite sophisticated now from its humble, simple

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1115407068988519172005-05-06T12:24:00.000-07:002005-05-06T12:17:49.010-07:00

If you are like me, you probably thought globalsourcing as the ominous black clouds far out in the horizon promising a big thunderstorm that never came. It's just an excuse used by the suits to deny you pay raises and threaten you with layoffs if you don't behave. I don't know about you, but I am seeing hail the size of golf balls.We have a small project that's being developed by a couple

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11036588.post-1115309551214028402005-05-05T08:55:00.000-07:002005-05-05T09:12:31.243-07:00

I ran into this little firefox hack a while back that does wonders for your love/hate relationship with google, if you are using firefox (doesn't everyone?). Mark Pilgrim's "Butler" strips out most Google ads, removes copying restrictions in Google Print, adds alternative search results to nearly every Google service. It's "sticking it to the man", without diminishing google's usefulness.But

Ronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08203939815693785144noreply@blogger.com1