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New Zealand is calling!

Pasha went tracking in New Zealand in December and brought back a bone penchant from the Maori’s. It is now hanging off my neck along with the previous one I acquired years ago before I left the land. This new penchant symbolizes a new beginning.

14th of January 2010, inevitably I was brought out of Singapore, if not Philippines then Korea.  I eventually arrived in Korea and dropped by at Mansu’s place. We met when we were back in Auckland for student exchange.

Upon my return to Singapore Joseph another friend whom I met back in Auckland dropped by in Singapore for a visit.

The name New Zealand seems very visible of late. Just a while ago, I saw this advertisement by the New Zealand Government specifically targetted at Singaporeans. It was like an open invitation to drop by in Kiwiland to stay for long if we want to.

The northern winds has been blowing incessantly still, despite the fact that it is now February nearing the end of its season. Strangely, I have always this acute case of wanderlust when the winds from the north come visiting in Singapore.

Over supper, I kept turning these occurrences one after the other in the back of my mind. Is this a sign? Has Fortuna finally shuffled her cards and dealt a card from a new deck. This new path seems so clear all of a sudden and it is beckoning me along. And it seems to be pointing to the land of the Long White Clouds once again. Perhaps the stars have finally shifted. Coincidentally it occurred just when the predestined quest of aiding Alena in Singapore came to an end.

Inshallah as Sean always says. Perhaps I should settle all outstanding matters over here in Singapore and explore what New Zealand has to offer. If there is one thing Alena has giving me during the past one year’s quest, it is the knowledge that while my ascendence is ruled by Saggittarius (one constantly struck with an incessant wanderlust), my house of Sun ruled by Leo (The eternal pilgrim seeking the Holy Grail) deems that I will start craving for a glorious battle when the time comes.

I wonder what is the possibility of setting up a supply chain to New Zealand and Australia?

Already I have set my eyes on this office space which I am planning to occupy soon when the next project comes in.

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Exceptions to the case – How to be a skeptic in this superfically optimistic world.

Recently I realised i have become more and more a skeptic instead of the optimist I used to be. Back in the old days, I do just take into consideration the actual path of how things should be and assume the reality would go along those ideal paths. Yup I have failed quite a few times because of these assumption of mine. Idealist be damned.

Nowadays, presented with an idea no matter how bright or beautiful it seems on first sight, I would unconciously test out the concept mentally to check for exceptional scenarios that would cause the whole downfall of things. Thereafter contemplate on tactics on how to resolve these scenarios should they occur. In the event of a lack of resolution put it on hold and come back to it at a much later time. Progress along the path seems slower now than it used to be.

Being a skeptic is indeed a painstaking task and not a role of brain lazy people.

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Improving the performance of Ajax on ThingsToDoSingapore.com

Recently I started working on Things To Do Singapore again.

Apparently the javascript libraries were getting quite thick and this was affecting the loading of the interface.

There is the use of the following :

  1. Xajax Library
  2. Jquery Library
  3. Google friends Connect Api
  4. Facebook Connect Api
  5. SWFUpload Library

After much observation I realised the SWFUpload Library sometimes takes too long to load and fails as well causing the whole interface to fail loading at time seriously affecting usability of the site. Perhaps this might be to cause of the high bounce rate I observer from my Google Analytics of 80%.

I spent this morning thinking how to go about solving this problem and this was the method I came to

Javascript library should be classify into two groups as critical and non-critical to user experience.

The Xajax Library, jQuery library are considered critical to user experience

The Google Friends Connect library as well as the Facebook Connect library are not often employed. though these two library are too tightly integrated with the core achitecture. Perhaps it was a bad design choice.

SWFUpload is not often used by other users and hence rarely employed.

Having done the proper classification, I next work  on loading the SWFUpload asynchronously after the other library and interface has loaded. This in face drastically reduced improved useer experience. It reduced user waiting time as well as at the same time reduced the error rate of the loading interface.

This was how I did it.

jQuery(document).ready(function() {

loadScript(“http://thingstodosingapore.com/swfupload/swfupload.js”);
loadScript(“http://thingstodosingapore.com/swfupload/swfupload.queue.js”);
loadScript(“http://thingstodosingapore.com/swfupload/fileprogress.js”);
loadScript(“http://thingstodosingapore.com/swfupload/handlers.js”);
//alert(“swf loaded”);
});

function loadScript(sScriptSrc) {
var oHead = document.getElementById(‘head’);
var oScript = document.createElement(‘script’);
oScript.type = ‘text/javascript’;
oScript.src = sScriptSrc;
oHead.appendChild(oScript);
}

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PHP set to further penetrate Enterprise solutions arena

What is Enterprise Application?
Enterprise Applications are software which provides business logic support functionality for an enterprise, typically in commercial organizations, which aims to improve the enterprise’s productivity and efficiency.

Characteristics of enterprise software:
Characteristics of enterprise software are performance, scalability, and robustness. Enterprise software typically has interfaces to other enterprise software.

Services provided by enterprise software are typically business-oriented tools such as online shopping and online payment processing, interactive product catalogue, automated billing systems, security, content management, CRM, ERP, Business Intelligence, HR Management, Manufacturing, EAI etc.

What is Scalability?
There are a number of different aspects of scalability. It always starts with performance, code maintainability, fault tolerance, and the availability of programming staff.

Why people has negative impression that PHP is only for small scale web-sites?
PHP is a language for the rapid development of dynamic Websites. It also has many features that are friendly to beginning programmers, such as the fact that it doesn’t require variable declarations. However, many of these features can lead a programmer inadvertently to allow security holes to creep into a Web application. The popular security mailing lists teem with notes of flaws identified in PHP applications, but PHP can be as secure as any other language once you understand the basic types of flaws PHP applications tend to exhibit.

PHP is an open source programming language that is widely popular on the web. However because PHP so popular in shared hosting environments, many people have an impression that PHP is only for small scale web-sites. This is patently untrue, and PHP is in use in many large scale web sites such as Yahoo, wikipedia and Lufthansa Online Ticketing for the creation of large web applications such as IMP.

Enterprises want to have specific assurances about a web technology they use in the following areas:

  • performance and fast development
  • reliability and security
  • extensibility – able to use industry standards to communicate with other software systems.
  • scalability – able to add additional servers as the load increases.
  • load balancing – ability to distribute the load so no single server is overloaded
  • high availability – ability to survive failure of server components transparently.

Conclusion:
To achieve high performance and scalability – it not only depend on language, it also depend on the developers.

Cited from Why not PHP for enterprise applications?

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A web that is hard to escape from

I sat by the river of Kallang enjoying the breeze as the sun slowly set over the western horizon. it was the end of the year again and the winds from the north were blowing. The air was chilly. Certain parts of Singapore has been flooded today due to heavy incessant raining. Alena was with me entertaining herself. We sat beside each other, but as is normally the case, worlds apart from each other.

It so chanced across my mind the idea of what constitutes the shakespearen style tragedy during that very instance sitting there by the river with all these around me. In such normal tragedies the main character meets a bad end not because of his flaws but ironically because of his strength. A strength which in that unique instance of a situation becomes a fatal flaw.

Past few weeks the incentive to work for money slowly but surely evaporated like the morning mist with the coming of dawn. I was of the mind to step away for a while and do some journeying. What kept me working was but duty. To avoid no task, but to handle and deliver everything promptly as has been promised and agreed upon. Ironically, it was mainly due to closely sticking to this only mission statement and my lack of incentive for money that causes a contradiction.

My lack of incentive for money wishes that each project that comes in be the last for a while, my close sticking to my mission statement was like a magnet that inevitably attracts more and more projects and consequently money in my direction, additional of which I really have not much need of at the moment. It was hard if not impossible that other elements on this net of karmic cause and effect be convinced that my time and effort be inconsequential and not useful to their cause and agenda without my active involvment in betraying my cause and mission statement.

Metaphorically it resembled a Shakespearean style tragedy. One obtains not what one desires due not to his lack of strengths but exactly because of the existance of such strengths.

I continued sitting on the bench by the river pondering how I ever landed myself up in this web of things?

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Leveling up. New laptop, new technological platform Microsoft SharePoint

Suddenly I recalled my younger days sitting in front of the computer playing my favourite game “Unchartered Waters”

A merchant cum pirate cum explorer role playing game. Depending on your choosen character, you start off with with a small miserable ship, the only thing of which you could do with it was to travel from Lisbon in Portugal to Seville in Spain, trading Salt from Lisbon with Porcelain from Seville.

However with each trade if done properly you gain more capital to trade in bigger bulk. Somewhere along the way you gain enough capital to buy yourself one of those floating bastions call Venetian Galleons and then of course you get it modified for the high seas. Once that is done, the ports the world over awaits. Haha!

Recently real life has been starting to resemble this RPG game I was playing since young. The trading side at least, less the adventure side.

Suddenly, running out of capacity and processing power on my current laptop, I bought myself a new one with more memory and processing power than what I currently have. Spent more money than I usually would on anything mechanical.

Well the system specifications are correct and now the microsoft pre-requisites are as they should be. Seems like I am now ready to move into deeper waters. Bon Voyage. 😛

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Capitalism : A love story

I just saw the greatest love story ever on Capitalism. It is a must watch, extremely satirical, but accurate and information giving us a good overview of why the US is in the state it is in today.

It is puzzling sometimes wondering how come humans do not conform to the normal behavior of natural predators. It was ever reported that lions, tigers and wolves normally leave their prey alone once they are done with their meals.

Are we really cursed with the inexplicable drive towards converting every known resource on earth into dollars and cents? What the hell is wrong with us?

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Why money?

Recently I have been spending alot. More than what I have budgeted for per period time. In reflection though these spendings are not really derived from needs or necessity but seriously due to the lack of answer for this fundamental question? On good food and tonns on books.

Why the hell am I still wasting time working and making money? Seemingly I have made enough money for a long while a year or more perhaps given my predictable spending habits. Any extra money is but just some figures sitting in the bank account.

It seems money as a compensation for effort spent on work is just not really enough past a point.

Even though having spent way more than I should on what I dont really need, I still felt that something fundamentally was missing. I literally walked half of Singapore on foot the other day just searching for that missing answer. Dropped off a bus at fort canning park and slowly made my way on foot to Mount Faber and thereafter on foot back to Clementi traversing through the southern ridges. At some points in time, I did feel as though I could almost grasp at the abstract thing i was searching for however always it remained elusive.

The day after though when I just so happened to step into the National Geographic shop in Vivocity, I was totally blown away. Coming to a wall at the far end of the shop staring back at me was a huge map on the world on the wall, with each and every country and territory clearly demarcated one beside the other. Lying around the place too were photos and books on the exploits of fellow adventures to parts of the world hidden from most.

Yes! This is and remains the only reason as to my motivation for working my ass of making money. Alena’s living expenses aside. Without this goal of traversing the world overland or by boat, life becomes truly meaningless, despite the tonns of money to be made.

That night I made Alena a proposal. We must go to India and journey from the southern parts to the northern parts just south of the Himalayan region, if not Bhutan, Nepal than Kashmir. To go I must!

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Eternity be damned

On and off, I do join some folks for jamming sessions. Once in a while during those sessions, I do suddenly find myself caught in some songs where there were just 3 to 4 chords maximum that just kept on cycling mindlessly one after the other.

Such occasions are a real torture to the soul, most especially when you ran out of new ideas what to do over those re-current chords. The torture is especially acute when you know that there outside this 4 chords are a whole universe of chords to explore.

Lately observing the people around me that have entered the work force. It seems their daily lives are imposed strictly within the limits of those 3 to 4 metaphor chords. From an outsider’s stand point, life seemed unbearably tasteless, in a sense tortorous.

I suddenly recalled from one of my lectures in Computer security how random numbers one after the other are created. Random numbers in computing are articifically created through the segmentation of an extremely large prime number. Within the domains of the prime number, all occurances appear random. However once past the pre-specified domain, a pattern starts to appear and becomes painfully apparently

Example:

13 expressed in binary will be 1110111100110010001110

We take a section of 4 places each time at an increment of 1 place per interation

1: 1110
2: 1101
3: 1011
4: 0111
5: 1111

…

23: 1110

On iteration 24th we get 1110 which is exactly simlar to 1

What has first been interesting has started suddenly to become boring, unpredictable and uninformative (Law of Anthrophy) Each additional iteration becomes less and less significant.

Translating it back to every life, we start to live more and more like machines losing our souls to the daily toils of live all for this false sense of security, the need to modulate back to iteration 1, once all available iteration within the set has been exhausted.

Exploring the exceptions available within our limited environment, I suddenly found that though my life has been rather random thus far, it has started to modulate back unto itself. It is starting to get really boring.

The possible solutions I could think of are either to getting myself into a new environment or seriously attempting at getting myself old and senile way ahead of my time.

The first seems pretty hard, with Alena serving as the drag, chaining me to this limited set of permutations with her inherent god be damned need for security and predicability. The second seems highly impossible, considering the fact I am no from the medical field by training.

Perhaps a third then. I think I should quietly slip away once all work has been settled for the year. India looks pretty foreign and exotic a place to explore. Perhaps I should even volunteer myself to work there in one of those NGO venues. That’d be a nice change of sets.

Imagining a existance that last for eternity, where all possible permutations has be tried and exhausted, life be really tortorous that way. Thankfully, we dont live forever.

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Security or imprisonment?

I finished my assignment with Ivy where I was playing the role of the zombie. It was late, I walked towards Singapore River, buying myself a pack of beedi along the way. The wind was blowing. The night was restive

I sat down by the river where I lighted my stick. Sitting there by the river, I relapsed into a thoughtful mood.

I imagined myself a orphan with no kin in this world and no home to return to, surviving by etching out a living on the streets with my wits. Today was one of those fortunate days where I managed some penny in my pocket. This evening I will not go hungry. Puffing away on my beedi, I smiled to myself. Was such a life a sad and miserable one or was it one free from the shackles of kinship?

I seeked further into this imaginative world of mine. Such a person must indeed feel terrible loneliness at times, however such profound sense of loneliness must be intermittenly mixed with a deep sense of peace, a peace which is hard to be found when bounded by ties and kinship but only in solitude. To live this life perhaps demands a great fortitude then. Such a life must perhaps be one that is bitter but yet at the same time sweetness, one that must be very beautiful indeed.