Google just updated the Palm version of Google Maps, now we have My Location feature for Centro users. It's not as accurate as GPS, but is good enough to find your way around. Also it's fast enough even with EDGE to get updates on what's up ahead on the map.
Now if only directions (route) works for Malaysia, that would be great. No need to buy GPS enabled phone. Better yet, if Malaysian streets are enabled it would be perfect. The Palm version integrates with the Palm Contacts Lookup function to quickly paste addresses. Unfortunately this doesn't work yet.
These people driving by, their faces were so sad. It wasn't just the first one, but the next one and then another one... It was like they were dead.
They're commuting to work, they're not supposed to be wearing a grin
Paraphrased from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
When an environment of creativity and enthusiasm is curtailed, rarely are projects successful. Instead they just get done, to the lowest level that is required to check it off. Of course you can then set this level as the measure of success.
To me projects need life, a human aspect to it. Something beyond check boxes and figures. The feeling you get when you see something and feel like somebody put a lot of care and effort into it at the least, and lives changed on the other end of the scale.
For me success defined by the latter. I can't work on projects when the human aspect is taken out as I don't believe they will be successful. I've seen it happen before. The bureaucratic project just gets by, the one with a team that cares from the top down and focusing on human and community values continues to be successful above and beyond their project deliverables.
One thing I like about Seoul is the great use of spaces in urban and building design. When you're in packed and crowded city, the idea of space is really important. So in a lot of the newer areas, there are nice spaces in between buildings for people to walk in and chill out. The sidewalks are also spacious, not like in Kuala Lumpur where sidewalks are afterthoughts and not built with the pedestrian in mind. With an efficient public transport system, it makes long commutes more bearable. Sit back with your take out coffee and chill for a bit while waiting for the next bus. Or take a breather before catching a crowded train.
The other great thing is that there is a law that in certain parts of the city (Gangnam only?) that all buildings must have outdoor sculptures. I think this is great for a city. Art is really important to give a feeling of culture and life to a city. These are just a sampling of the hundreds of sculptures in the city.
I was back at the train station I know well. There is still a queue of students for the bus to the university as it was before. There are quite a few new buildings. One thing that has changed is the increase in multinational brands. StarBucks is everywhere as are other common global brands such as TGI Fridays. For a short while I got to savour the care free world of my student days and sip coffee while watching the world go by on a weekday.
Met up with a friend, who is still studying. It may seem weird after so long, but Korean guys have to be in the army for about 3 1/2 years. So while I've been working, got married and had kids.. my friend is just about to think about his career. Sometimes I'm tempted to think about studying again, but it doesn't fit with my long term goals.
For those of you interested in studying Korean, it's always best to do it in the country itself. You will learn much faster and what is more important when learning a language is to understand the culture and how people live. SNU has a great intensive programme. It's only until lunch, which means you can learn language the best way, go out, make friends, have a chat with the ajuma (auntie) at your favourite eating spot and explore the city the rest of the day.
If you're about to graduate or just graduating, I think it's worth exploring this option. Work for about a year and save up as much as you can. Then do something you've always dreamed about.. backpacking through Europe, visit a Mayan temple, living and learning another language in another country etc. It can be scary at first, I remember having second thoughts about being a plane full of Koreans and wondering what I was doing, but it's worth it. Even if didn't have a chance to travel again after that, I wouldn't have any regrets about could haves, should haves and might haves..
For the past few days I've been at the UN Asian and Pacific Training Centre for Information and Communication Technology for Development in Incheon, South Korea. The site is being launched today and the DNS switch should take affect soon. Of course it's on a FOSS platform.
It's a bit bigger than OSCC, and Songdo Techno Park is like Cyberjaya.. but on a much more massive scale.
Now I'm in Seoul though for an OECD Ministerial Meeting. Now this is more like the Korea I know from having lived in Seoul before.
It's been 8 years since I've been here last, but I feel right at home and it only took a day or two hearing and reading signs in Korean to start understanding things again.
Not identifying and managing risks in a project leads to problems and possible project failure. It is a critical part of iterative development process but also applies to projects in general. An iterative process helps you discover and evaluate risks so that high risk, high priority issues are dealt with during the early stages. Not dealing with them at an early stage, or revisited in an iterative manner leads to a multitude of problems.
There a few things you need dig out for risks:
- User Requirements
- Development time
- Resources (personnel and infrastructure)
User requirements
Are really important. One of the lessons learnt when I was a grasshopper (maybe still am), is that this needs to be dealt with continuously and you need to lead it. If there are any ambiguities, it needs to be cleared up. This needs to be done continuously at least on a weekly basis. Constant feedback is important, with priority on the major concerns.
Development and implementation time
For IT projects, I consider this a major risk, as it is the most expensive one and increase the risk for personnel resources. For IT the highest costs are skilled developer and engineer time. Anything the requires significant development time, is high risk. From experience development isn't a case of, let's put developer x for 5 days, and he will create 5 features. In 5 days, the first iteration, those 5 features are going result in the need for testing, result in new issues and an investment in particular code. User requirements become damn important here, as you need to make sure you're doing things so that the users can test early and provide feedback. Funcationality over gloss, is important at this stage.
Beyond that developers and engineers need to look at the technical risks and match it to user requirements. You'll need to test very early on, frameworks and components that you will be using. For example, if you're storing in an RDBMS.. does it have the features that allow you to deliver on the user requirements? These will need to be early testing focuses. As a real world example, one of Inigo's projects, the requirements was integration with different web applications or systems for user authentification which were undefined. "Undefined" means it's a high risk. So it was a testing focus way back and different authentification plugins was already evaluated and a difficult requirement was researched and communicated to the client. So when there was a suggestion to implement, we can be confident in delivering a quality solution, ahead of time. It's beyond the scope, but not beyond resources, which translates into a very happy client.
If it wasn't a testing focus, it would seem like it came out of the blue, and then developers would be pushed to implement something that their existing code base doesn't support near tight deadlines. Result? Possible delays, unanticipated problems, overtime, cutting back on something the client thought was an important requirement... well you know the drill, it's a common situation.
It can be avoided with proper processes that evaluate risks and sets the right priorities.
Resources
The previous risks also tie in to a major, major one.. human resources. None of the above matters then when you have nobody around or they are not productive. The risks are even higher if you count productiveness and quality of a good team, in addition to the acquired knowledge that may be lost. Look after your skilled staff, and have teams that overlap in skills.
Hardware, by comparison is an easy risk to manage. You just need to communicate to the client, the costs and risks clearly for this. Most clients just put in 99.9% uptime, but if you communicate with them the risks and downtime they are willing to tolerate, they may be thankful that the costs can be much lower by reducing it to say 95% uptime, and explain clearly that it will be up almost all the time, but if their is a hardware failure which is rare (once a year?), it may take up to 5 days before it is up again. People are happier when they understand the choices they have to make.
I don't believe they're playing repeats of Champions League when the conference finals are on.
Back to the point, it's sad when basketball has this problem. It's an unwritten rule in basketball that you man up. If no foul is called, you play through it. If you're injured, you don't mention it. See Kobe playing with torn tendons in his finger and Manu who is probably on pain killers with a busted ankle. When there was an obvious foul on the last play of the Lakers-Spurs series, the coach of the losing side says, "You don't call that a foul in the Western Conference Finals". You shouldn't flop and cry about a foul like footballers, and then whinge about it some more in the press after the game calling for reviews and what not.
Hopefully the players themselves will keep things pure, and the floppers can try their luck in the Premier League or something. They shouldn't be in the NBA.
Finally got myself a Nike Mobile Case (flash!) , which wraps around your arm. This shortens the length between cord and earphones.
The Centro actually is a good music player. With Pocket Tunes upgrade (which I had from my TX), it plays all my media files including Ogg Vorbis. Only annoying part is that you need a bulky 3.5in adapter.
I put my Centro upside down in the case so that the headphone jack is at the top. The case stretches nicely to cover the adapter and also excess cord. Once adjusted, the cord length is very short, so there is almost no flapping due to movement. Matched with my MX55's this allows me to run and do stuff while listening to music. I'm going to have a go next weekend to see how well this setup holds up to a morning jog and shooting hoops which was the main reason to look for the headphones and case.
Working on projects at OSCC, provides access to a large amount of information regarding OSS adoption. Mechanisms are being put in place to get this information out in the open.
- http://knowledge.oscc.org.my/search?Subject%3Alist=OSCC
- http://knowledge.oscc.org.my/case-studies/malaysian-case-studies
Of note are the adoption charts and detailed breakdown of known implementations by all agencies federal and state.
A conditioning coach once showed a graph of continuous improvement through training. Then how much the drop is after a few days off compared to the slow and gradual improvement of continuous training. It takes a lot of effort to get back up. A few more days off and the effort and time looks almost insurmountable.
This theory however seems to apply to other areas also. My development environment has been neglected somewhat for a few months. It took some time to get a development environment going again this weekend for me. A lot of updates were needed and my skills degraded severely. So I have to be careful to avoid falling behind and to keep my developer skills current.
The work doesn't stop there though. Just as in sports you have to keep pushing the limit to improve yourself, and this is a slow, continuous process. Also try to continuously be better at everything not just career related. Be a better parent, better member of community etc. Otherwise when the years pass by quickly you'll find that it's all too late to start again.
Old university friend posted this photo on Flickr.
Canberra is the place where I grew up. I hope some day, I'll have an opportunity to visit the place and meet up with old friends again.
I've been looking for the best solution for listening to music while running or out and about. A wireless Bluetooth setup would be best, but at this stage, it doesn't sound good enough yet or work perfectly between devices. I'll wait for next version of the standards for stereo audio. So I decided to go for a traditional wired setup.
Over the ear sports earphones which hook over the back of your ear are common in several styles in most shops, but I've never liked this style when wearing glasses or sunnies. Too much stuff behind the ears. Headphones, have the best sound and comfort, but still move around too much for me, and unless you're wearing a cap, you're going to have a rather sweaty audio accessory. In the end, I decided to go for in earphones or ear buds, which don't come out easily. After researching online on and off for a bit, I decided on a pair of Sennheiser MX55 VC (flash!) twist to fit earbuds. These looked like what I was looking for.
One thing I've learnt is that, for things like these, it's best to look for a reputable local online dealer. These shops, on http://lelong.com.my are able to have a larger variety of stock as they don't have to have large warehouses/shops. The prices are competitive if you compare it to the time and shipping costs from buying it from overseas. Check the seller reviews first. The entire process from purchase to getting it delivered was about 2 working days. I got it on the second day, in time to enjoy it over the long weekend.
They look a bit different from the traditional earbuds you see:
The extra buds hook up inside the upper part of your ear. There are different sizes so you need to try them for the best fit. This is important as it makes a big difference in fit, comfort and sound. If the earphones don't fit in properly there is a big drop off sound quality and bass. This may be reason for some poor reviews. Of course this is mentioned in the notes. Once I got the right combination it fits well and sounds great. They're not as comfortable as headphones but I have my PXC 250 for that especially for travel on long flights and noisy terminals. If running isn't a requirement, but you want quality sound with portable headphones, I would recommend the acclaimed PX 100's instead.
One advantage of bluetooth headphones I saw was the remote control option. The MV 55 VC comes with a simple slider, which makes it very easy to adjust the volume without needing access to your player. It is actually very light, and doesn't flap around as much as reviews online mention.
The MV 55's comes with a fold over cover that reminds me of temaki sushi.
This almost completes my out and about setup. The final part is the generic arm band strap, which I've managed to find in sports stores to hold your player/phone, in this case my Centro.
It was rather telling this evening, where other people's priorities are. When you know how loaded up somebody is with contractual deliverables (discussed over 8 hours of meetings already),due after the long weekend, you don't take the person's remaining available working hours to discuss an event 6 months away. It's a decision that pretty much condemns me to working over the long weekend.
Once I get some important milestones done for OSS and ODF in Malaysia in June, I'm planing to move on. There are exciting things to work on at Inigo and I'm looking forward to start doing UN consulting work again. I'll also have time with family again.
Nobody when they're dying ever wished they had spent more time at work
http://www.iosn.net/Members/kaeru/blog/epson-2480
I should redo these blogs as proper articles. I spent quite a bit of time learning about working with levels, which should be shared with others.
Just bought a second hand Proton Wira today. Now I know just how bad the quality is. From the barely working side mirror controls to the rear view mirror with almost no view. As a low maintenance car to get from A to B it will do for now.