Why me, Mr Gates?

Ok, i juz found out that among my frens who signed up for Mr Bill Gates Live in Singapore on 1 Jul, everyone got their confirmations..... except me!!! Why me, Mr Gates? issit becos the "Ask Mr Gates a question" part, i asked you whether java will be the biggest obstacle to .net's success, and that pissed you off? or issit becos i am already a .net fan, and there's no need to convince me anymore? Boo hoo :'-(

We not ah sum (Part III) : The 4 types of clients

In my line of work, I classify my clients into 4 main types.

The first type is those that know nothing about IT and leave everything to you. These ppl are easy to work with, becos they let you make the decisions on e.g. what categories to have in a website, what colours to choose, etc. And they are very happy if you produce work of satisfactory quality to them, and they PAY UP FAST.

The second type is those that are IT-savvy, and they know it. But working with these ppl are in fact not as tough as expected. Becos they know what they want, and they give you guidelines and comments along the way. Though it may be a little pressurizing to meet high expectations sometimes, you learn much along the way and as long as you fulfil the requirements, you get along well with them.

The third type is those that know a little IT, but they think they are gurus. These ppl are a pain in the @$$. They throw all the IT mumbo jumbo they think they know during meetings, criticize and compare your work with those commercial products (despite paying at a fraction of the commercial product), and can never see eye-to-eye with you. Whats worse, they will pick on any recommendations or suggestions you make, and come up with some nonsensical idea they think can work. When it doesn't, they proclaim their disappointment in "your inability to perform". BTW, these ppl are usually the ones that you have a hard time chasing when it's time to pay up.

Finally there is my favourite type. Those that simply cannot be bothered. They will first say "Please come up with a prototype", then when you come up with one and send it to them, they will never bother to touch it. few days/weeks later when you meet up, he will only then open up the prototype and comment on this and that. Then you make the changes, and send it to him for approval, and he will never touch it till the next meeting... and the evil cycle continues. Then they will proclaim "why are YOU ALL so slow in getting a simple thing done?", "can't you see that there is a problem here and here?" These ppl are usually those that you will never get to see a pay check from, simply becos the project will never be completed :P

We not ah sum (Part II)

How many times have you been to a meeting with a client, and the both sides agree on something, and the next time you meet him/her again, he/she says something like "I remember correctly i told you to do (insert crap here)? How come its not done?" But obviously that memory was fabricated for his/her own convenience. What's worse, when you show the client the points from the previous meeting, he/she either denies ever saying that, or will say stuff like "Hmm, it's obvious you misunderstood wat i meant. i want (insert crap here)....." Damn.

I wonder how many of you have situations like that too, and how you handle these ppl? I will be glad to hear suggestions to protect ourselves against these stuff.

The sad reality of our field

There was a time where IT graduates were in demand. A diploma holder with no work experience can easily find jobs with starting pay of ~ S$1700 - S$1800. You dun have to be an expert in programming or design; juz learn on the job. The employer juz needs some IT savvy young blood to help them jump onto the www wagon. Those were the days...

I saw a post for job openings on the NUS student placement board recently. Look wat the requirements were:

Degree in Computer Engineering or similarKnowledge in Java, J2EE, JSP, Javascripts, XML, BEA Weblogic, SQL Server, IIS, Exchange 5.5, Wireless Communication, Pocket PC development, C++, C#, VC+, VB, .NET or Object Oriented Technologies

oh yeah baby. I think you'll be quite good if you fit some of the criteria. I've flipped the Recruitment pages on the papers recently as well. Out of a gazillion posts, there were only 2 posts under the IT section. 2. 2. yes. 2. there used to be at least ~20-30 openings on any given day. haiz.

Maybe i should find Shunjie and start our Geek Cafe idea and sell coffee instead. Then the only beans i have to know are coffee.

Databases. haiz.

I was never good with databases. i remember in my poly days i had my classmates mark attendence for me for the database classes, cos it was at 8am and me, always "working" till the twilight hrs on my FFVII, could only arrive when the class had ended. heehee.

Shunjie recently helped me debug a project of mine. And being the qualified developer as he is, less than 5min a bug was found (ok there were tons of bugs that he found, haiz). One annoying problem that i was never aware of was that the inserts to mssql will fail if the input data is longer than the max column size that was set. There were 2 ways to solve this problem apparently: set some ANSI warning in mssql to off (which was said to be bad practice. duh), or restrict the maxlength of your strings in application design. Being the inexperienced developer, i decided to go thru my entire application and set maxlengths on my input controls. haiz. hope ppl will not fall into the same pit as i did.

...so there really are ppl reading my blog, despite being up for only a few days! thanks ppl.

北は南、南は北。

Saw discovery channel on tue while havin my dinner. OMG, do u know that the earth's magnetic polarity switches every few hundred thousand years??? that means that north becomes south! imagine the hell that will happen! and according to studies, we are currently overdue for a polarity switch!

The documentary also said that during the phase where the north is becoming south (few thousand years), the magnetic shield that protects us from the solar radiation will go haywire, and we'll be exposed to the dangerous rays up to 20 times stronger than wat it is now. that means more ppl (and watever living creature) dying of skin cancer. gosh.

However, on a lighter note, the documentary did end by saying that "at least we get to see auroras in the sky everynite from anywhere in the world when that happens." Yippee.

Hello vs 2005!

Juz managed to install Vs.Net 2005 beta 2. WOW.

Not only juz it looks cooler, development hasn't been easier. theres tons of new controls, some of which make u go: "how can they do this! stuff i tooks days to design and create, now i juz drag-n-drop from the toolbox???" a good example is the SiteMapPath class. Damn.

Most obvious improvements include the designer and source views, which are now click-linked, so you dun have to scroll up and down whenever you switch views like Vs 2003. i'm oso excited about the web developer ide, which promises to retain the source code (ppl who designs on the old vs know what i mean). Other than the cosmetics, theres more stuff going on in the code, which i will take my time to explore next few days.

Hope that vs2005 can really once and for all be the trouble-free ultimate all-in-one IDE for .net!

Vs.Net too ex? Dun worry, there's SharpDevelop

When you work at a small company, you may need to rely on free/cheap IDEs to develop your apps. A reason startups avoid working on the .net environment is perhaps the cost of acquiring visual studio, thinking that without vs, there no way to develop "real" apps. Another annoying thing is that Vs.net 2003 likes to modify your html code. arrgh.

Enter SharpDevelop, A free IDE for .net written in, er, .net. SharpDevelop feels a lot like VS.net, and best of all there's intellisense. The current version does not support web forms yet, but Mark DiGiovanni has a good writeup on his blog how you can do it. I've developed a few projects using a dreamweaver + sharpdevelop + DbgClr combo (because my company has bought dreamweaver, you can use your favourite web editor) and its not a bad way to get things done.

So if u are looking to start using .net but do not have the bucks to fork out for Vs.net, why not take SharpDevelop for a spin.

Photoshop Tip: Rounded edges

I've been using photoshop to design web graphics for some time, and though i dun consider myself an expert in it, i do have a few 招s (tricks) of my own. One of the most common questions when doing layout design is "how do i create those rounded edges like the one on this blog?"

Here are a few steps to make rounded edges from an angled selection in photoshop. Save the steps as an action and reuse it each time like i do.

• In photoshop, create a new document. select the rectangular marquee tool (M) and make a selection.
• Open the actions window and click on "Create New Action" and enter an action name, like "Rounded Edges". Press "Record" to start recording.
• Open the channels window and click on "Create New Channel". The canvas should turn black.
• From the Edit menu, choose Fill and select Use: White, Blending Mode:Normal, Opacity:100%. The marqueed region should turn white. Press ctrl-D to deselect.
• From the Filters menu, choose Blur > Gaussian Blur. enter a radius of 3 pixels and press Ok.
• From the Image menu, choose Adjustments > Levels. Enter 115, 1.00, 145 in the Input Levels boxes and leave the rest on default. Press Ok. You should see that the marquee region is now rounded.
• On the channels window, ctrl+click the created channel (e.g. Alpha 1). The rounded region should be selected. After selecting, click on Delete current channel.
• On the actions window, click stop recording.

The steps have created a reusable action in photoshop for making rounded edges from a selection! You can in fact apply the action several times to a selection to make an edge smoother. Happy photoshoping!

Make up your bloody mind

Contracts are signed by the client and the developer. Often you hear about the client making a developer produce work without signing a contract, and the developer, for the sake of $$, does wat the client requests, and in the end the client refuses to pay, and the sort...

Then there is the case where the client signs the contract. oh now all must be well. no. Apparently many of these clients sign for the sake of making the developer hurry and produce work. Often in web development projects there is a part that states "the developer will produce work to the requirements of the client. any design which the client requires a change after approval of the prototype will be liable to charges".

How often, though, do clients keep changing their minds on a pre-agreed design?? we create the prototype for approval, and the clients say ok. after weeks of development, then the client says: "i think this and that is better. change." And how often does the developer nod and agree without charging the client? sometimes the change on paper is small, like "adding a drop-down list", but they do not realize that these changes require a lot of re-design not only on the interface, but internal components and databases as well. And when the change is done, they will say: "hmm. i think you add something more to that". Why can't these clients make these decisions during the prototype stage? the prototype is meant to be a "toy" for them to play with, but they neva take the word prototype seriously. How often do you hear a web project bust its deadline and clients complain on the competency of the developer? LOL. Make up your mind and do some soul-searching. please.

AJAX: will it be next big thing?

Check out http://www.baconbutty.com.

This site showcases the use of ajax. you can read more about ajax at adaptive path's publication. I think ajax is a wonderful thing for web development, as it allows server posting without refreshing the page and more. a developer can post to server and populate the page data without having to refresh the page, which can be annoying at times.

but imagine sites many sites in future becoming like baconbutty. visitors will be blur on why the browser back and forward buttons go to unexpected places, cannot bookmark, and whole site reloads from page 1 after a refresh. This is also a major komplain about full Flash websites. for the developer, he/she has to make customized links so that there are alternatives to the problems.

ajax can be extremely useful, if used correctly. for example Gmail is using it with good effect, i think. it is a responsibility of designers and developers not to abuse it like wat happened with frames and Flash in the earlier days of web development.

We not ah sum

ah sum: a servant who cleans up after the master.

I am currently working as a web developer at my fren's kompany. Becos we are a small bizness, some (not all) clients wanna squeeze the juices out of us. like a ジュース• ミキサー (juice mixer).

We have a client called more-gas (not real name) that wants us to do a webby for them. my boss n colleague were in charge, and initally came up with a standard template design for him. The client barked back and said: "dun do wat u wan, do wat i wan, understand".

Ok, so we (from now on we means my boss and colleague, cos i not actually involved in this development) did wat he wanted. so he must be happy? no. he said: "your design is not professional, like a student's work". oh my god but thats wat he wanted??? he also komplained that why we didn't deliver the project to him in MS-Frontpage format, which was agreed upon. he slapped (not literally) us by saying that we kept breaking promises made to him. LOL. For peeps not familiar with web development, there's no such thing as MS-Frontpage format. MS-Frontpage is used to edit HTML documents. the format of standard web documents is HTML. period.

After this the client went to edit all the designs by himself. he added stuff like clipart cartoons, magenta colour and singlish (Singaporean slang english) to his site. btw his site's supposed to be a CORPORATE site for his kompany.

my boss's really a nice person, so wanted to give him value service, and decided to redo the design based on improving their corporate image while following the client's major requirements. at the same time, he informed the client on the reason for change and created a prototype for his approval. However, after seeing the prototype, more-gas insisted that we do the entire website out first in the prototype design. normally no one will do this in web bizness, but my boss, hoping to build a good relationship wif him, decided to take a risk for his sake.

BUT guess wat? after delivering the entire site, he scrapped everyting and changed all the design to the thing he did himself initially. he then dun even bother to contact us, and got his secretary to convey: "please follow instructions. if not, juz drop the project."

recently more and more clients in our line are like this (ok, more-gas is a exceptionally extreme example). all wan ai pi ai qi (cheap n good), some unwilling to pay up, many want free updates and a few think they own us. I really hope that these ppl realize that even though we're in the service line, that does not mean we are ah sums heeding every command. haiz...

First Post!

First Post!

There was a time i tot blogging was lame. LOL look whos toking now...

oh well. this should be a plc for me to ramble about my brushes at work, skoo, play, wateva. Maybe i shld put a profile of myself?