• Jul 9, 2003

    State of IT journalism in Singapore

    There's this publication called Computer Times which comes with The Straits Times every Wednesday - supposedly an IT read. Today's issue has this article on Singaporean Nickson Fong, COO of Digimax, which does CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) for Hollywood movies, among them The Matrix Reloaded. There's nothing wrong with Nickson Fong or Digimax (in fact, I'm glad a local "made it") - it's the reporting that I've reservations about.

    I quote from the article:

    The self-acknowledged geek builds his own computers and knows programming languages such as Unix and Linux.

    Aforementioned "self-acknowledged geek" being Nickson Fong of course, who would definitely not have said that himself. The reporter (who's name would remain undisclosed in this blog entry) doesn't seem to have a clue. And this is an IT publication - if the reporter was a full-time employee of Computer Times, he should be transferred to a more suitable department!

    It makes me shake my head really, and this isn't the first instance I've seen discrepancies of this sort in Computer Times, nor many other local IT publications.

  • Jul 4, 2003

    Anime goodness

    Thanks to a fellow intern (and friend) at work, I've gotten hooked onto anime. I've to be honest that I didn't think much of anime before - thought it was cheesy with those exaggerated, caricatured faces and, erm, Pokemon. That episode of South Park with it's parody of anime didn't help. Well, I was wrong - I was guilty of generalization.

    There are quite a few excellent anime series and movies out there, which have truly engaging stories and characters. Naruto is one of those. I'm sure everyone would have heard of Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell and Gundam - these are immensely popular and excellent.

    I'm currently following Naruto (one of the best and most popular series at the moment), Scrapped Princess (ditto) and E's Otherwise. I also borrowed the complete series of Dragon Drive ("My sweet honey") from my friend. Well, I have the time, now that South Park is showing reruns and Futurama is on hiatus.

  • Jul 4, 2003

    Google Toolbar 2.0 beta

    Google has recently released a beta version of it's 2.0 version of the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. The Popup Blocker's good, especially since IE doesn't come with a built-in popup blocker like Firebird does. With Google's buyover of Pyra's Blogger, it isn't surprising to see a BlogThis button, which allows you to post a blog entry on the page you're currently at. Pretty nice, but I'd stick with MT's bookmarklet and Trackback - not that I have a choice, since only Blogger.com is supported.

    If you're a Firebird or Mozilla user, you should really check out the Mozilla Google Toolbar.

    It may seem like I've switched back to IE from this post, but that is not the case. I'm still a fervent Firebird user, except at work where for some reason Firebird doesn't work because we've been having problems with the proxy server. That makes me a sad panda - erm, no phoenix.

  • Jul 2, 2003

    PHP5 beta released

    Well so it seems PHP5 has finally become usable enough to be released as a public beta (PHP.net). It is interesting in the way that it is interesting to see an initally non-OO language have OO features pegged on - remember Perl?

    The biggie here is the new object model which has been really all the rage in the PHP developer community for the past months when PHP5 was in development and available via CVS.

    Of the new features, I'm glad for:

    • interfaces
    • exception-handling ala Java and C++
    • the new __construct() method that acts as a constructor - this partially solves the old nasty problem of constructors and inheritance
    • static class methods and fields
    • method and property accessibility - public, protected and private

    To be honest, I've never really had the time nor want to play with PHP5 when it was in pre-beta development. It does seem to be a nice move, but I'm still undecided on whether the apparent "bulk" of OOP would have an adverse effect on a large user base of, erm, scripters who are largely unknowledgeable of OOP. Or maybe it would finally make the "real programmers" look twice at PHP.

  • Jun 26, 2003

    JADE on BEA Weblogic Server

    I'm confused by BEA Weblogic Server's implementation of JMX. I've been trying to figure out how WLS 8.1 allows configuration and addition of new services so that I can run JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment Framework) as a managed service (via JMX).

    Basically, it would be a "port" of BlueJADE (which works for JBoss) for WLS. Now if only I could figure out from the BEA documentation how to add a managed service, but the JMX edocs were of no help - lots on how to manage MBeans, nothing on how to actually deploy one for a new service.

    It appears that WLS's and JBoss's JMX implementations are quite disimilar enough that there isn't any resemblance in their XML descriptors nor their directory structures - I'm lost on how to proceed. And looking at how JBoss manages all it's services via JMX, with configuration descriptors (*-service.xml files) clearly visible in the server directory, I can really see how JBoss's microkernel architecture really pays off in this respect. I didn't even need documentation to figure out how it works in JBoss!

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