2 days ago I ordered through a New Dell XPS Studio 16 Laptop from Dell Australia website. Here is the basic spec:

• Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 (2.53 GHz/1066 FSB/3MB). Very tempted to upgrade to T9550 (2.66GHz/1066 FSB/6MB), but I don’t think it’s worth it. T9550 consumes more power (35W compared to 25W) and yet overall performance gain, in theory, shouldn’t be that much (unless in gaming of course). Comparison of Intel Centrino 2 CPUs.
• 4 GB dual-channel 1066MH DDR3. Sweet, DDR3.
• 500GB 7200RPM Hard Drive. At the moment I don’t think it’s worth it to get a solid state drive. I need to add $267 just to add a 128GB SSD. Surely it’s faster, but I have to trade off 372GB of space. No Thanks.
• Windows Vista Home Premium (64Bit) with Windows 7 upgrade eligibility.
• 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670. This worries me a bit, not sure how much power hungry this thing is.
• 6 Cells Battery. Wanted to upgrade to 9 cells, but it cost me $190 more. Hopefully the 6 cells battery will do just fine.
• Slot Load 8X DVD + /-RW Drive with double layer write capability. Again tempted to upgrade to blu-ray. Then I thought, I prefer to watch HD Movies on a 46” HD TV.
• 15.6" 1080p WUXGA (1920x1080) WLED display. Full HD, Sweet.

This system costs me about $1570. I think its a pretty good deal, considering the specs is not bad at all. The estimated delivery time is about 9-12 working days.  If you wander why it takes that long, it’s because most Dell computers are manufactured in and shipped from Malaysia. I hope I can get the laptop by the end of next week, can’t wait to get my hands on it. :)

RWendi

Last week I mentioned that I would start honing up my business skills by reading more business books/blogs. I haven’t started on blogs yet, but I have picked up a book that’s called “The One Minute Manager ” written by Kenneth Blanchard & Spencer Johnson. This book is light weight and only contains 106 pages. It’s a fairly easy reading book, which is good for me. Having very low business skills, I think it’s a bad idea for me to start reading books that is very in depth and hard to follow.

The writers deliver their ideas in a form of a story of a young man who was looking for the most effective manager, so that he can work for him and learn from him. His search led him to many kind of managers, and they can be sum up to two categories: managers who were primarily interested in results (autocratic, bottom-line, hard-nosed, realistic, and profit-minded), and managers who were primarily interested in people (democratic, participative, supportive, considerate, and humanistic). He learnt that those two type of managers are just partially effective, because they can only benefit/profit either the organization or the people, not both. The young man search finally led him to the “One Minute Manager” where he finally learnt the most effective way to be a manager.

The book promotes three management techniques, which are: 1 Minute Goal Setting, 1 Minute Praising, and 1 Minute Reprimand. If you wander if 1 minute actually means 1 minute, it’s not. It’s just an idiom to remind us that they are not as complicated as they seem. They should be clear and simple.

Management “lifecycle” has to always start from 1 Minute Goal Setting. Before starting any work/project, it’s important that all the goals/objectives and the desired output clearly defined and agreed on. The purpose of this is so that the people you’re managing are able to see what good performance behaviors look like. They’re encouraged to constantly review their performance to see if the current behaviors/situations match with the goals. The goals should be written on a piece of paper, and should not be more than 250 words. The idea is to keep them easy to read and simple to understand, so that re-reading them will re-clear your objectives.

After all the goals have been set, it is important to give constant and ongoing feedback of how your team is doing. This is where the 1 Minute Praising and 1 Minute reprimand come into play. Praising and reprimand should be given out immediately whenever you see good and bad behaviors. Constant feedbacks motivate people, because they become completely aware of how well they’re doing and progressing in achieving the goals set by the 1 minute goal setting. Here are some tips given by the writer on how to give praising and reprimand effectively:

• Let them know that you’re going to observe how they’re doing and constantly give feedback of their performance from the very start.
• Praise/Reprimand immediately.
• Tell them specifically what they did right/wrong.
• Tell them how you feel about what they did right/wrong.
• Additional steps for reprimands:
• Remind them how much you value them.
• Reaffirm that you think well of them  but not of their performance in this situation.
• Additional steps for praising:
• Encourage them to do more of the same

I think that the book gives a simplistic approach to management. It is more like the macro or brief general overview of what managers should do to give benefit to both the organization and the people their managing. His approach is pretty basic, and it sounds like it can be practical in real life. I think this book has met my expectations. I expected to gain basic knowledge in management and I believe that’s what I have got. I think I’m going to look something more of a heavy read next time.

RWendi

Read this great article about unit testing wisdoms, thought its worth sharing.

The Way of Testivus

• If you write code, write tests.
• Don’t get stuck on unit testing dogma.
• Embrace unit testing karma.
• Think of code and test as one.
• The test is more important than the unit.
• The best time to test is when the code is fresh.
• Tests not run waste away.
• An imperfect test today is better than a perfect test someday.
• An ugly test is better than no test.
• Sometimes, the test justifies the means.
• Only fools use no tools.
• Good tests fail.

RWendi

Yesterday, I found that my laptop was infected by a virus. I was a bit surprised by it, because, well, it’s my first time. I always try to keep my computer pretty clean whenever I’m using it, and I’m not sure where and how I got this virus. The virus is undetectable with AVG Free, which I have installed in my machine. This can mean 3 things: The virus is relatively new, the virus is not a BIG threat, and lastly AVG Free sucks. Anyway, the virus has the following symptoms:

• Internet explorer title bar has “[--Hacked by ROCKSTREET—] @InF” message.
• Your computer keeps on prompting you with “Drive was not found, please insert disk at location” dialog.

As you can see from the symptoms, the virus is not very threatening. The second symptom can be a bit worrying, but I’m finding that all of my drives can be found and work with no problem. Thus that dialog window is probably a bogus dialog window. After gathering some more information from the net, finally found a way to remove the virus, here is how:

• Go to “Start Menu” and then “Run”. In the dialog box type “msconfig” and click “Ok”.
• Select the “Startup” tab, and un-tick rockstreet entry. Click “Apply” –> “Ok” –> “Exit without Restart”.
• Go to “c:\windows” and the root of every drive that you have (e.g. “c:\”, “d:\”), and then delete the “rockstreet.dll.vbs” file.
• Go to the following registry key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run”, and delete the load key.
• Go to the following registry key “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main”, and clear up the “Window Title” value key.
• Restart your machine.

Hope this helps in removing the virus if your computer is having the same problem.

RWendi

Working as a programmer I feel like that I’m lacking of business skills. Whether that be my business knowledge, marketing, nor management skills, I have none of them. I think I focused too much on how to be better in what I do and completely forgotten of my long term goal. It’s always been my dream to run my own business, and I think I will have better chance of succeeding if I come well prepared.

I think there are many aspects of business that needs to be explored, such as:

• Running your business.
• Managing your employee/team.
• Marketing your product/services
• Leadership
• Sales/Revenue strategy.
• Others.

Those are pretty much gray areas for me. I have no experience in any of those business aspects, nor do I have the knowledge. I’ve decided it’s time to do something about it, so that when the time comes to run my business, I wouldn’t be a complete idiot and had no idea what I’m doing. My approach to getting my business skills hone up is simple, Books and Blogs. From today I’ll start reading more and more business related books and blogs. Hopefully they will help me to gain some business skills as they do with my programming skills.

RWendi

The last 2 weeks have been one of the most fun times working for Docscorp. The team were given the chance to redesign our comparison model to be a better one. At the current state, the model is one big giant blob of procedural functions which are contained in …. 2 CLASSES. Yep that’s right 2 classes. (Now you know how bad it is). Our job was basically to transform these 2 classes into a model that is much more object oriented.

I spent some times to skim through all the functions of the 2 classes. I realized that all the logics are already solid, its just that the code are not as “organized” as it should be. Or in other words, redesigning the current model means One BIG refactoring job needs to be applied to the 2 classes.

I decided to take a stab on it and started refactoring the classes. After a few days, I came up with a good clean model of how it should be done. While refactoring, I realized that all I’m doing is just applying a couple of programming principles to those 2 classes. These principles are:

• Single Responsibility Principle (SRP).
• Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY).
• Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS).

Yep, those are the only principles that helped me transform/refactor 2 giant procedural classes to be a modular object oriented model.

I think those should be the basis of your decision of when to refactor your code. If you find that you’re repeating yourself or writing the same/similar logic, then it warrants to refactor your code. If you find that your logic/algorithm gets too complicated, it’s time to break it down to make it simpler (doesn’t mean that you have to change your logic). Lastly if you find your code is doing to much or having to much responsibility, it’s time to refactor it out (I know by definition SRP is a class thing, but I think the same logic can be applied to functions).

You can always take things further and apply more programming principles to your code. But these three principles is a must in order to achieve a reasonable clean code. If you apply these three rules in your day to day code, I’m sure overtime you’ll find that your code will be a lot cleaner and much more maintainable. Thus, don’t be afraid to apply these rules to refactor your code.

RWendi