Nonsequittal Rumblings

I’m guilty. I skipped my walk yesterday. Day 3 in to the year, and I’m already getting lazy.

But hey, I got pretty good amount of walk today – exceeding 10k. I’m feeling pretty good about it. Of course, it being so warm–in the 40’s–helps a lot too. Getting warm does come with a price – it’s melting so much snow that it’s making good size puddles on the walking paths everywhere.

Walking music of the day was Berlioz’s comic opera, Beatrice and Benedict, performed by London Symphony and Sir Colin Davis. It’s not a bad piece of music. The only thing is… I don’t know French. Not only the whole thing is in French, they throw in some dialogues. So I was listening to a few tracks of non-musical dialogues in French here and there. Well, okay… I guess it’s not going in my “favorites” folder for now.

Having almost two full weeks off for Christmas was excellent. It does make me pretty lazy. Lazy isn’t really a good thing. Just like so many thousands (or is it millions) of people in America, I’ve decided to throw in diet as one of my new year’s resolution for this year. Heck, I even got a pedometer this Christmas. Might as well put it to work. Being lazy is the last thing I need.

So… yeah, I’m now walking around with this pedometer in my pocket all the time. Since a few days ago, I’ve been using it, took it out to walks, etc, to get a feel of how much I should be walking. I decided about 8500 steps per day is a pretty good, not too difficult goal for now. The thing I didn’t know… By the time I came home from work today, pedometer already had 4500 steps on it. It’s a good thing though. By the time I get home, it’s way past sun set. It’s not most pleasant or safe to be walking at this hour for long. So… there we go. This is my tiny start for my goal of losing a few pounds this year.

And this blog is going to be one way to keep myself stick to that goal. More to come.

One of the Japanese traditions that’s still somewhat popular is seeing of the new year sunrise (hatsuhinode-初日の出, not to be confused with hatsumoude). Last year, I think I stayed up all night, then went to see the sunrise before hitting the sack. This year, I actually went to bed by 3AM and woke up by 6:30. Lucky me.

Since I drove toward east, I was planning to drive west to find a good spot to see the sunrise. The sunrise is at 7:44, and I didn’t get to leave home until 7:00. And because I live in the east side of the town, following that plan was obviously not a good idea… And thus I headed south. Man, Kansas has so much windbreak woods. It’s not easy to find a good spot in such a short time.

Another problem—it’s so friggin’ cold! 21F, with wind chill of 11F. Standing out in the cold just for fun? That’s crazy. But here it is. The moment of truth.

Maybe I’m back. Maybe not. I’ve never been a writer. But as the need to document my programs more at work, I need to be more proficient and willing to write. So here’s my attempt to come back to my writing tasks. I do have a few things in my mind to keep myself going, such as writing more about my programming journey, and reporting what I’m doing to keep my health up – especially my challenge to lose a few pounds here and there.

Let’s all see where this will go.

Just like any other places, there are both good and bad things about working here, where I’m at. The company has many great benefits, and other programs. One of them comes in the form of an employee requirement–each of us are supposed to take minimum of 40 hours of training in job related topics each year. Which is great. They really want us to improve on our skills and enhance ourselves. That enables us to do better job, helping the company more effectively.

What’s the catch? I hardly see any training that I’m truly interested in. I’ve been a paid programmer for 6 years with this company, in this department, working with same people. To this date, I’ve taken zero hours of professional IT/IS classes. I’ve taken a whole bunch of soft skills – how to manage better meetings, project management, speech, presentations, conflict management, e-mail etiquette, etc, etc. The list goes on. Some of them are useful.I’m very fed up with it, and I’m trying to deal with the management to agree that I can take a technical course. But there’s a great many obstacles to do this. For one, most of the outside, professional courses have the prohibitive price tags. $600+ minimum. $1000+ is often. WTH? For a 3-day courses?! Give me a break. And one more thing – class locations. This is one bad thing about living in Kansas – there’s nothing. Many of the courses are offered in either side of the coastal areas. Nothing in the middle.

I don’t take no as an answer very easily on these things. I’m always on the search on things I can read to learn more. Internet is great. It has shit load of junks. But it has loads of useful information as well. The problem? No matter how much reading I do, and how much I learn from them, none of them count toward my 40-hour requirement. *sigh* I can’t help it. Really, I don’t do blog surfing for nothing. My daily blog surfing consists mostly of programming topics. Not even a single anime site, really. (That’s saying quite a bit as a fansubber.)

Anyway.

In one of those quest for more self enrichment attempt, I was searching around the web on another topic that I thought would help me – user interface design. Joel on software is a very evil blog to me, in the same sense as how wikipedia is evil for many people – articles are inter-linked with each other, that you can spend hours reading different articles.

So, I’ve wasted 2 hours of my time this morning reading his blogs. I don’t regret it. He has written many things that made me go “ah-ha!” Most of the things are so fundamental, that it’s stupid. But stupidity really is his key note – it’s better to assume that the software users are dumb. We shouldn’t treat them like they’re dumb personally. We always need to pay respect to them. But more dumb we assume they’re when they use the software, it’ll be simpler for everyone to use the software. Great concept. Actually, many people say the same thing, in different words. But still, it is a great reminder how to think like a clueless users, not like a smart programmer. (That’s also one of my frustrations – we don’t have dedicated software testers, unlike other programming shops, who can give us good feedbacks often, and quickly.)

So, I’ve learned a lot, which is…. frustrating. Like I said, none of this counts toward my training hours. I’ve learned so much for free. I don’t want to waste 3 more days on this topic, telling me the same thing. I don’t want to spend $1000 company budget to learn the fundamentals I already know. Not even $20 to buy the book this blog author has written on the topic.

Before I disappear for another 3 months, I want to take a slim chance, and make a request :
If anyone knows of an on-line college/university course I can take, let me know. I’d much rather take a 3-months or 1-semester class than 1-week seminar on any topic. I want the materials taught in it to stick with me for a long time, not just for 3 days after I leave the classroom. My topics of interest right now – effective web design, software development and software project management with some focus on how to use the tools to assist us, software development in team environment, graphic designs with some training in graphics software (photoshop, paint shop pro, etc), extensible and flexible software design (with some emphesis on object orientation and software frameworking topics), and advanced topics on RDBMS – how database works behind the scenes, query optimizations, etc.

I’m not too picky, am I?

The next version of Firefox is making the public alpha debut, with a code name Bon Echo. How exciting.

But after seeing the page above, I’m a bit concerned. The professional developers are willing to release their flagship software without having all components in place? I’m worried that they’re starting to rush their products out, rather than taking their time and make everything as perfect as possible. Grrr…

So soon after I ramble about something, another potential solution pops up – The Zend Framework. This looks interesting. Because of its simple design, it seems to have less dependency on libraries and stuff. And it should be fitting in more environment than other frameworks.

But…. eh, it’s a bit too late. Right now, I’m using the combination of the Stupidly Simple MVC Framework and in-hous PHP based template system. I’m still struggling to set things up correctly. I dearly hope that this will be saving me time in the future, because it sure feels like tons and tons of time being wasted now. Bleh the learning curve.

I knew it’s been possible for years and years. But for some reason, I could NEVER figure out how to do this. Last night, I took another plunge at setting up the environment up so I can type Japanese on Linux again. This time, the tools used were Ubuntu running XFCE desktop (Xubuntu), anthy, and uim. I followed some instructions on various ubuntu wiki and forums, and… ta-da! It’s good to go!

I took this linux laptop to Walmart this morning before work. While they were working on the oil change, I typed up my first Japanese blog entry on that laptop. It works like a charm. ;_; My 8+ year goal has been finally reached.

[22:48] <Sylf> installing wordpress was so, so, so easy
[22:48] <Sylf> I’m thinking about moving my blog from LJ to my server
[22:48] <Serjei> yea, LJ sucks
[22:48] <Serjei> be leet
[22:48] <Serjei> and host your own
[22:48] <Serjei> hahaha

It’s not that being leet sounds good. I’ve bee thinking about moving away from livejournal for quite a while. For over a year, actually.

So yeah, I’ll be moving soon. This is actually the 2nd time this blog will be moving. It used to be on my own domain, using something I wrote really quickly. Then moved to LJ. Now I’m moving back to my own domain. I’ll post more about that soon. Probably tomorrow.

Beware – highly geek whining ahead. And it’s rather unorganized.

As a programmer, I’ve hit a huge stumbling block. Actually, it’s not something that happened at once. I’ve been feeling the pain for at least couple years, and I’m getting more and more fed up with the situation. And the worst part – I still haven’t found a way out.

When I started using it in 1999, PHP was somewhat a new language on the web. It’s a language that was made for the web. It did what I needed. It was very easy to learn, especially with my background in C, however rudimentary it was. I’ve built a site with it, and it worked. Not the best, but it worked. But ever since then, I’ve been stumbling on number of problems that these various “why PHP is bad” articles point out.

I think the worst problem I’m facing is that the apparent simplicity of the language is actually the cause of added complexity. I don’t know for sure – I’m just guessing. I don’t have the expertise in other languages like these bloggers. I must be missing something in the area of knowledge in software engineering, and the knowledge of the features that those languages offer.

The sites I manage here at work are getting bigger and bigger. The complexity adds on each time. At first, these sites were rather simple, just like some simple personal sites. I didn’t have code manageability in mind when I started on these sites. Spaghetti codes are everywhere. We’re managing the current sites fine, but I’m not sure how we’ll manage if we have to do a total overhaul of these sites.

I have no intention of abandoning PHP just yet. Despite the weaknesses that PHP has, I still think it’s possible to build a good software with somewhat clean codes with it. There are some major, successful projects built in PHP. Many popular blogging software like wordpress, drupal, b2evolution, etc are written in PHP. New wiki systems pop up quite regularly, many of them written in PHP. Large scales bulletin board systems too. Heck, I use b2evolution, PmWiki, and Simple Machines Forum, all driven by PHP. So I know it can do the job.

But on the sites that don’t rely on these pre-built software, I’m really struggling. First and foremost, the separation of the logic and presentation is not there. I’ve been reading on that topic for quite sometime. I’ve heard about Smarty template engine. I’ve read rants about smarty. I’ve looked at some much smaller template system such as this one. But I’ve never implemented these. And I just left it alone.

Ever since I read this article on slashdot, and learning what this WASP thing is about, the whole issue of separation of logic and presentation came back to me. Actually, it’s a bit more than that. It’s the concept of MVC – Model, View, Control. To me, this thought pattern makes the perfect sense. It does separate the logic and presentation. Not only that, it separates the data access logic from the core business logic. And here it is – WASP – a framework written in PHP that handles the MVC. Perfect.

Or was it? NO. A big no. It assumes I have certain libraries and such that I don’t have. It doesn’t work well forme. And my search for a perfect MVC framework started. Symfony? No. PRADO? No. Cake PHP? This one looked the most promising of all systems I looked in to. I spent about two weeks trying to learn this system. But still, it just isn’t flexible enough.

There is one problem when it comes to these systems written in PHP. Many of them assume that the hosting environment is Unix/Linux based, and is run with Apache web server, and MySQL is used as the database engine. My situation is completely different. I run my PHP site on Windows server, using IIS, and use an obscure database connected via ODBC, as well as IBM DB2. We connect to several others as well. Yes, multiple databases adds more complexity to the system.

Then I came across this series of article, Stupidly Easy MVC in PHP. It’s not a pre-built frame work. It’s a walk through on how you can build your own frame work in simple format. It takes inspiration from the same system that WASP and CakePHP did – Ruby on Rails. Great. I think this might work.

Right now, I’m in the middle of trying to figure this baby out. It still is quite a monster when I try to fit this monster spaghetti code in to this framework. I can no longer slap codes together as my instinct tells me to. I’m struggling hard to just rebuild one application using this simple framework. What I thought was somewhat simple when I coded it isn’t simple at all.

I really lack the proper knowledge of software engineering. I wish I could get some experience in larger software shop, and learn how to work in an organized software project. I want to learn how to manage large scale software projects. I just don’t know where to start. I feel like I’m trying to grab on to whatever piece of straw I can find.