Recently I came across an article touching on the impact of being too involved into a profession. Through my observation, I found out that my profession (programmer) has a major negative impact. I called it Programmers’ Negativity. Programmers’ Negativity (PN) is commonly found on a person after too many years engaging on coding, debugging or going through multiple SDLCs. A programmer has a habit to find bug and debug it. Everyday, we need to crush bug for our program to work flawlessly. When times flew by, unknowingly it has become part of a habit of programmer life. Programmers comment on everything. They see the negative side of everything. Criticise, criticise and criticise. Maybe this is part of the problem where majorly software developers hop so much in their career. Satisfaction is hard to comeby.

Yes I admit, I am infected by this disease. I must avoid it. Resisstt!

I have slowed down my updates on my blog these months. Lately, I spend my time travelling so do my works. The other reason behind the reduced of new posts because I am considering alternative platform to Posterous. Some of you might know that Posterous is winding down after the acquisition by Twitter. After several trials, I’ve decided to settle with Octopress hosted with Heroku due to several reasons:-

1. Complete mirror of local copy
2. Changes are tracked with Git
3. Markdown
4. Code snippet with Pygments (find some of them at Code Categories)
5. Awesome mobile theme

But this platform has several downside compared to Posterous

1. Lack of other ways of posting (e.g. email, mobile)
2. Hard to embed without writing some changes
3. I’m not familiar with Ruby
4. Size matters at Heroku (for free hosting)

I’m at about 80% of the total progress because I am still finding ways to include more images (by including other hosting) and porting embedded IFrame. One custom changes I’ve made on this blog is the ability to display LaTeX Math Equation with Kramdown (thanks to Greglus).

From past few weeks till now, everyday moves fast. Been through ups and downs. Most of the time, it was stressful. For the first time, coding felt like an operation. When I was looking at the IDE, my surrounding resembles an operation room like the one in Grey’s Anatomy. My teammates left and right were like the other doctors giving me advices here and there. While I am the one holding my mouse like scalpel and executing the surgery by typing on my keyboard. This time I am flying solo. My mission now is to replace the old organ with the new and improved organ. The operation was hard. It went bitter when decommissioning the old component went hay-wire. Some tightly coupled segments misbehaved when I tried to pull out the old component. In order for the new component to work well, I need to fix the other parts as well. Sometimes when I was fixing other parts, I encountered tumour that was preventing the new component to slot in. The tumour therefore need to be removed. My nightmare came when my patient when into coma due to code haemorrhage. The memory keep bleeding, I need to open out the body and detect the wound. I hope everything will be fine. The operation is still undergoing but it is almost completed. I just wish my patient will wake up tomorrow, living the life like a normal person with an improved organ.

Raining outside my window
The sun is hiding behind the haze
Hello sky, are you feeling better now?

Trees moving wildly at the garden
Dancing or shaking only they know
Hello trees, are you happy now?

Wind outside blowing sturdily
Birds traveling under strong current
Hello little animals, are you safe at home now?

Human must be the favourite creation from the Nature. We are not only blessed with the power to think and comprehend but also very much suitable for the current situation. Human population grows tremendously in recent centuries especially after World War II (refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth). Referring to the graph here, our population actually doubled from 1960s until now.

Once people thought we might experienced serious food crisis that will prevent the human to expand further however with the technology, we are able to produce food better for most of the people here (2 out of 7 billion people here still experiencing food security).

Can we keep populating the world more if we keep living longer, consuming the food and energy? There are signs we might hit the limit soon. With the growing competitiveness, some developed countries are experiencing lower birth rate.

I think we human are the greedy bunch. The mother earth has loved us so much, why are we keep taxing her? One day, the power of nature will strike us. :(

Two days ago at Orlando, Florida, RIM has just announce their upcoming product along with the spanking new Blackberry 10 (BBX). I am biased as I am working with BBX lately, I found that this announcement welcoming. Not mentioning the latest mobile gadget gimmickry, I am more intrigued on the development on BBX natively. Up until now only iOS officially support app development natively using Objective-C. As for the other platform, Android support native development with NDK (but its awfully ugly when you need to integrate NDK with Java through JNDI). As for Windows Phone 7, you all the codes are running on .NET VM.

I think BBX might change the game here with its Native development package. With it, I see many advantages (let alone the speed native can provide) compared not only with Android and WP7 but also iOS.

1. Low learning gap with C++
2. Great utility with Qt (Yes, BBX native is backed by Qt)
3. Lots of supported opensource project like OpenAL
4. With Cascades (and QML from Qt), UI is easier to code and pretty too!

I cant wait to get my hand on of those device.

I am considering switching from Posterous to Tumblr because of recent acquisition of Posterous by Twitter.

Apparently, I have decided to switch to Octopress :) 2012-08-20

Little bit updates since my last post. I am learning a lot lately, knowledge wise and spiritual wise. I think its important for a person to take a look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow’s_hierarchy_of_needs). It may or may not be applicable for each individual needs but I think every person have their own hierarchy of needs. Most importantly every needs are built entirely as an hierarchy where the lowest needs always Physiological. Each level of needs depends on their lower level of needs. If one’s fundamental needs cannot be achievable the top most needs collapse too. E.g. you cannot be successful at your work if you have trouble finding your food source and shelter (Physiological needs). On the other hand, life’s goal go hand in hand with your hierarchy of needs. In order to achieve higher goal, certain level of need need to be attain else the physical or mental properties of the person are not on par with the goal set. Take a look at your needs and set goal accordingly to achieve your needs and your future.

Recently I love a quote which I read from Siddhartha written by Herman Hesse. It says:-

“Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike. Beautiful were the moon and the stars, beautiful was the stream and the banks, the forest and the rocks, the goat and the gold-beetle, the flower and the butterfly. Beautiful and lovely it was, thus to walk through the world, thus childlike, thus awoken, thus open to what is near, thus without distrust. “

Yes the world is that beautiful, keep moving in tiny steps :)

My first github project

Basically it fetch from youtube data api and populate using Backbone.js

Head over here for the source. Fork and enjoy!

I often was asked how Malaysian are you when you do not believe at a religion as the first Malaysian Constitution stated ‘Kepercayaan kepada Tuhan’ which roughly translate to ‘Believe in the God’. As a person that cannot understand religion, I do not subscribe to any of them. However throughout the years, from an atheist, slowly I begin to realise there have to be something larger than what we (human) can comprehend. In our daily life, there are mysteries we encountered. The mysteries that we cannot perceive yet it just comes so naturally. Therefore, I realised I need to recogize this element of unknown, element that is watching us everyday and element that is larger than us. Recognizing this element make me curious, make me small and feel belongs.

For me, religion is a medium. It serves well in the past as a part and parcel of human civilization. It teaches us the values and some knowledge when we have no foundation to rationalize. There are those dark ages in human civilization where we are ready to evolve into a larger societies yet values is the barrier. The best method at that time to inculcate the values and knowledge is through religion. Religion uses the power of unknown and fear (God) to strike knowledge to our heart. It serves us well until education and scientific methods teach us how to reason. I believe they has replaced religion to teach us the values and knowledge we need in this era. Who knows one day, some technology might replaced education and scientific method that can bring human to a higher level. But certainly, some parts of religion has obsolete by scientific method. The other havles of religion including moral and values that religion bring us is replaced by education.

I strongly believe there is no connection between the God and religion. Religions describe the God, the fanatics tries to be the along with the God and the spiritual leaders often used the God. In the end, I believe the God as a larger set of this universe, the unknown and the space.