Moving My Junks Back, Part Deux

It was cold, drizzling and grey. What a great day to move in the furniture from the Relo Cube into the house. Also, most of my stuff is back and crammed in Arcadia. I need to start sorting out the real junks from goods.

Murakami Exhibition @ MOMA

Lisa had to work in the morning, so we started late and missed the
shabu2 line. Instead, we went to the sushi house next door and
visited the Murakami exhibition @ MOCA.

Don't be fooled by the happy colors, the message could be grim. The picture above, for example, is titled: Ton Ton Ba Puking.

Full coverage here

LOL

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

Reason #1 To Get SUV

One of the reasons why I buy SUV. Two more trips to go.

Unpack The Container

Surprisingly, the delivery truck shows up only 30 minutes late. The amazing thing is the fork lift that they use to move the container. It is small, yet it packs a lot of pneumatic power.

The orange straps work as expected, they keep everything from falling on me when the container is re-opened. Everything is intact, although some items have bruises.

Sleepy Day

Last night I went out with Chris, Carlon and Ruth (from Jacksonville) and people from the Santa Ana office. The dinner and conversation were good, Carlon paid for everyone.

Dan suggested me to work from home, since I am going to waste of a lot of time driving from my place to Santa Ana and up to Simi Valley to pick up my junks. Thank god that I could stay at home today, since I wasn't feeling very well from staying up all night and the gloomy, cold weather didn't help either.

I miss the coffee machine in the office... yawn... and the QA BRIO server feels that way too. Greg has to bounce the daemon to make it working again.

Deploying AV

Spend a couple of days deploying AV and the accompanying electronic policy enforcer. This experience serves as back up plan if the SMS plan doesn't pan out.

GPhone a.k.a Android

Today's big disappointments:

1. No hardware, HTC is on board but not Nokia. Sigh....
   
2. No carriers, FCC still pockets the 700Mhz until next year.
   
3. Only software (just like my prediction).
   

Well, I should wait for OpenMoko.

Decaying Code

I was presented with several problems due to software upgrade:

1. The SharePoint file upload feature using shared folder is not working anymore, and I need to upload lots of small files, the quantity kills me. Currently, uploading through explorer view in IE is not reliable.
   
2. On DashBoard project, the LoadRunner script for Contact Manager function is broken due to fixes.

Who says that code couldn't decay? Well, time to update the code.

Little Tokyo

We started our weekly pilgrimage to Little Tokyo again this morning with a little hitch: the traffic to City Hall is choked by city employees. Dunno why, but it caused major heart burns and Lisa provided detour using 3rd st. It is nice to have a living GPS system.

We went through a tunnel underneath an apartment complex using the 3rd. Interesting: I might have to come back and take some pictures.

Total wait time for shabu2 is .... approx 1.5 hour.

China's Missile Range

Very interesting graph from The Economist: China's missile range. It was presented in several The Economist articles, one of which: The long march to be a superpower.

I Thought I Only Have To Turn In EPK Today

The day started with me testing Wei's order placement script using short form, it worked great but Wei didn't input all of the data into all of available fields, causing me to second guess there might be object(s) that trigger HTTPGet somewhere. Wei did the full field recording but I didn't have time to take a look at it. Will do that once everything is delivered.

After that, for the rest of the day, I was working on correlating script (create contact) from Latisha, I didn't want to try to find out where her problem with the script lies, instead, I decided to do it again using my method. I have already recognized this problem since I have been in her shoes before. I guess it takes one to two weeks for someone to be trained to correlate LR script, and a couple of months to understand the underlying intricacies of the tool.

I guess I pay for the fact that my team is under-trained, only two people in my team (not counting the manager) know how to properly record, correlate and script LR thus we are a bit behind with the Dashboard project. My bread and butter is writing Perl/WR, it was 2 years ago I created LR script properly. The others are mainly writing in Java for FT, hardly touch LR at all.

It doesn't matter, we delivered 4 out 5. I believe I could make it by testing the fifth script this Sunday.

Price and Market Penetration of Consumer Electronics Over The Past 50 Years

From Wired magazine: Price and market penetration of consumer electronics over the past 50 years.

Check out the steep drop for DVD player.

Creating LR Scripts for Dashboard Project

Since I am going to be working solely on one project this week, I decided to lump everything in one entry instead.

Tuesday: Writing C function for parsing JSON-esque response. Since LR supports C (and other imitation of languages), I have to work with the limitation of the library. I am beginning to miss Perl's RegEx/split function.

Wednesday: Login/Logout, and OrderSearch(by Address or Order Number) scripts are done. Negative testing the scripts against available data and fixes all discrepancies found. Get feed back from Craig and implement them.
Determining work flow for updating Escrow tasks, found out that document uploading function is not working.

Thursday: Sorting out problems encountered by the teams. Record, parameterized and merge updating Escrow tasks script to the main script. Consolidates all functions that drive open order (long form) work flow into one script for simplicity. Create proper work flow from creating order, find the order within a timeout loop (take some time for the SoftPro server to process and assign order number), and update escrow tasks. 3 out of 5 scripts are done. I have overcome my quota but the target is not met.

BlackBerry Drives Me Nuts This Week

For weird reason, BlackBerry doesn't display reconciliation in the mail menu this week. The problem is solved after upgrading BlackBerry Desktop to 4.2SP2.