General

Old Company, New Company, Same Company

By on Saturday, September 20, 2008

It’s my first month with a new company. Although there are vast differences, e.g. the previous company is a BPO while the new one is a consulting company, there are also certain parallels. I guess companies really are in essence very similar, they just vary in scale and scope.

For example, on the IT side, there’s only a handful of support people serving so many. The end result is similar: one week service record turnover, monitors lining the hallway, etc. People are also people bitching about access control. Now I know how it feels. But that’s another story. Hahaha.

On the Software Development side, the new company is so much better. They have a strong project management discipline going as well as a consistent development life cycle. But, although there’s a long way to go, there are similarities. Were focusing on Java, frameworks like Spring and Hibernate, we’re moving towards an iterative software development cycle, etc. It’s definitely a good thing to know that we were on the right track.

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General

Ford Focus vs Hyundai i30

By on Sunday, September 7, 2008

With the upward trend of fuel prices, people are finally seriously looking at diesel which used to be less expensive than gasoline (not anymore) and lasts farther than gasoline. But there are limited choices for diesel in the market. At the car segment there was only the Ford Focus TDCI and a bunch of Hyundais (Elantra, Accent, Getz). The last two were small cars and the Elantra didn’t really succeed in the market and is now replaced by the i30. Unfortunately, the i30 suffers from the same problem of high price. Sure it looks good, but it’s only has a 1.6L displacement compared to the Focus’ 2.0L.And it falls behind the Focus in other ways. Will it suffer the same fate as the Elantra? I hope not. We need more diesel vehicles.

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General

Google Chrome: The Browser War Is Joined

By on Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Google has released the beta of Chrome, their own browser. Chrome joins the ongoing free-for-all browser war between Firefox (my personal favorite), Internet Explorer (the current leader by virtue of its being pre-installed along with windows), Opera, and some other smaller players. Looks like this is going to be a pretty exciting next few months.

First impressions: Most visible is the slick minimalist UI whose most notable feature are the tabs being above the address bar. This does make sense if you think about it. As for the way it displays web pages, there seems to be nothing markedly different compared to say Firefox. This is not surprising since they’re supposed to be using the same rendering engine. But its primary selling point is that it is supposed to be faster. A longish narrative about that and more here. Not sure if I’m just imagining it but it does seem just a bit so.

Not bad. But what else are you expecting from Google?

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General

Asus EEE PC 1000H

By on Saturday, August 23, 2008

After a lot of dilly-dallying, I finally pulled the trigger on the Asus EEE PC 1000H. As I mentioned on my comparison, it seemed to me that it is the best of the current crop of netbooks.

The Asus EEE PC 1000H is definitely bigger than your typical netbook. But it brings with it a bigger display, keyboard (majorly sucky wrongly-placed itsy bitsy right shift key), and battery. Although these lead to less portability, these definitely improved usability and coupled with the bigger memory and disk space brings it up almost to the level of ultraportable notebooks but without the hefty price tag. The sleek black case even reminds me of the Fujitsu P7020 that I was lusting for a long time ago.

It booted up straight out of the box and, with the input of some personalization and localization information, was almost ready for use.

The wired network worked fine. It let me get my wireless network’s security details which I then keyed in, unplugged the network cable and I was wireless in a snap.

The 80gb hard disk provides a comfortable amount of space but is partitioned in two. Not very flexible. So merged the two with the freely downloadable EASEUS Partition Manager. As with most netbooks (and some ultraportables), there is no built-in optical drive. So I had to use my USB to SATA/IDE adapter to copy my backup files from my external drive and install software from their CD installers.

And that was it. It seemed snappy with Firefox 3.0, Yahoo! Messenger, Open Office 3.0 beta 2, and Eclipse. Movies and music played smoothly with VLC. I’ll also be running Tomcat and MySQL servers but maybe after a 1Gb memory upgrade.

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