equivocal ramblings

I sent an email to the Malaysian Open Source mailing list about how I couldn’t seem to find any PHP programmers worth hiring and it generated quite a bit of buzz.

This morning though, something struck me. Despite this seeming desperation, you’ll not find programming jobs paying above average salaries. Interesting isn’t it? Perhaps there are programmers for hire, but they simply find it more lucrative to take jobs in other sectors? Combine that with the fact that not many would want a job that made thinking mandatory and it certainly seems to be a problem…

Today we had dinner at Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was a distressing experience. They had this pitiful replacement for coleslaw that was yellow. Yes, sickly pus yellow. Ugh.

When Morons Design

I spent the whole 11 hours (!) at work wrestling with a Flash applet and the accompanying PHP/database backend. It’s an absolutely drop dead dumb piece of crap.

It basically allows video conferencing. Now, the main problem with it is this:

1. Alice starts up the applet, and she waits for the other party to connect
2. Bob connects and they have a conference session
3. Now, Bob disconnects and goes on his way
4. Until Alice explicitly clicks “End conference” she is considered to be unavailable with her status set to “In a conference”.

Smart eh? Obviously someone was half-asleep when he dreamed this system up. Oh and get this — the database table uses two rows to store Alice and Bobs conference status - this is what leads to Alice being tied up. When Bob disconnects, his row is removed, but no no, not Alice! Nooooo! she has to wait her turn. Idiots.

Before anyone even suggests it, no it’s not a feature. It’s a recognised bug.

Last night I arrived in Shenzhen, China for work. This is as good a reason as any to start up my online journal again… so shrug here goes.

We took the 6:46pm flight out of Malaysia to Hong Kong. After that, it was a car ride across the border to China, and then to Shenzhen.

At every single immigration checkpoint I got stopped and checked… I think this is because I was the only ‘foreign’ looking one in our group — my two colleagues are Chinese.

Finally, after a crazy taxi ride (I counted three almost killed cyclist and pedestrians), we arrived outside our apartment building at about one in the morning. My boss (Loh) then declares that he must now run off and get the key from our office… So I end up standing around with luggage and my colleague, Foong. The upside to that was that it gave me plenty of time to look at the surrounding area . It appears that I live in the area where all the pubs/clubs are:

From Our Condo

Finally, he returned with the key and we went upstairs to the apartment — very strange layout, but I have my own room and hot water, so all is good. At about two in the morning we went out for dinner… and that pretty much sums up my first ‘night’ there.