Application Support Engineer… That’s what my title will be, when I start work at Hewlette Packard this coming Thursday After 2 mths of sending out my resumes to so many different companies, I’m finally emplyed now. Quite surprised how fast it takes for this particular position to get back to me.

Send in my resume on the 21st Mar. 23rd Mar, the company got back to me saying I’ve been shorlisted. 24th Mar, I had my first interview. A phone interview, which came all the way from US. I was still sleeping when Jeff, the manager from US called at 10am. He called again on the 29th Mar for the 2nd interview and half an hour later after the interview, the HR dept called making me a job offer. 30th Mar, I went down to HP to sign the letter of appointment and on the 6th April, I’ll start work. Yipeeee

Was talking to Iwen and Reza and boy do I miss all of them. Iwen mentioned that U2 postponed the Vertigo concert in Melbourne. Muahahahaha.. Here I was feeling so disappointed that I can’t go and what happens? The concert was canceled. lol.. He gave me an update on Melbourne. Dennis is taking his masters in business at Monash Uni. I was surprised how he can take up the course considering Iwen mentioned hes a FOB. Muahahaa funny shit.. Matthew and Dzung is taking their masters at RMIT. Reza doing honours at Monash.

Talking to them sure reminds me of the good old days back in Uni. I sure miss my uni life. Lots of goof up and incidents that I can’t stop laughing at now. Dzung validating for the position of the decimal point in a double type, Dennis always going around asking everyone else “Does it work?”, Matthew with his finger accident which prevented him from typing his codes, Matthew again with his specs being blown off his face onto the road and many more…. Darn hillarious.

I sure miss my uni life. Doubt I’ll get to experience it again any time soon. The hurdle of getting a job is now over. Next hurdle would be to perform my job to expectation. Lets hope I can hadle that…

Man! I can’t beleive my luck. I got a call and was told I’m shortlisted for another position in HP. Its even better than the first one. Application Development Engineer. Formal training will be provided to teach me Peoplesoft and the remuneration is also better. Weeeee…. shortlisted for 2 different positions in HP. 1 under the HR dept and the other under Global Operations. Hehehhee… At this point in time, I don’t care much. Just give me an offer for any position and I’ll take it. I need a job fast. Running out of money

Life is ironic though. I remember telling my classmates after my first sem in uni that I will not want to be a software engineer due to all the tedious things we have to do. In the end, this is what I’m offered. A software engineer position During the 2nd and last sem, I told people I hated MS and only took the subject on .NET development so that I can mock it and compare it to PHP. Now?? I’m not only offerd a software engineer position but a .NET software engineer position at that. Man… How ironic is that. 2 of the things I never wanted to be and now that’s what I’ll be doing. Lol..

2 positions shortlisted for in HP means more chances for me. Please please please gimme either 1

This weekend has been a tiring one. There was a furniture warehouse sale and my mum and grandma ended up buying so many things. Guess who had to help transport the furniture from the warehouse back home. Me… I had another guy help me though, the lorry driver.

Went to the warehouse yesterday and mum, uncle and both aunts and the lorry driver were there. All helped to load up the lorry and van. Aunt and uncle load up their stuff in 1 van, mum load her stuff into another van and the aunt and the lorry driver loaded my grandma’s stuff ( the bulk of it ) into the lorry. I then followed the lorry back to grandma place. Boy… was the marble table heavy.. In the end we finally got it in her house and I got a 20 bucks reward. Hehehehh

Today, finally went to the photo studio to book a session for my graduation photo. Cost 320 bucks total. What I get is 1x (11″ x 16″), 2x (8″ x 11″) and 8x (4″ x 6″) photos. Not bad price. Dad will be in his graduating gown as well. He has yet to take his graduation picture too. Shoot will be scheduled for next week.

I’m still jobless now but things are starting to look better. Got a reply from 2 companies. Cxrus (PHP developer) and HP (Application Support Engineer) MUahahahha HP… I’ve always wanted to work there. Went for the interview with HP on Friday and it went very well.. I hope they call me up again for the 2nd interview.. It was a phone interview by the way since the hiring manager is a US citizen based in US If I got an offer from both company, I’d still go for HP even if I’m offered a slightly lower pay. Better oppurtunities for me I’m sure, if I’m in HP.

Wish me luck…

Those who code ASP.Net web pages will probably already know, the DataGrid Server Control has built-in paging features. This means that to implement paging in a DataGrid control, all you need to do is set a couple of the DataGrids properties. This is quite easily done in Visual Studio.Net (vs.net) 2003. Go to the design screen, click on DataGrid and drag it to the page, right click the DataGrid controls and choose property builder. From there, you can easily set the pagination properties. Easy.. Can this be done too, for a DataList or Repeater controls??

Not really. For DataList, the property builder has no pagination options and for Repeater, you don’t even have a property builder. All codes have to be written in the code view. So how do you actually paginate them? Was googling it up and realised that the PagedDataSource Class is actually used to provide the DataGrids paging features and this Class can be used directly to facilitate paging on any type of DataBound control. Awesome… Below is how you can do this..

1) Get the data that you want to page through. This can be an array, a DataSet, a DataReader, or any other object that can be assigned to a data Web control’s DataSource property.

2)Create the PagedDataSource instance, and assign the data to page through to the PagedDataSource’s DataSource property.

3) Set the PagedDataSource class’s paging properties, such as setting AllowPaging to True, and setting PageSize (to indicate how many records per page to show).

4) Assign the PagedDataSource instance to the data Web control’s DataSource property and call the data Web control’s DataBind() method and Voila! Instant pagination support for a Repeater. Its not too hard to understand.


// initialise all the page variables
int curr_page;



// setting the current page and the record to start from
if (Request.QueryString["page"] == null
|| int.Parse(Request.QueryString["page"]) < 1)
{ tcurr_page = 1; }
else
{ curr_page = int.Parse(Request.QueryString["page"]); }



//All your initialisation of the stored procedure goes here



// Setting a new DataAdapter to use the GetBooks
// stored procedures
SqlDataAdapter myAdapter = new SqlDataAdapter(GetBooks);



// Use a DataSet - required for paging in a PagedDataSource
// object and populating it with data from the DataAdapter
DataSet ds = new DataSet();
myAdapter.Fill(ds);



// Populate the PagedDataSource with the DataSet ds
PagedDataSource pds = new PagedDataSource();
pds.DataSource = ds.Tables[0].DefaultView;



// Indicate that the data should be paged
pds.AllowPaging = true;



// Set the number of items you wish to display per page
pds.PageSize = 3;



// Set the PagedDataSource's current page
pds.CurrentPageIndex = curr_page - 1;



// Binding the PagedDataSource to the BookList DataRepeater
BookList.DataSource = objPds;
BookList.DataBind();


Cool thing bout the PagedDataSource Class is that you can make use of the available methods such as PageCount(), IsFirstPage(), IsLastPage() etc…. Makes your life easier rather than to manually calculate if the current page you are in is the last or first or how many records there are in the Repeater

No doubt I’m more confortable here in SG, i really miss Melbourne a lot. The nice weather, the friendly people, hanging out at 10.10 and 14.10 (my school labs) till 4am, waking up at 12 noon to go to school, hanging out at Max Brenner, roche gellati (ice-cream).. Haiz.. so many things bout Melbourne I’m missing right now. Wonder when I’ll get the chance to go back there again.

Weather here is unbearably hot these days, while its getting colder by the day in Melbourne. One thing good is at least food is cheap here, mostly. I suddenly have the urge to wanna go skiing. Winter’s approaching soon too but too bad no snow in SG.

Kinda disapointed that I cant attend the U2 Vertigo world tour concert this comming friday. Actually bought the tickets already but sold it off in the end since I’m no longer staying in Melbourne. SO close and yet so far. Been wishing that U2 will tour Australia and when they finally did, I’m back in SG. Crap!!!! At least I managed to catch the F1 race and Joe Satriani live last year. Not a total waste

My sister gave me this picture of Miko. Taken bout 7 mths ago, it showed how small she was when we first took her in. 7 mths later, look at how fat she became. Living a very pampered life, all she does is eat and sleep. She’s so fat she can’t even hunt very well. Unlike Sutra who would always bring back either cockroaches or lizards when she goes out of the house.

Before

After