Its been exactly 1 week and 1 yr since the submission of my last assignment in RMIT It was really the most fun assignment I ever had. To design and develop a full fledge e-commerce site based on PHP and MySQL. Worked in a group of 6 people. Reza, Iwen, Dzung, Matthew, Veron and myself. I couldn’t be more happy than I already am at that time when I formed this group. They’re a very nice bunch of people to work with. Creative and very technically inclined.

The project didn’t really did as well as we expected it to but nonetheless, everyone was happy with it. I was lucky that the skills of my group members were very diverse. We have Reza, whos the main web designer. His creativity really shows in the templates of the website itself. Gd color combination and excellent layouts. We have Iwen and Dzung. The DBAs for the project. The optimisation of the database structure was brilliant. Well placed indexes and well normalised table structures enabled the site to function at an optimum speed Then there was Matthew and Veron. Brilliant coding… very clean and well optimised. Makes it easy for the others to pick up where they left off. As they say, “keep it simple stupid”. They fully understand what it means and its a joy to work with them man.. I miss them all.. I wonder if we’ll ever get together again to work on another project. It was my pleasure to be the team leader of a wonderful team

Oh and btw, I eventually had my root canal done at the pte clinic today. No way I’m gonna wait till next yr for my appointment. Wonder what would have happened to my tooth by than. So there goes a major chunk of my bonus.. BYE BYE BONUS!!!! I’ll see ya again next year same time… sigh…

#$%^&*() Man.. am I pissed off.. Service provided by poly clinics sure sux. I was there yest after my meeting to visit the dentist, hoping that he would write me a referal letter to the dental institute to have my root canal done there. Was there at bout 1.50 and had to wait 10 mins for the counter to open. Not too bad right? Wrong! that’s only the start.. so my conversation finally went like this at the registration counter..

Me: Hi, can I visit the dentist.
Lady: May I know what’s the problem?
Me: I chipped my tooth and it hurts.
Lady: Oh! We don’t do walk in cases for chipped tooth. You have to make an appointment.
Me: Er.. this is urgent. All I need is the doc to write me a referal letter..
Lady: You have to make an appointment first.
Me: But its really urgent. Starting to hurt.
Lady: I’m sorry but I can’t help.
Me: So what cases do u accept walk in cases.
Lady: Accident or swelling cases.
Me: This is an accident. Who would purposely chip their own tooth.
Lady: Er…
Me: And its gonna swell up if I dun get to see a dentist soon.
Lady: Er… u still need to make appointment..
Me: Come on.. the doc dun even have to do anything.. Just see and acknowledge there is a problem and write me a referal letter. 5 mins work…
Lady: Yes! You still need an appointment…
Me: All right then!!!! I’ll make an appointment.. When is the earliest one…
Lady: Next year…
Me: WTF!!!!!!!

As you can see.. bloody lousy service… how can I not get pissed… Arrrgghhhh!!!!!

Its finally here.. YAY!!! The festive atmosphere was so refreshing Glad to be back home for the celebration after missing it last year. Woke up to a gd morning and breakfast of Ketupat (rice cakes). Yummy… it taste really good. Only get this authentic food once a year. The imitation instant ketupat just dun cut it. Taste really bland compared to the original ones

Visited my relatives after that. That’s the only difference from previous hari raya. My grandparents are no longer with us and cos of that, my aunt’s house is some what more quiet than ever Haiz.. i miss them lots. It just seems so.. quiet? Hmm… It was off to some other elderly relatives after that. By the time we got back, it was already after 10. Feel so full too.. ate at every house.. delicious food as usual My chipped tooth is not gonna stop me from enjoying the food. I chewed on my left side.. Hehh..

Anyway, I made an appointment for my root canal on friday. Total cost of it has been confirmed at 870 bucks.. Zzzz… there goes my bonus..

Happy Deepavali everyone! Wheeee long long holiday are here… I love long weekends. Heh! How long is my holiday? How bout till Friday next week I din even go to work yest. It was a half day and I choose to work from home. Monday is a holiday, Tuesday too, wednesday morning work from home just for a call conference, thursday on off How awesome is that.. wheeeee…

Plus Hari raya coming up really soon. I’m really excited. Missed it completely last year due to me being in Melbourne all alone. Real depressing I say but this year I’m back. It will be different though, cos my grandparents are no longer with us.. Haiz.. I miss them so much. Also diff cos now that I’m working, I have to give green packets to my cousins.. zzzzz.. changed all my money already

Anyway, as with tradition, I met up with my NS frens yesterday. We meet up every year, few days before Hari Raya to break fast. Its really nice to meet them again. Gd company. Everybody’s doing well and thats gd thing to know. Glad we still keep in touch. The bond we forged back in NS sure holds strong even till now. I’d go into battle with them anytime (really unlikely since all of us are paramedics. hahhaa)

lol… It all boils down to that. An incorrectly configured unix platform, which caused EEM to fail every single day at 5pm. Who would have thought that such a small mistake like this, will actually cause such a massive problem After all the code changes to manage and optimised the memory issues of the application, and many developers working round the clock to fight this problem, my team finally found the root of it all. Muahahahahaa…. not before the EEM manager taking heavy fire for not ensuring his team produces quality work though. really pity that guy.

Well after the new code changes last week, EEM was still failing every single day. Pouring over the log file, the problem was still the same. Insufficient memory. Thats the challenge. To find out whats causing these memory problems. DBA issues? Coding inefficiency? Well these does affect the memory problems but eventually it was found out that the server was incorrectly configured. Whoever set up the production server set the application to use only 256mb of memory instead of the 512 mb memory which was specifically allocated to it. hahahaa… upon changing it back to 512mb, everything worked fine What a week… lol