I have never encountered this much pain in the arse customer than the current one before.

I’ve done twice/thrice more complicated and bigger projects than this project in the past but never ever had this much of discussions, arguments, back and forth explanations and long meetings after meetings with the customer before.

I grew a few white hairs after handling this project and going to grow some more since the project is no near to the closing stage.

I thought I’m 90% done after sending out the last build and the user manual. I’m only expecting minor bug fixes but NOOOOOOOO he just has to go change the whole damn lot and have to fix almost everything from the DB schema to almost every form.

It’s all because of this F*ed up requirement spec and F*ed up customer to start with. I need a bad ass project manager to handle this kind of bad ass customer. Unfortunately, there is no proper project manager was assigned to this project, thinking it’s going to be a small one. I know I should
turn myself into a bad ass bitch to take matters into my own hand but the problem is I can’t become the bad ass bitch; I don’t know how.

It’s not that easy to become a good “bad ass bitch” when you’re trying to become one. You need certain skill in that area as well. I’m terrible in that area. The most I can do is I start raising my voice and become angrier but there is no art/tactic in it.

My main problem is that the angrier I am, the quieter I become. I’ll just yell back a few words then I won’t talk anymore. I got mess up in the head that I can no longer put those mess into proper word. I need some trained/naturally talented bad arses to back me up with the arguments. I think I need to go take a course on the art of bitching. Let me know if anyone providing one.

Anyways, my boss is just so nice dealing with customers. He accepts anything if they pay for it. Ok, it’s actually a good thing if they pay for it but what if they don’t pay and just keep bullying me and dragging the project on and on?

There should be a time when we say, “That’s it, no more, we are done, no nil nada F* off!”, and close the damn project.

Anyways, I’ll have to do more analysis and effort sizing on the new changes. I’ll bitch more about it later. Bye!

I haven’t written about office muses for a while and thought I’ll write something about last week muses from our department. Here is the story.

You see, we have this disc stakka where we stored all our department softwares. It’s attached to a spare box sitting on my desk and I kind of become an unofficial librarian. Whoever ask to borrow software from me, I’ll just eject the discs from the stakka and hand it to them. There is no record of how many discs we have and who borrowed them. The stakka itself is installed for everyone hence anybody can login to the box and eject any disc as they like. The result is we lost a few important discs over the months. I have no idea who took them but discs are obviously keep missing from the disc stakka. We sent a few notification emails to everyone in the office asking about the missing discs but nobody responded.

I kind of feel responsible about it since it was sitting on my desk and I am the one who is giving out the discs most of the time (unless ofcos they login to the box and eject the discs themselves when I’m away). The problem with me is that whenever I am into something or concentrating on a task at hand, I seriously don’t care about things happening around. I don’t see or hear anything unless someone pokes at me or waves in front of face. Even so, I don’t hear half of the thing they are saying. So when someone asks a disc from me while I am busy, I just remove the disc and give it to them without looking at their faces or noting their names. That must be one of the reasons people take advantage of my ignorance to snatch some discs from me.

Anyways, last week we had a very loud and noisy discussing about how to maintain our softwares. Most of my colleagues say not to borrow software to anybody outside our department. Our HR manager disagrees and wants everyone to share the software the company owns. (Ok, I wasn’t in the discussion/arguments as it was happening at one of our colleagues’ desk and I just over heard bits and pieces.) Finally we agree to properly keep track of the disc movement in some way. Boss made up a software borrowing register spreadsheet and mail it to everyone saying, unless and otherwise people fill in the register prior to picking up a disc, we are not to give it to them. But the spreadsheet was editable by everyone which is not a good idea so I created a form out of it and pass around the form. After checking the form, one of our colleagues argues that the form is very easy to fill and we like to make thing difficult for whoever comes to borrow our discs. So he suggested a few adjustments to the form.

Here are some of his suggestions:

Way too easy, we need some pain here. Can we add some more fields :
Put this under “Borrower Details“

• Weight (kg)
• Height (cm)
• Eye colour (offer Green, Blue, Grey, Brown)
• Blood Type (offer A, B, AB, O) (suggestion to add negative, positive as well)
• Hair Colour (offer Black, Grey, Brown, Red, Blond)
• Random Question from http://www.survey-machine.com/take_survey/627331 that we’ll change every week or so, we’ll start with no. 1 “Have you ever peed your pants after age 8?”

Make all fields required.

There is a few more input from other colleagues as well such as “Do you have any recent health problem say in last 6 months?”, “Provide the medical certificate to prove your blood type”, etc…

How about that!? Is the form painful enough yet? Haha, I’m not sure how many borrowers will be able to fill in that form and surely throw some serious curses at us.

Anyways, I felt sorry for whoever have to fill in the form, and I did not implement those “Borrower Details” but left the simple form as below and see how things turn out. We had a few beta tests with our gang and now it is released to suva_everyone. One serious flaw we try to ignore is that anyone can login to the machine and remove the disc while I’m away from my desk. But for the time being, it’s doing quite well without complaint, a few minute ago, someone filled in the form and took 3 discs from me. I wonder how long this system will last though.

So how do you keep track of the softwares in your organization? Do share with us some of the cool systems you use in your company. And ofcos’ you are most welcome to make suggestion to our system above as well.

This little apps, “Open Street Map” is getting popular among my colleagues and quite becoming the topic of discussion this morning. It’s all started from strangepants who pass on the word to my bro zatlite and now everyone at the office started adding street names for their residential areas. As for me, I just observed the site but haven’t done any actual work on it since almost every streets in our area has already been added by my bro. Anyways, here is how this cool little thing works.

It’s a wiki sort of world street map where anyone can login to add/edit the streets in your region.

OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you.

OpenStreetMap allows you to view, edit and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth.

To edit, you need to sign in first. Anyone can open an account there easily. You can also export the chosen map area into a few formats, (png, jpeg, svg, pdf, postscript) and can play around with the size, scale etc under “Export” tab.
You can also write some diaries on it or do some GPS tracing.

Ofcos’ if you are confused with how to do the tracing, you can always check out their wiki help page. In the Beginners’ Guide, there is an very well explained introductory video for you to get started with. I’m also checking out the video and briefly reading through the steps.

I did ask my bro, who actually done editing on the map, to write a post about it since it’s quite interesting to play around but as usual the lazy slime just passed me the video and ignored my request. So here I am dropping a note to whoever out there love playing with maps to check this site out.

Ciao!

I was reading this post, “Endless Conversation: The Unfolding Saga of Blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Social Sites” from Web 2.0 Blog and checked out a few twitter applications mentioned in there.

I LOVE Summize and Twitterfeed; I use them the most. I find this two, Tweetwheel and Twitter Charts, pretty interesting especially the Tweetwheel.

The result wheel is just amazing and you can hover over to see all those links in your connections.

Beautiful isn’t it? Well, if you have time, try play around with those. I bet you’ll love a few.

This is something interesting to check out. You can access your files and folders from any of your computers remotely.

Keep all your files in sync
Use FolderShare to create a mirrored image of your most important folders – like your Favorites, Pictures, and Documents – so they’re the same on all your computers.

Sharing files is easier than ever
Sharing with friends, co-workers, and family is easy when you add and update files in a shared library. Large files? Not a problem – FolderShare can sync files up to 2 GBs in size. And it works on both Mac and PC.

Get to your files instantly when you’re away from home
Install FolderShare on all your computers, and you can access all your files from any computer on the Internet.

It’s 3 steps installation,
# it will ask you whether you are an invited user or a new user,
# Name your computer,
# if you are new user, this step create an account for you,
Then you are done.

If you’re interested, download and test it out here: FolderShare and visit the site.

Just an aside note for myself.

Visual Studio Gallery
A place where all developers can go to find extensions to Visual Studio. The site has everything from community built power toys for VS to industry partner solutions for enterprise development.

MSDN Code Gallery
MSDN Code Gallery is your destination for downloading sample applications and code snippets , as well as sharing your own resources.

Via: (#) | (#)

Updated: New Features. Thx Anthony.

When I install LLBLGen Pro 2.0 on Windows Vista, I got the following error and the installer rolled back itself.

Error:
The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2869.

So I dig around the forum and found this solution from Otis.

• Create a new .bat file in the same folder as the one the LLBLGenPro20.msi file is in.
• Add the following text ‘msiexec /i LLBLGenPro20.msi’ and save the file.
• Right click the .bat file and select ‘Run as Administrator’.

I tried doing as mentioned in the steps but I got the following message and couldn’t able to install it.

So I changed the Otis’s command to ‘msiexec /a LLBLGenPro20.msi‘ and run it directly from command line instead of right-click – run as administrator on the .bat file and it works!

If it still doesn’t work for you after following the above steps, I guess you better do these, disable UAC and enable XP compatibility mode as mentioned here.