In our current project, we have to work with WinForms using VS 2005 and VSS as the project source control. There are two solid developers and one developer/Product Manager involved in the coding of this project. Our Product Manager suggests and prefers we use VSS rather than SVN for better source management (check in/out). As for us, developers (me and my bro), we had a great time using SVN in the last project and prefer to use SVN; nevertheless both of us are flexible and agreed to work with VSS after a few discussion. Things are fine when I focus on designing forms and my bro working on code behinds. But the problem arises when we start testing on a few forms, which need both of us to work on design view.

In VS2005 WinForm IDE, it adds or writes to the licenses.licx file whenever you use custom controls/third party controls such as Infragistic in your form. Though I’m not so sure, I observe that the licenses.licx file is not needed if you work entirely with normal winform controls, but with third party controls, it acts as a config file storing the references of the controls.

Once you add a project to VSS DB, the licenses.licx file is always binded since it’s part of the project property. You can check out the code just fine but when you work with the form design, you’re forced to check out the licenses file. If you don’t/can’t check it out, you can’t do anything to the form design. With VSS, it’s really a pain if one developer checked out the licenses file exclusively, others can’t do any design work on any of the forms. To solve the exclusive checkout on licenses file, we tried to exclude the licenses.licx from the project and let it stay in local folder. Unfortunately, the file itself is part of project property and once it’s excluded, it loses the references as well. For that little experiment, I’ve lost two of my form designs and have to start all over; thank god, they were just small forms. With that failed experiment and out of ideas, we searched for the solution on the web. Found out that it was a known issue for VS2005 IDE and the fix would only available with the next release of Visual Studio. The only work around they suggest so far is to use VSS multiple check out mode.

We don’t want to use Multiple check out mode in our VSS DB for:

1. VSS doesn’t provide individual file multiple check out mode but for the whole DB,
2. There are a few careful steps to take before checking back in the multiple check out file. (You cannot check in directly. You must get latest on that file to ensure you get different versions from other developers to merge the file then only you can successfully check it back in.)
3. VSS merge is a real pain and should I would never trust it. Unless ofcos’ you don’t care about losing some of your codes or have a separate backup, go a head and try it out.
4. There is the need of source control administrator for merging files.
5. And again, don’t trust VSS Merge and can’t rely on it.

But untill the next VS release, it’s the only possible way so we don’t have a choice but to use that method. Don’t have time to dig up properly either. So gonna stuck with this problem for the whole project. It’s just making my life miserable. *sign*

Readings: MS Feedback | Forum Q&A

So I’m one of 53 participants (I hope) of the first round of CSSOff – Jabroni. (too many Ofs)

I always have a problem with world time zones. I had to ask two of my friends from US to check for the time. But their times are also different so they can only tell me the estimates. I did sent the entry a few hours before due time (I hope).

I don’t care whether it went in on-time or not; I’m just satisfied with myself that I’ve done something on my weekend and enjoyed it. It was interesting; took me a couple of hours to think the possible ways to slice and shape it up. I got bored on half way but my bro said I should finish up and done with it, so I did.

I’m not that satisfy with my CSS structure but I think I tried my best. It’s valid xhtml transitional. I don’t know why I didn’t make it xhtml strict…I guess I forgot and used to with my normal xhtml transitional Doctype. I thought of asking a friend to recheck my code but I dismissed that thought cos’ it’s a competition and I should participate it fair and square to find out what I’m capable of. I’ll upload my entry on my site soon.

Here is my entry: CSSOFF – Jabroni (2007-06-01)

Anyways, my weekend was meaningful and busy one…yah not bad. How’s your weekend go? Oh, Do you know any good world time site/application that list different types of time zones and country times? I’m too lazy to google.

အခုတေလာ ဘေလာ့ဂါ ျမန္မာစာ ရိုက္နည္းက်င့္ေနတယ္။
လက္ကြက္ကို ေကာင္းေကာင္း မွတ္မိသြားျပီ။ စာရိုက္ေတာ့ အရမ္း ေႏွးေသးတယ္။ လက္ကြက္ စာရြက္ၾကီး တၾကည့္ၾကည့္ အဆင့္ကလြတ္သြားလို႔ ကိုယ့္ကိုကိုယ္ ဂုဏ္ယူတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ေရးရတာ အရသာမရွိသလိုပဲ၊ ကိုယ္ေျပာခ်င္တာေတြက ဗမာလို ေကာင္းေကာင္းထြက္မလာဘူး၊ စာေၾကာင္း ေကာင္းေကာင္းစီလို႔ မရဘူး။ ဘာပဲျဖစ္ျဖစ္ ငါဗမာစာ ရိုက္တတ္သြားပီကြ လို႔ေျပာလို႔ရသြားျပီ၊ သိပ္မ်က္ႏွာငယ္စရာ မလိုေတာ့ဘူး။

အခုတေလာ ဘေလာ့ဂါ ျမန္မာစာေတြ ျပန္ဖတ္ေနတယ္။
ဘာရယ္လို႔မဟုတ္ပါဘူး၊ စာတလံုး တတ္ထားတာ၊ မေမ့ေအာင္လို႔။ ကိုယ္ဖတ္တဲ့ စာတလံုးရဲ့ အဓိပၸါယ္နဲ႔ တန္ဖိုးကို နားလည္လာေအာင္လို႔၊ အရသာရွိရွိ ခံစားႏိုင္ေအာင္လို႔။ ဘယ္သူ႔ အတြက္မွ မဟုတ္ဘူး၊ ကိုယ့္အတြက္ ကိုယ္ပဲလုပ္ေနတယ္။

အခုတေလာ ဘေလာ့ဂါ စာအုပ္ထူၾကီး ၃အုပ္နဲ႔ မ်က္ႏွာအပ္ အိပ္ျဖစ္ေနတယ္။
မိုက္ခရိုေဆာ့ဖ္ စာေမးပြဲ ဆက္ေျဖဖို႔ စဥ္းစားထားတာ၊ တဆင့္ေတာ့နီးသြားျပီ။ ဟိုး ေခ်ာင္ထဲက ဖုန္တေလာေလာနဲ႔ စာအုပ္ၾကီးေတြ ခုတင္ေပၚျပန္ေရာက္ေနလို႔။ အိပ္ေဆးေကာင္းေကာင္းတစ္ခြက္လဲရသြားတယ္။ စာအုပ္ ကိုင္လိုက္တာနဲ႔ ေခါကနဲပဲ။

အခုတေလာ ဘေလာ့ဂါ အလုပ္ေတြ အရမ္းရွဳပ္ေနတယ္။
project ေတာ္ေတာ္ၾကီးၾကီးတစ္ခုကို တာဝန္ယူထားရတယ္။ မလုပ္ဖူးေသးတဲ့ နည္းအသစ္တစ္ခုန႔ဲ ဒီ project မွာစလုပ္ရတယ္။ နည္းသစ္ရဲ့ လုပ္ေဆာင္ခ်က္နဲ႔ အသံုးျပဳပံုေတြကို အခ်ိန္ယူျပီး ေလ့လာေနရေတာ့ ပံုမွန္ ထက္ပိုျပီး အခ်ိန္လဲၾကာ၊ ေခါင္းလဲ စားတယ္။ အဲလို project ေတြလုပ္ရျပီဆိုရင္ အလုပ္အေၾကာင္းကလြဲလို႔ ေခါင္းထဲမွာ ဘာမွ မထားေတာ့ဘူး။ စားလဲ ဒီစိတ္၊ သြားလဲ ဒီစိတ္၊ အိပ္လဲ ဒီစိတ္၊ ညညေယာင္လို႔ ထေအာ္ရင္လဲ အလုပ္အေၾကာင္းပဲ ေအာ္မိမွာပဲ။

အခုတေလာ ဘေလာ့ဂါ သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြနဲ႔ စကားသိပ္မေျပာျဖစ္ဘူး။
သူတို႔ေျပာတာေတြပဲ နားေထာင္မိေနတယ္။ ကိုယ္မွာ အလုပ္အေၾကာင္းကလြဲရင္ ေျပာစရာ စကားမရွိလို႔။ ေလစိမ္းေတြ တိုက္ေနတာမဟုတ္ဘူး၊ ေလျငိမ္ေနတာ။

အခုတေလာ ဘေလာ့ဂါ စိတ္ရွဳပ္ေနတယ္။
ပြစိပြစိ ေဘးကလာေျပာတဲ့လူေတြကို တခုတခုနဲ႔ ေကာက္ေပါက္ပစ္ခ်င္တယ္။ ဘာေတြေျပာသြားမွန္း နားထဲကို မဝင္လိုက္ဘူူး၊ တဂြီဂီြ တစီစီပဲ ၾကားလိုက္တယ္။

အခုတေလာ ဘေလာ့ဂါ စိတ္ဓာတ္က်ေနတယ္။
လုပ္ခ်င္တာ၊ ျဖစ္ခ်င္တာ ေတြမ်ားျပီး ဘာမွ အရာမယြင္း မျဖစ္ေျမာက္လို႔ပဲ။

အခုတေလာ ဘေလာ့ဂါ စိတ္ပ်က္ေနတယ္။
ရည္မွန္းခ်က္ေတြ၊ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္ေတြ ကင္းမဲ့ ေနတယ္။ ေရလိုက္ ငါးလိုက္ ေပါ့ေပါ့ေလးပဲ ေနခ်င္တယ္။ အဲလိုေနခ်င္တဲ့ စိတ္ကို ဘာလုုပ္ရမွန္းမသိ စိတ္ကုန္ေနတယ္။

အခုတေလာ ဘေလာ့ဂါ ဘာကိုမွန္းမသိ စိတ္ဆိုးေနတယ္။
ကိုယ့္အသံုးမက်မွဳေတြကို ေဒါသထြက္ေနတယ္။

အခုတေလာ ဘေလာ့ဂါ စိတ္ေရာဂါအထူးကုေဆးရံု ေရာက္ဖို႔ ပိုနီးနီးလာတယ္။
စိတ္ စိတ္ စိတ္ စိတ္ နဲ႔ တစိတ္စိတ္ ျမည္ေနတယ္။

အခုလဲ ဘေလာ့ဂါ ေပါက္တကရ ေခါင္းထဲေပၚရာ ေလွ်ာက္ေရးေနတယ္။
အား ေခါင္းထဲမွာ ဘာေတြမွန္းကို မသိဘူး။
ေလာေလာဆယ္ေတာ့ ဘေလာ့ဂါ အိပ္ခ်ိန္ေရာက္သြားျပီ။

X: What’s for lunch today?
Me: Chicken and Egg
X: Very good; mother and fetus.

Thought #1: I never thought of it that way before…now that he mentioned it, it sounds very eeky. I feel sorry to eat up the whole family. Gosh that’s it, I’m gonna tell my mom, not to cook Chicken and Egg the same time.

Note: It’s not cooked as combination but a separate two curries. Egg, potato and green peas as one and separate fried chicken as one. Still…mother and fetus.

Thought #2: You know, when you eat stake or pork or anything with lots of meat fibers, it got stuck in your teeth. I hate that feeling the most. Sometimes if it’s really stuck in between, you can’t even remove them by brushing your teeth. You gotta floss them with some thread. Oh I just hate that so much. So trying to eat less meat.

Thought #3: Last night Mom says, she’s becoming a Peking duck because she missed her badminton games for a few weeks. I asked her what is that mean and she said Peking ducks can’t wonder around. They just sit in their own little boxes, get fed everyday and waiting for their time to get eaten. It sounds very painful just living to get killed. Mom said every animal live stock are just living and eating to get killed/eaten. That make us, human, to be very cruel beings. I feel very sorry for those animals.

Thought #4: I recalled someone says, eating meat is regarded as consuming on dead corpses. That is just so gross.

Thought #5: Going back to thought #2, I got another thought about tooth brushes. There is a Colgate tooth brush Ad on FijiTVOne. There is this big glamorous tooth brush and small normal tooth brush. It goes something like this:

Small Brush: Ah…excuse me Sir; are you the Colgate 360?
Big Brush: Yes, I am.
Small Brush: Is that true that you have a tongue cleaner?
Big Brush: That’s right, not only tongue cleaner, I’m a teeth and gum cleaner.
Small Brush: Waarh!!
Big Brush: You see kid, blar bla blah……
(The big brush talks of some explanation talk on his special features and stuffs.)

Finally the small brush says:
Small Brush: You know when I grow up I want to be just like you.
And the Ad ends there.

Whenever that Ad comes, I always wonder this BIG question in my head:
When a tooth brush grows old, you throw it in the rubbish bin and buy a new one.
How can that “Small Brush” be just like the “Big Brush”?

C’mon, I don’t want to disappoint him, but he gonna go straight to the bin for sure. Unless you recycle him (upgrade to Colgade 360) or whatever. But he still going to the bin. LOL.

Thought #6: I have another big thought on Coca-Cola TV Ad as well. This guy, he put a coin to the soda machine, the coin starts rolling in and there is this big Cola factory with all those cartoon characters bringing Coke bottle, filling up by mid-air Cola tank, icemen gets blown away by big fan to frozen the Coke bottle and they shooting fireworks as filling up the gas…and finally perfectly filled Coco-Cola bottle comes out from the machine. The guy took it and get confused by little Christmas music coming out from the box. The Ad ends there.

Now here is my thought. I like the Ad very much for all those cartoon characters and the music. But there is one place I don’t understand. There are some kind of puffy white dolls kissing all over the Coca-Cola bottle before it gets frosted up by icemen. What are they for? Are they for cooling purpose? But icemen pretty much done the cooling process. So till now, it’s a mystery for me and I keep wondering what those kissing puffy dolls do in the Ad. If anyone knows the reason behind those puffy kisses, please let me know so that I can sleep well at night. LOL

Note: Surprisingly, my genius brother, who normally get the ideas from TV Ads quite easily asked me the same question about kissing things other night. So now we both searching for the truth behind kisses. Hehe.

Thought #7: There is another Ad on “D-Power” dish cleaning soup. I can’t stand that Ad cos’ it’s so awful the way they act in there. But the music stays in my head and can’t get rid of it. It goes “D-Power, Oielai lai lai…D-Power”. It makes me wonder what is that “Oie lai” actually express in there; does it make like “Wow” or “OMG” or “Zzz” kind of expressions?

Ok this “Oie lai” is the same thing/expression as “A Ma Lai” in Burmese. You can use “A Ma Lai” with different kind of expression depending on the sitution rite? Well that goes for this “Oie Lai” too. So in this Ad, I always wonder what expression does it emphasise upon. Hmmmm

Ok enough with stupid thoughts; they all started from Chicken and Egg story which go all over TV Ads.
Now May, back to work!!!

I read this news, Going to school ‘not compulsory’, on BBC other day and am thinking about it since.

Parents in England are being reminded that they have the right to educate their children at home if they wish.

My school years were filled with memories and remembrances that would sink in for the rest of my life. I enjoyed everything about my school life. You can appreciate more once you finish school and getting away from school environment. People tend to say they hate schooling or studying and just want to get over with it but in reality every single one of us misses our school lives later in our life. My high school and Uni years are nothing extraordinary yet they are one of my treasured memories. I’ve never think of home schooling as any normal person’s choice and I only understand those who home-school are to be:

• people with redundant amount of cash (filthy rich who can afford private tutors/governors)
• popular/famous people, where their fame gets in the way of public study (such as high-classed families, celebrities)
• handicaps and disabled people who need special treatment and
• those with unfortunate circumstance that they cannot do regular schooling (eg. traveling families)

Apart from those people, the average normal family should send their children to school and make the schooling (study at school) compulsory. After reading the article, I got some thoughts of my owe. What would I do in this case? What if I am a parent and am given a choice to either home feed the kid or send them to school? My answers are quite obvious and simple. If it’s in any normal situations, I’ll send my kids to school and never let them stay at home. If they don’t want to go, I’ll make them go. For the age of 1 – 18 they are in my control and for that they must act as I say. So go to school or ELSE!!!
These are some of the reasons they gave for home schooling.

SOME REASONS FOR CHOOSING HOME EDUCATING

1. Distance or access to school
2. Religious, cultural or philosophical beliefs
3. Dissatisfaction with the system
4. Bullying
5. Short-term particular reason
6. Child’s unwillingness or inability to go to school
7. Special educational needs
8. Parents’ desire for closer relationship with children

The article mentioned the pros only. What about the cons? My response to the above given pros would be :

1. The first point is understandable and can be added to those exceptional cases.
2. The second point is unreasonable. I would think whichever religion or culture that would restrict a child from going to school and oppose social interaction to be a lame culture.
3. The third point itself is lame so no farther expression to add on it.
4. Dealing with Bullies, gang fights and normal peer pressures are necessary to thicken your skin. You will encounter numerous bullies and abuses in life. School is the best place to get your first experience of the first step to enter the real life.
5. Goes into those exceptional cases as well so it’s fine.
6. If you give yourself in to your child’s will, you child will be spoil little brat. It is a parent’s responsibility to guide them through inspite of their unwillingness. If you fail to do so, you are also a spoil little brat’s Mom and Pa – the bigger brats. Ok for the second part of “inability to go to sch” will go to special cases of disable and handicaps who need special cares so it’s alright for them to home school.
7. If your child is a genius or the other-way-round then he obviously needs to get special classes of his own. So I agree that home school in this case is the best for him.
8. I have nothing to say except that they are the biggest idiots of all.

Here are more of my thoughts on some quotes in the article.

It is the legal right of parents to educate their children at home if they so wish and the Department for Education and Skills supports the right of parents to make this choice for their children.

It’s unspoken yet always there as one of the parents’ rights. There is no need to emphasize that it is a legal right. But since it has been legalized, it is better for those who needs an acknowledgement.

It really is so heart-warming to families to have their choices recognized in this way.

Sometimes having too many choices make you go stray. You get confused what to choose. Sometimes I wonder why can’t we all be given one best choice and just follow that? I always have a great difficulty making decisions. What if the one you choose is the wrong choice for you? You’ll be regretted for the rest of your life. Too many choices make me go nuts!

But the authorities have no right to enter people’s homes or make routine checks on children’s progress.

Again, too much freedom can be very dangerous if it is being misused. In this case, how can one monitor the progress of a child?

“Children learn in different ways and at different times and speeds.”

That is true, but IMHO they learn more in the presence of competitions and social interactions. They speed up their abilities in the presence of friendship and team work, provided that they are with a good peer group. Competition is a catalyst for personal improvement. Depending on how a person handles it, competition can either boost your goals or put you in misery and self depression. But for me, every competition is a good competition whether you win or lose. If you have the ability and strength to stand up for the competition then you are already a winner.

Home-schooled kid is like a little bug in a cocoon where he thinks the cocoon is the only world he know of and he exists around his little world.
# It restricts the social and mental development of your child. For eg. They might not know how to communicate with their peer group, how to handle different mind-sets.
# They lack social experiences such as school trips, parties, sports events etc.
# They most probably become a mommy/daddy boy, who don’t know how to grow up and always sticking to the parents.
# Time management problems. No good concentration at home, you can never do something properly at home in one sitting cos’ there is always too much distractions around.

Also there are some points that the article didn’t explained on which I wonder over.

# What about the home-school course work compare to proper school curriculum?
# What would they do for the tests and exams?
# Who would decide whether those home-school kids are qualify for the level?
# Which grades or reports they show to enter universities? (what are the prove of their qualifications?)
# Who would design/decide on those grade reports ie. which grade to give them? (since the educators are the parents themselves and no interference from outside is allowed)
# Will the employers accept those home-feed kids as qualify people for the job?
and so on……….So, if you are given that kind of option to either send your kids to sch or home-sch, what would you do/choose? Now it’s your turn. Let’s think it through and share with me.

Link: Going to school ‘not compulsory’

Scenario: My mom checking out what I’m doing and curious about who my friends are.

Me: tap tap tap….
Mom: what are to doing?
Me: Chatting with Missy.
Mom: Are they your friends? (Looking at my gtalk friend list icons)
Me: yah
Mom: who is the one called D-A-D?
Me: huh? Who?
Mom: D-A-D
Me: LOL it’s Dad!! Faygyi lay.
Mom: Oh, you chat with your father across the room too.
Me: You don’t know who the person is in the photo?
Mom: well I can’t see the photo properly.
Me: Yah yah that’s Dad.

For some reason, I chat with my dad and brother on gtalk at home instead of go talk to them in person. Last time, I was asking something to my brother over gtalk then he started yelling from his room, why am I chatting him on gtalk instead of just ask him outside. My mom is the only one who doesn’t use computer at home so I do the proper talking with her the most. At work too, all of us talk each other over gtalk even that person is sitting a few feet away from you. I guess I’ve been communicating with my laptop too much that I hardly ever need to do the real talking. These days I’m excessively using gtalk or emails for my communication purposes. Oh geez, what if I forget how to talk. haha that’ll be interesting.

Talk about OHS in work environment, our office stinks! I mean really really stinks, the real rotten dead rat kind of stinks. It’s been stink for two whole weeks now. First we thought someone in the office didn’t take a bath but obviously it shouldn’t stink that much. We searched for a dead rat but till now in vain. Then we concluded it must be the air-condition problem. So we called the technician to check. He changed the filter and sprayed aerosol. The smell disappeared for a while and back again as usual. The problem is some people get the rotten smell and some don’t. It might depend on the air circulation in the room. Anyway, I’m one of the most unfortunate ones in the office for I have to work with that rotten smell for two weeks already plus that stupid AC is too cold for my liking. Occasionally (quite a lot this week) people are yelling and arguing and throwing and banging things around me. Headache and suffocation, really spoiling my mood!!!

Updates:
On the third week of despair, we’ve finally found out the source of the problem. It’s a dead rat after all. The smell has been spread out the entire place and everyone starting to dig up the drawers and junk mess. Found out that the rat was on the table, behind the servers all tangled with wires. It must have gotten an electric shock.

Ironic enough, we found it behind Zatlite’s desk; he has been desperately searching for it without success last week. Today with the help of the rest of the gang, get hold of the rat.
Pheeeww!!!