I have unintentionally become an expert at installing and reinstalling Windows. It’s Windows XP this time.  This is my third Windows XP installation in two days, before I finally got a problematic program running correctly. It’s a silliness with software compatibility. It’s the year 2010, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 is standard. But no, this problematic program isn’t compatible with MSIE8. It isn’t even compatible with MSIE7. It needs MSIE6.

Then, I’m reminded about how difficult it is to deal with Windows. I installed a program. I attempted to install its update, but failed. The program doesn’t work anymore. So I try to uninstall. Uninstall failed. So I tried to reinstall, but it requires to uninstall the existing installation first, which fails. So I’m stuck.

I retried in a Windows XP virtual machine I have on my MBP. Main program installed. Then attempt update, but failed due to lack of disk space. So I cleared some space. The update needed about 300MB free, and I had over 600MB free after clearing some space. The update ran, then failed, oddly still running out of space. Fine, uninstall the entire program. After uninstall, I found my disk still entirely full. Huh, what happened to that program that was supposed to have occupied about 1GB of space? I checked Add/Remove Programs… it’s really not there anymore. Somehow, uninstalled without freeing any disk space. So I’m stuck again.

There’s many more silliness that I couldn’t be bothered to list them all. Just one other example is about the setup program insistence that a network installation requires the network path to be mapped. Fine. I did that. The setup program still bombed out with exactly the same error.

Sigh, dealing with these “old programs” is nightmarish. Fortunately, virtualization solutions like VMware make things just a little bit easier.

Related posts:

1. Windows 7 to Launch at US$30 Apple’s Snow Leopard must really have put the pressure on...
2. Booting Windows XP on MacBook After procrastinating for too long, I’ve finally gotten around to...
3. Linux for Newbies I’m sad to say, Linux still isn’t quite ready for...

I didn’t think the YOG intended any courtesy in their Give Way sign. My suggestion to “Please give way” was moot. It’s now officially “Give Way or Give Me $130″.

Related posts:

1. Courtesy is for YOG too After so many years of courtesy campaign, it seems our...

16. At least. Sixteen! That’s for academics!

It’s not a big building. There are only just 4 storeys (and one basement). It’s not a maze. It’s just a rather longish building. There are only two stairwells. But it seems, some academics need, or believe they need, 16 directional signs to locate a single room on the 4th storey of the building.

The excessive numbers isn’t so much because the directional signs started from the wrong building. The wrong building, because it seems it is preferred to take the elevator up three storeys, walk a long way, then climb one storey up the stairs, mostly in air-con comfort. As opposed to starting from the correct building, walking mostly along a corridor with no air-con, to take an elevator directly to the 4th storey.

That’s not the reason. The signs are just excessive. Like, for example, the above directional sign was put at a point along a narrow corridor that turns to the right. There is no where else to go. No doors. No forks. No junction. It is a mandatory right-turn. Is someone expected to get stuck trying to find an alternative to the obvious?

Or some other sign that points towards the stairs, but before that there is a door to the Gents. So add another sign to point again toward the stairs. Would someone be left wondering if their destination was through the Gents?

The most complicated thing in NUS is finding the right building. Not finding a room once you’ve got the right building.

Hmm, I wonder which way to the PREVIOuS Workshop? We need some signs…

Related posts:

1. Hotel Ibis Singapore Review – The $1 Room Yup, I’ve checked in. The deal at paywhatyouwant.com.sg is for...
2. Mother’s Day Lunch at Bukit Room I’ve been so busy lately, the backlog of blog postings...
3. Wan Chai Hong Kong Tea Room This is the Ham & Cheese Bread Toast from Wan...

For about a week now, Google Maps has been rather confused about where I am. It fixes me at a specific spot in Bukit Batok, when in reality I’m like 10km away, in an area also wrongly labeled as Pulau Bukom in the zoomed out map view. There’s nothing wrong with the GPS. It’s the way location is determined from cell tower information. For a while, though, I sent myself on a wild goose chase wondering if my dabbling with the latest CyanogenMod ROMs (alpha versions then), and particularly since I build them myself, might have messed up something on the phone.

However, it was not my ROM. I’ve verified that another Android phone on the same telco in the same place also ends up having its location fixed at that same spot in Bukit Batok. So either my telco has been messing around with its cell tower identifiers, or Google has mucked up their cell tower database.

I searched around online and found a handful of complaints about the reliability of the cell-tower location fixing method. Someone even quipped that if he ever had to run away from the law, he would turn on Latitude.

Where in Google can I send my complaint to? I don’t want to have to turn GPS on. Location has been working pretty well until last week.

Related posts:

1. Google Phone Hits Problems Google’s new phone, the Nexus One, has started to turn...
2. What if Google Became Evil Google just launched yet another new service this week. It’s...
3. My Cheque from Google Adsense Yeah, it’s my turn to show off my Google Adsense...

I just made a discovery, or perhaps shall I say, saw a relationship between the iPhone 4 signal loss problems, the way the phone is held, and multitasking. You’ve probably read about how the iPhone 4 encounters some problems with its cellular signal strength when held in a certain way. Steve Jobs answer was to simply not hold it that way. It seems that the iPhone 4 works better if held in the right hand. Well, I started to think about how I held my hand phone. Hmm. I use my left hand.

So the iPhone users around me will say, since I’m right-handed, why am I not using my right hand? Interesting question. I suppose, holding a phone doesn’t take a lot of strength, nor dexterity. It seems like a secondary activity that can be delegated to the non-master hand, so that my master hand is free to do other things. Like taking notes while answering a call. Type on a keyboard. Open a door. Eat. Hmm, and operate a certain type of heavy mobile machinery while traveling on the road. These other activities are best done with my right hand.

If the iPhone 4 had to be held with the right hand, it seems somewhat inconvenient to carry out other tasks simultaneously.

Then, I saw the connection. The iPhone doesn’t multitask. Neither, probably, do their users. I can just imagine, if an iPhone user were on the phone (held the right way, of course) walking down toward a door, they would hang up the call, return the iPhone to the owner’s pocket (or wherever), then open the door (the right way too) and walk through it. After that, the call can be resumed. Too difficult? Well, basically you should just sit still when making a call. Try not to do any other thing at the same time.

Sounds really silly?

That’s why iOS 4 now has to support multitasking.

Related posts:

1. iPhone 4 Recall ‘Inevitable’ So say crisis communication experts, Professor Matthew Seeger and Chris...
2. Problem With SingTel Mobile Network? Has anyone noticed problems with the SingTel Mobile network this...
3. iDon’t: What The iPhone Doesn’t Do Verizon, a big telco in the US, has started a...

Hmm, I must sound very geeky to be excited by the release of Android 2.2 (aka Froyo) source code today. There is already a Froyo ROM floating around the Internet, but it is only with the source availability that enables modders to build custom ROMs for various Android devices. Many Android users are happier with the custom ROMs than what originally shipped with their device. Even if it is a pristine ROM, like the one that comes with the Nexus One, that hasn’t been mutilated by any manufacturer.

But I’m a bit miffed by the fact that we still have to wait for the blessings of Google before we can see the light of the Froyo source. Isn’t it open source? If a built ROM can be floating around… then the source has got to be somewhere eh. Why in the world do we have to wait for Google’s blessings? Or that of the Open Handset Alliance? Okay, I’m sure that the legal terms allow them to do what they do. It’s just that the spirit of “open source” seems to have been slightly tainted.

Anyhow, the source is there, we should start to see wonderful ROMs emerging soon. The mods have proven to be much more interesting that the pristine ROMs. Or those defaced by hardware manufacturers. Phones are going to be just like PCs… you’d expect a quadrillion versions of Linux available on it.

And, we get the choice to have Flash. (I don’t mean the camera flash.)

[I just heard that the boss' boss has an iPad too. Sigh. I wonder  why is the iPad so exciting?]

On another topic: I finally got around to upgrading to VMware Fusion 3.1. It boasts to be 35% faster. It better be. I haven’t been terribly impressed by its performance lately. Either my MBP is getting slower, or my expectations have gone up somewhat.

Related posts:

1. Building CyanogenMod 6 from Source This is a how-to guide on building your own Android...
2. Android World Domination I came across two interesting bits of news. First of...
3. Building an Android ROM I’ve been struggling to build CyanogenMod ROM from source for...

I just heard about what the rain is doing to various parts of Singapore. Like turning Lucky Plaza’s basement into a swimming pool. It’s the kind of rain that happens only once every 50 years that has come to visit us again. Just only 209 days since the last time such a rain struck us (I think it was 19 November 2009).

I saw some pictures posted about the scene down on Orchard Road. It looks very third-world. Murky flood waters covering the roads, with stranded vehicles, even big vehicles like busses.

But don’t complain too much. Our government says it happens only once every 50 years. They must be very fast workers. That’s why 50 years of their time passes in about 209 days.

Funny, why do I remember that such floods were quite expected during my schooling days. That wasn’t 50 years ago either.

Lucky Plaza tenants are so lucky to have an indoor swimming pool. It’s apparently only a wading pool now, but I’m sure they can upgrade it to a full-sized swimming pool.

Related posts:

1. Vanessa Having Fun With Water We brought Vanessa to the Jacob Ballas Children’s Garden last weekend...
2. Princess Vanessa’s Bubble Crown This is Princess Vanessa, all dressed up in her crown...
3. Mandatory Get Out Of My Way Scheme LTA recently announced their new Mandatory Give Way to Buses Scheme to...

I wouldn’t say I’m really that much of an expert in IT project management. But I’m not fresh out of school. I’ve been working for enough number of years to have seen many things. So it is really annoying when a bunch of non-IT people want to interfere with my project planning, because they think that I’m doing it wrong, and they think they know better how to run IT projects on the basis that they know how to run non-IT projects.

The problem is that some (or perhaps many) people think that IT projects are just like non-IT projects, and they run IT projects just like non-IT project. IT projects are different, and you need to manage them differently. Sure, there are some principles of project management that apply the same way, but it is a fatal mistake to treat an IT project the same as a non-IT project. Perhaps that’s why IT projects sometimes fail.

Non-IT projects like, say, construction, renovation, or relocation, are what I consider “traditional” projects. These projects are “easy”. Alright, I know the people who do these sort of projects are not going to be pleased that I make their work sound simple. But here’s what I mean. The projects are straight-forward because there are results that can be seen, results that can be measured objectively, man-effort that can be estimated, timelines that are deterministic.

IT projects don’t quite work the same way. You could have consumed 90% of the time, but have little measurable results. It’s right at the end, perhaps that last 10% of the time, when things come together, something we call “integration”, that present the biggest challenges. That’s where things fall apart. You have to manage risks. You have to foresee problems. You have to make backup plans. It’s like playing a game of chess where you have to map out strategies way ahead of time. There may be standard patterns to follow, but there certainly aren’t standard solutions.

I talk about risk management because, really, IT project management is about reducing risks. The goal is to reduce risk level to 0%, at which point, it means the project is “deterministically completed” and you can speak about committed delivery.

The traditional non-IT projects don’t quite work the same way. So in a complicated IT/non-IT project mix, the interaction becomes a little problematic.

What is the point of asking me for a best-case scenario expedited completion time? An estimate that removes all my rubber time, and assumes everything happens on-time and works perfectly right-away? Maybe it’s nice to know, from high-level planning, what kind of best case scenario we’re talking about. But you cannot do this for committed timelines!

Say you are upgrading the computers at the Singapore Stock Exchange over the weekend. Let’s say trading hours begin at 8:30am on Monday. Do you want your project to complete by 8:30am in the best-case scenario? Or do you want a firm commitment that it will complete by 8:30am? Actually, better yet, do you want a firm commitment that it will complete sufficient early, so that if it screws up, you can activate a well-tested backup plan to restore full operations by 8:30am?

This is so simple and such a no-brainer. But I am just so shocked to have to argue over these nonsense about fixing a timeline. How can you plan an IT project based on best-case scenarios?

When I was “new”, I used to grossly overrun my operational maintenance schedules. Then someone told me this: Estimate the time taken, multiply by two, increase one order of magnitude. So if you think it takes 2 minutes to implement a change in a network device, multiple by two to get 4 minutes, then one order of magnitude to make it 4 hours. Alright, maybe this is an exaggeration. But really, you will grossly overrun the time that you think is only actually needed. With experience, we learn how to make realistic estimates of task times. Even with experience, I am still overrunning my estimates from time to time.

IT is the lifeline for many services and applications. Even more so for network. The phone, for example, already runs on the data network in many companies. Do you want to come to work knowing that the phone will work, or merely wondering if the phone will be working that day? You probably don’t even actually think about it, because you assume that, obviously, the phone will work. Whoever actually thinks it is acceptable for the phone to not work?

Related posts:

1. Content Management with Drupal I promised many moons ago to write something about Drupal....
2. I Hate Writing Minutes I hate writing minutes. I wonder why hasn’t anyone yet...
3. Project Shop Cafe We were at Paragon one of the mornings recently. We...

Sometimes, I think about how silos are formed in organizations. You know, the sort of situation where fellow colleagues are divided into organization groups that are oblivious to the existence of the others. Or, they compete with great hostility. They might as well have belonged to some other company altogether. It’s related to politicking, but it isn’t quite the same thing.

I have been in such a situation where, being part of a sub-organization seconded on a short-term to another sub-organization to help out on a certain project, that I found such silo structure so ingrained in just about everyone’s attitude in that other sub-organization. I had considered myself an “outsider”, because there was little interaction between our sub-organizations (it’s not a silo-y matter). So I found it so strange to be rallying people from that other sub-organization to get things moving. I was thinking, why is it they could not work with each other?

That was a long time ago. I was thankful that it wasn’t like that around me. Or is it?

It’s been a lousy week. Organizational problems, people problems, lunch-date problems. A simple phone call to ask a question can be treated with so much animosity. It seems like alliances have shifted. Or, maybe they hadn’t existed in the first place, and it was just a mistake to think that they did. Simple communication can become so complicated. Simple coordination can become so complicated. I’m particularly peeved when even a simple thing like setting an appointment can screw up. It’s so depressing.

I guess I like a technical job because technical problems seem so much easier to handle. Even those impossible technical problems don’t seem that hard. Human problems, on the other hand, even the trivial ones are in fact complicated.

But anyway, I wanted to rant about silos, because the things that I hate about it seem to be happening. It appears to be getting into a sad state of affairs. To be able to work in a silo-less environment is a great blessing.

Related posts:

1. 09/09/09 09:09 Today, and this time of day particularly, is one of...
2. Suicide The recent few high-profile suicide cases features in our media...
3. Building an Android ROM I’ve been struggling to build CyanogenMod ROM from source for...

It’s finally raining now in the afternoon of the second day of this Lunar New Year. I think this must be about one of the hottest ever Lunar New Year. It’s been so hot I already feel uncomfortable the moment I step out of the house to go anywhere. So thank goodness it is raining now. Oops. It seems it has stopped. But well, hopefully that brief shower cools down the ground a little, otherwise it feels as if the whole of Singapore was a giant frying pan.

All the house visiting, exchange of pleasantries and ang pows, the usual Lunar New Year things-to-do are getting too routine. I think the most outstanding thing of this Lunar New Year is the weather.

This month has been so busy that I actually hadn’t caught up with the usual list of shopping items I go through for the past seasons of Lunar New Year preparations. In fact, you might even have noticed that this blog hasn’t been regularly updated this month either.

An “incident” happened at work on the eve of this Lunar New Year that had my colleague spending about the entire day at the office. We take turns, actually, to tend to after-office hours “incidents”, but no one has yet had this misfortune of having a Lunar New Year holiday disrupted, so I think we all feel bad. Coincidentally, this incident was related to heat too. So I think this Lunar New Year is going to be remembered for the heat.

Related posts:

1. Finally a Dual Monitor Setup I finally got around to connecting up a secondary monitor...
2. Baby Vanessa is finally here! Our baby girl Vanessa was born 3rd April. Weighing 3.04kg,...
3. Where is the Paperless Office? Yes, while most people do their spring cleaning before the...