Wil Tan

Happy Rice Dumpling Festival

I haven’t gone out to get a real glutinous rice dumpling but this one I took away last night at Ryo-Te (Falcon Street, Crows Nest, Sydney) will do.

I bought a 17″ LCD Monitor (a Samsung SyncMaster 740N) from Kingsford yesterday for $325. Came home, set it up and started happily using it. Went to sleep, woke up with a stiff neck. I did not make the connection to the LCD monitor immediately, attributed it to my sleeping position. After brunch, I got back to work and sat down in front of the lapper and realize that I had to strain my neck to look at the LCD on the left. Then the light bulb went off, I should’ve put it on the right of my lapper!

Look at how far the mouse is from the LCD – which means I have to keep my right hand holding the mouse while turning my head to the left to face the LCD monitor.

A little lesson learnt, this is much better…

Also caught a nice rainbow over Kingsford yesterday for your viewing pleasure.

Warm orange glow over the skyline at dusk..

This camera doesn’t do them justice of course.

Yes, I’m on a roll – week after week of healthy activities, jogging, snorkelling and now kayaking! Ever since Tiff and I are living oceans apart we’re both trying to have a “lfe”. It’s certainly not easy just living day to day without your soul mate, especially one whom you’ve grown so used to seeing every day for the past 9+ years. Many friends have asked how we do it. All I can say is that we’re coping, gets us through the days.

On the upside, we now have a bit more free time outside of work. So, for me I make an effort to breath fresh outdoor air and see daylight more. Today I have definitely outdone myself by going to Shelly beach for snorkelling and sun tanning, then heading to the Spit Bridge for some kayaking in Sydney harbour. Shelly beach snorkelling is turning into a weekly routine, and if winter does not get much worse I foresee myself there for a long time. Swimming with gorgeous marine fishes among the corals is really the best form of relaxation. It’s so beautiful, peaceful and surreal. I’m convinced that Brian Eno’s Deep Blue Day was written for the activity. Well, this and psychedelic expeditions.

Here are some pics of my day at the beach:

Hmm… I wonder if the trucker could see the bandicoot.

Me and my iPod

Methinks I caught a good shot of the girls playing

It’s the shadows of course, I’m not so tan yet.

The next destination is Spit Bridge, Mosman, just 15 minutes drive from Shelly, where they have kayaks for rent. Rented a Kayak for an hour and paddled around the harbour area, crossing under the bridge, watching boats zoom by and occasionally pausing to snap photos with my camera phone. Here’s a selection of shots:

Many more scenic shots (and in higher resolution) on my flickr album.

Had Korean BBQ with Clare and Hazel at Charcoal Mine Barbeque House — a cosy restaurant in Parramatta. Fresh food, good service and positive vibes: highly recommended. Most notably: their shoyu button mushroom (absolutely umami when barbequed!), squid (I’ve never tasted the natural flavour of squid like this), beef ribs, and the chilli sauce with a free flow of coriander leaves was simply heavenly!

After dinner we went back to the Coffee Alchemy roastery, I did not miss the chance to get a bag of freshly roasted coffee beans, which means I can dump the almost-stale batch that I bought before I left for my US trip. If you’re in Australia, you owe it to yourself to try one of her blends, I guarantee you will not be disappointed.

The downer of the day had to be getting a parking fine right in front of my place, which used to be a free-parking zone until two days ago when they decided to put the 2P restrictions in place. Thanks a lot, I do not remember being notified of this by post or otherwise. I’ll be sending a letter of appeal tomorrow, they will not get a dime from me.

When I first saw the news about the newly released Google’s Web Toolkit:

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatabilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

I thought to myself, since when is Google so into Java anyway? Friends of mine know that I’ve never been a big fan of Java mainly due to its There’s Only One Way To Do It philosophy that so starkly contrasts the motto of my favourite language – Perl. As much as I try to avoid it, I often find myself needing to use it (with non-trivial involvement) throughout the years (10!) Even in my current job at NeuStar, I would say Java has 80% mindshare in the company. These days, with advanced tools like Eclipse (not to mention age – mine, that is), my view on the language has certainly improved by heaps and bounds.

So, after reading more into the toolkit, I realized that, oh my God, that’s an excellent idea! Not only does it take care of browsers’ idiosyncracies (at least it claims to), it allows you to program Javascript in Java giving you compile-time checking, type-safety and reusable Ajax-aware widgets, debugging support (using your favourite IDE). Let’s face it, Javascript never had the features to support programming robust applications and differing levels of support by different browsers only makes it worse. It even purports that you can avoid the much-dreaded AJAX problem of breaking the browser back button!

Until now, I’ve been wary about going Ajax with anything I program mainly because I have to learn about browser quirks and inject ugly hacks. Moreover, it will invariably reverse the 80-20 rule; unless you are Ajax God, you will spend 80% of your time achieving 20% core functionality.

So, this is very good news and gives me the reason to incorporate some snazzy Ajax in my existing apps wherever it makes sense. Once I get some spare cycles, this will be the first I play with.

This is really funny… 2 aussie blokes remade scenes from “Blues Brothers” (here) and “When Harry Met Sally” (the fake O scene).
Good thing for them, they’ve got Quickflix (Aussie’s equivalent of Netflix.com) and Intel Viiv to sponsor them.

Received this in the letter box yesterday – a packet of seeds from NeuStar for the May Diversity Inclusion Celebration… so nonchalantly sneaking past AQIS.

Milestone: 10 days

Had lunch at our fav HK joint

At UNSW