Thursday, April 28, 2005

Riding my Honda

Took the Honda for a ride today. It was like heaven driving the Honda after a long time. The feeling was absolutely great. For sometime I was driving a Pulsar. Should resort to driving the Civic at least during the week ends.

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Using the Database - IP Address Lookup - Community Geocoding IP Addresses Project

Stumbled upon this while searching for something else on the web. This is a free database that you can use to determine the location of a user from thier IP address: Using the Database - IP Address Lookup - Community Geocoding IP Addresses Project

They did locate my country correctly, but not the city. But this could be useful for web application developers to find out where thier users are coming from and they can even show thier country flags. A cool thing indeed.

MS Data Access Applicatin Block & Portal Starter Kit

Completed the helper class for OleDb for data access application block. There was nothing much involved in it.

My next task is to convert the Portal Starter Kit to work with MS Access. For this I have already exported the SQl database to Access. But the issue was the SP's are not exported and I have to manually create them. This requires some work cos not all the features supported in SQL Server SP's are not supported in Access. But should be able to get things done in a couple of days.

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Microsoft Data Access Application Block

I was just browsing though the MS DataAccess App block and suddenly realized that it only supports SQL server. So without complaining about it I decided to code the OleDbHelper class my self, of course by taking the que from the SqlHelper Class.
Thought of just copying and pasting the code and then replacing all 'Sql' s with 'OleDb' but hten decided against it. Decided to take each method and do it individually. At least that way I'll get a better hang of the app block.
And the next step will be to create a helper class for SqlCe. Now that will be quite a challenge cos of the limited functionality of SqlServerCe.

Monday, April 18, 2005

Back to work!

Hmm It's Monday. You know the usual feeling. After the holidays coming to work was a total let down. Specially after a week end out of Colombo, with my baby! That was totally fun.

As usual Mondays are a bit boring and a bit dragging. Everybody is draggin g their feet a little bit too slow. So need to breathe some energy into these folks.

Well I am waiting to see a mail from Singapore. As usual, I have a feeling they might want us to do something that is erally CRITICAL aroung 5.30 pm. Well it's 5.00 and still no mail. ANd if a mail doesnt arrive within the next 30 mins I'll be lucky.

I'm still trying to figure what I like about this job. Is it the pressure that they put us in?

Friday, April 15, 2005

A Friday Night...working!

This time it's the same story. They say they dont care if we have a long holiday or not. But having said that, what really bothers me is the attitude.

They had two full days to test the system and request mods and to report bugs. But no, they wiat till 5.00 pm on Friday to report the issues, and tell us that it has to be fixed by Monday. Now that's really some attitude. Why couldn't they test a little earlier and let us know a little in advance. So we would have done this work during day time and would have enjoyed the evening chilling.

Just a little bit of compassion will do!

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

An all nighter..

It's been a long, long time since I wrote anything here. Mainly cos, I've been busy and had been a little lost for words.

But since today I am working all night, because our head office told us that they dont care whether we have long holidays or not, I thought I'd pen down a few thoughts.

First of all, I understand them complaining about us having the most number of holidays in the world. Te hfrustration is understandable.

But when the holiday concerned is a national holiday with a lot of cultural significans to us Sri Lankans. We dont ask them to work on Chinese New Years day, do we?