Software Salariman

How to edit a base calendar in Microsoft Project 2000:

1. Ensure that no or all rows in the Resource Sheet are selected.
2. Select menu item Tools / Change Working Time.
3. In Change Working Time dialog, select the required calendar from the drop down list, then edit the calendar.

Note that if some rows are selected in the Resource Sheet is selected, you can only change the calendar for the first resource in the selection, not a base calendar.

Labels: Miscellaneous, Software

Transferred to a new hosting service. I kept running out of disk space on the old service and the new one has more space and is even cheaper. This is essentially a test post.

Notes to myself:

• It takes some minutes before nameservers propagate the updated host address for a domain name. Check with the ISP's name server to see if the domain name has been redirected.
• To test the new host, remember to flush the browser's cache.
• Ack! Forgot to copy the PHP header files! Remember to run sync software and test on a second computer next time!

Labels: Miscellaneous

Found some better ways to use Vista's Tablet Input Panel (TIP):

• Activate TIP by wriggling the tablet's pen above the tablet's surface (in other words, don't press on the pen's tip). To turn on this feature, select checkbox Enable start Input Panel gesture in Pen and Input Devices / Start Input Panel Gesture Settings control panel. Aside: the instructions are in that dialog but it took a while to sink in that I had to avoid pressing on the pen's tip while moving the pen.
• When using Flicks to navigate, set the sensitivity close to Relaxed otherwise you have to move the pen very fast for Vista to recognize a flick event.
• Use Press and hold to generate a mouse-style Right-click event so that you can display a context menu. This action is useful for browsing (e.g. open URL in a another tab) but any selection (such as highlighted text) is de-selected.

Labels: Miscellaneous, Windows

Vista comes with a handwriting recognition system for tablet PCs, so if you have a tablet device, such as a Wacom graphics tablet, you can enter text using a pen interface. If you are used to pen interfaces on handheld devices, then the Vista version is - um - different. You can only write in a special dialog called the Tablet Input Panel (TIP), not anywhere on the screen and you have to insert the text into your text field or document window. The TIP takes some getting used to. It always appears on top of all windows if you float the window. If you dock it at the top or the bottom of the screen, it fills too much of the screen and you can't shrink it.

After some experimentation and practice here's some tips that may help you use it:

• Use an extra-fine point (ink thickness) so that you can more easily read your own writing. The default point size just makes a smudge if your handwriting is small.
• TIP can better guess your words if you have clear spacing between words and if you write on the horizontal guide with obvious descenders {e.g. g and y) and ascenders (e.g. d and h). After a while, you don't even have to cross your t's or dot your i's or even write every letter for the system to guess the right word.
• After writing in TIP you can just tap your input field to enter your text instead of having to press the Insert button.
• To cross out words, you should carefully draw a horizontal line through the middle of the entire word. If your stroke is drawn too quickly, TIP thinks that you are writing another letter and tries to guess what it is.
• TIP's Writing Pad allows you to correct the guess for a word even if you are already writing another word. For example, if you started writing "XML lag are..." you can go back to cross the "t" and add an "s" in the second word to change it from "lag" to "tags".
If you want to enter special codes such as XML tags, use the Character Pad instead of the Writing Pad, and enter each character separately.

Some improvements to TIP (if any developers are reading this):

• There should be a second horizontal guideline, like preschool writing exercise books to help TIP distinguish between capital and lowercase letters that have the same strokes, such as "x" and "X", and symbols such as "<" and "(".
• It should be possible to make the TIP dialog smaller and semi-transparent so that you can see more of a document or input field. With all the eye-candy available in Vista, it's annoying that the user can't better configure this dialog.

This entry was mostly written using TIP and edited using the keyboard.

Labels: Miscellaneous, Windows

Started laying floating floors in the dining room. We'd removed the skirting boards last weekend because we wanted new ones anyway. The floor boards had click lock joins which didn't need glue and seemed less messy than the usual ones with straight tongue and grove. Fitting the floor boards together required a certain knack of holding the boards together at an angle and pushing them together until the joins met. I crushed some of the joins initially by whacking them with a piece of wood and hammer before getting the knack. Made a mistake of leaving the moulding around the doors and having to hack some of the floor boards around them, which left a ragged edge on the floor boards near the doors. We'll redo those boards next to the door next weekend. Another mistake was not extending the boards halfway through the door frame, so the expansion joint is in the room rather than in the door. Finally, have to be remember which way to cut the board at the end of a column; the boards only join in a one orientation and I wasted one board.

The kids love the new floor. No more splinters from the old floor or bits of filler sticking to the their soles. They skated on their socks all day and played crab ball in the evening.

Labels: Miscellaneous

The shower screen has been installed and the builders have finished. It's finished!

Labels: Miscellaneous

The toilet, sink, taps, rails and vanity doors have been installed. Nearly at the end!

Labels: Miscellaneous

All the tiling, including grouting and sealing, is done. We're leaving the bathroom for a day, then we'll paint the ceiling around the light fittings before the fittings are pushed into their final position.

Labels: Miscellaneous

Started swimming again after an 11-month break. No surprise that making 500m on day one was hard. Got to 600m in day two. Aim to return to 1km sessions otherwise I won't lose any cm's. Nice that I didn't gain any kg's in the mean time.

Labels: Miscellaneous

Day 8. Tiling started on the floor, around the window and in the shower areas.

Day 9. More tiling and the frame for the bathroom vanity has been installed.

Labels: Miscellaneous

The bathroom has a new frosted window to replace the old glass louvre one. The old one was an ugly thing; the frame was weatherworn, dust collected at the bottom of the frame and the louvres were hard to clean. The plumbing outside is reconnected to the sewer pipe and we have a diverter valve to water the garden from the bath. The builders have painted some sort of primer to help the tiles stick to the walls.

Labels: Miscellaneous

The builders have sealed the joins in the walls and floor, and waterproofed them. The old inlet to the sewer has been replaced by a new plastic one. Tiling should start tomorrow.

Labels: Miscellaneous

The builders have installed the new plasterboard walls (our old walls were hard to clean and had tiles stuck to them) and laid the new waterproof concrete fibre lining for the floor and the bathtub's enclosure. They spent some time discussing how to tile the walls and how to tile around the window; Terry showed me their pencil marks on the plasterboard where they did some measurements and test layouts.

Labels: Miscellaneous

Day 0: The skip arrived in our driveway. Terry moved the car the night before else we'd be trapped!

Day 1: The builders gutted the old bathroom and filled the skip with all the junk. Terry bought some extra insulation for the ceiling.

Day 2: The bathroom has a new ceiling and insulation.

Day 3: The builders dug a pit to expose the sewer inlet, installed a new underfloor and electric fittings.

Day 4: The bathtub was installed. The builder filled it with water and told us to leave the water in for the weekend until the cement dried.

Labels: Miscellaneous

Last night, we went to Mentone Beach (south of Melbourne CBD) to look for Comet McNaught. It was a clear night and would probably be the last chance to see it in the city before the weather changed. We found a small crowd of sightseers, armed with telescopes, at the beach car park. At dusk, about 2130, we started looking for the comet in the sky but couldn't find it. A lady in a wheelchair by a telescope showed us where to look and we spotted it. It was higher above the horizon than we'd expected and very faint due to light pollution. The kids were pretty excited since it was the first comet they had ever seen.

Labels: Miscellaneous

Added a little article on making paperbacks by hand to my web site. It's kind of retro to make books, what with PDAs and mobile phones on the scene, but I've always had a soft spot for bits of paper with markings.

Labels: Miscellaneous

After moving all my stuff to my new web site, I thought it'd be simple to redirect all the visitors from the old site to the new one. After some false starts, I found that the easiest method is the following:

1. Create a moved.html file with <META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="5; URL=http://kamhungsoh.com">.
2. Copy moved.html to index.html.
3. Create a .htaccess file with this rule: ErrorDocument 404 http://members.optusnet.com.au/khsoh/moved.html.
4. Delete all files and folders on the old server and upload the new files.

The META directive in the HTML files tell the browser to load a new URL after 5 seconds. The index.html handles the case when a visitor only enters the URL without any file name. If the visitor enters the URL for a file name, then the ErrorDocument rule is activated and the moved.html is displayed.

Labels: Miscellaneous

After more procrastination, I finally got myself a domain name. Registering a domain, buying a host service, transferring my pages and blog to the new domain was a bit time consuming; luckily I could consult people who have done the same thing for advice.

Labels: Miscellaneous

After interviewing some engineering graduates, I noticed that hardly anyone brought documentation, reports or samples of their work to the interview session. It seems pretty strange to me because the interview is a graduate's big chance to make a strong impression, and giving us interviewers something to read or examine strengthens our rapport with the candidate. I suggest making a kit consisting of your transcripts, certificates, awards, reports or theses, pictures or samples of your software or hardware. Actors and artists always have their portfolios ready for interviews, so why not engineers and scientists?

Labels: Miscellaneous

I read a resume to get an idea of the person it represents. Obviously, if your resume is vague or skimpy, I'm going to get an incomplete picture. Having recently perused plenty of graduate resumes, here's what I look for:

Completeness

Write a complete timeline of what you've done recently without leaving any huge gaps. What's a huge gap? It depends on how precise you are. If you list your activities by the month, then you should explain any multi-month gaps (other than summer vacations). If you list by the year, you should explain year-sized gaps. For example, "In 2001, I took one year off studies to live in Vietnam."

Clarity

Don't obfuscate and don't be vague. Bad writing leaves a bad impression.

Academic record

Just give me the facts. "Bachelor of Electronic Engineering and Science, Honours 2A, 2006, University of Northern Mars" is fine. Better still, attach a copy of your academic transcript. It's pretty useless writing "Credit / Distinction Average" because I can read the transcripts.

Projects

Your big chance to shine! Describe your project, your involvement, highlights and lowlights. "Rescued project from failure by heroically working two days and night to remove memory bugs" is pretty impressive. "Member of final year project team" or "Reports to Project Manager" is uninformtive and uninspiring.

Work Experience

Describe relevant work experience in detail. Who did you work for, what was their business and what did you do? As before, "Member of …" and "Reports to …" is uninformative.

Interests

What are you like when you're not a wage slave? Please don't slack off and write the usual trite "Reading / Socializing / Watching Movies / Playing Games / Jogging" list. What do you really like doing in your spare time? Run the Harry Potter fan club? Train for marathons by running 10 kms a day?

Referees

Don't care until you survive the face-to-face interview and we really want to hire you.

BIG TIP: Get someone else to analyse and criticise your resume. Yes, it's painful and embarassing. Face up to the fact that hardly anyone can edit their own writing.

It's your resume, not you, that will be compared against 50 others that arrive in my inbox. If your resume doesn't have enough information or is badly written, there's no way I can tell if you're a savant.

Disclaimer: I'm not a career consultant or recruitment specialist, so don't send me any resumes to review. I'm just the dude who tries to review resumes as fairly as possible.

Labels: Miscellaneous

Graduates, take pity on the poor sod (like me) who has to read your applications looking for that handful of interesting candidates to interview. I've just read 50+ applications and resumes (and read another 50+ late last year) and almost without exception, they were dull, dull, dull. Anyone who did something out of the ordinary automatically jumped to the head of my list. Where are the innovative final year projects? Don't you take any difficult units? Just for computer science, I didn't find anyone who studied compilers, computer architecture, mathematical logic, computability or information theory, who implemented a game or a utility, contributed to an open source project, wrote an FAQ or even has a Web site!

Corollary: Don't write rubbish. Interesting doesn't mean you have carte blanche to write whatever rubbish comes to mind. If you claim to be an expert in Babbage difference engines (or more prosaically, C++ or SQL), you'll be certain that we'll find someone to ask you about your expertise.

If you want to be taken seriously, you have to rise above the ordinary graduate who only did the required units.

Labels: Miscellaneous

All the statistics in the Australian Bureau of Statistics can now be accessed for free.

Labels: Miscellaneous

The Australian Broadcasting Corp (ABC) ran a survey called "My Favourite Film" (MFF) and did a (rather cheesy) special last night. The most amusing part is the faux review of the programme by David Stratton after the end credits, where he mentions his Movie Show co-host Margaret Pomeranz's award-winning bit part in "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" and the dreadful bearded guy in the special.

If the results of MFF are to be believed, then either Australians are closet SF fans or geeks have manipulated the survey because the top ten films are:

1. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
2. Amelie
3. Blade Runner
4. The Shawshank Redemption
5. Donnie Darko
6. Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
7. Pulp Fiction
8. The Princess Bride
9. Gone With The Wind
10. Fight Club

You can find the top 100 on the web site.

Labels: Miscellaneous

Trading Post sure makes it hard to place an advertisement on-line! First, I have to install Macromedia Flash and restart my browser. Having done that, I was expecting something really special for this wonderful Flash interface. What I go was a UI that works worse than a normal web page. It takes a minute to load (I still only have dial-up) and only has to display seven pages of forms. When I have to submit an image, I can't cut and paste the path into the text field (I use 2xExplorer's Alt-C function) but I have to use the Windows file browser to navigate to the folder containing my file then press the Open button. Ho-ho-ray.

Labels: Miscellaneous

Two Mad Penguin interviews with OpenOffice developers discuss the importance of open data formats.

Gary Edwards explains why clean XML (or an open XML format) allows an organization to avoid being locked into a vendor's solution and then being left high and dry when that vendor goes belly up. Florian Reuter describes using XForms for OpenOffice's forms and the difficulties in writing importers for proprietary document formats.

It heartens me to find good arguments for developing open data formats. Data migration is a well-paying but messy task whose complexity is always underestimated.

Labels: Miscellaneous

This week, it's taking me about 10% less time to drive to work. Are higher petrol prices starting to bite and forcing commuters to use alternatives? Are some schools starting their term break a week early?

Labels: Miscellaneous

I spring cleaned my hobby Web site over the weekend; I ditched the idea of writing the source in DocBook and using XSL to produce the final HTML pages. The whole process was too cumbersome for the eight or so pages I had on my site and a pain to test. Instead, I just edit the XHTML directly using gvim, preview and validate the pages on Firefox then upload them.

Labels: Miscellaneous

Just now, I had to check out a project management module from CVS. What do you think it's called? Something obvious like ProjectManagement? project_management? No … it's called proj_mgmt. What a pointless contraction in this day and age.

Labels: Miscellaneous

When the phone rings at dinner time, it's usually some call center operator on the other end. Yes, its a wonderful offer but no thanks. Recently, some call centers have started using auto dialers to improve their staff efficiency because their operators don't have to dial out and wait for a response. The auto dialer only connects an operator when the recipient answers the phone. To foil these nuisances, just pick up the phone and say nothing. After about 10 seconds, the auto dialer hangs up. Other tips can be found in http://www.scn.org/%7Ebk269/data.html.

Labels: Miscellaneous

It was a busy evening at the Shell. I had to wait to refuel because one of the bowsers in my line wasn't working. Then I had to join a long queue to pay because there was only one cashier. "Pump 4, please," I said to the cashier when I reached the counter. The cashier looked puzzled. "Are you sure? It's been paid." I went out and double-checked. "Yep, it's 4." We worked out that someone else had paid the wrong bowser (mine) and since his or her amount was less than mine, I paid for the petrol from the other bowser and count myself lucky. Why don't customers pay the wrong bowser more often? Attendents can't match the person paying to the bowser. Perhaps by evolution, the self serve process is robust because:

1. You can't pay for a bowser that is still pumping, so you have to quote a bowser that is both idle and not paid.
2. If you quote the wrong bowser number, the person who used that bowser is probably in the shop and would hear you.

So, the incident happened because it was busy, the other person finished quickly, paid my bowser when I had just finished but I hadn't yet walked into the shop.

Labels: Miscellaneous