Go back to school

Recently, my fiance is considering to study bachelor degree that give me an opportunity to search courses among HK universities. And also I'm interested to study a master degree course as well.

I read an article from an insitute's lecturer's blog when I was finding ITIL course. I'm gonna share with you.

I remember that in the article the blogger said bachelor graduated is like that the recipent obtained a general education, master graduated is like getting a license to practise, and doctor is like getting a license to teach. I think that is so right! I just have a Professional Diploma that is not enough and I can't stop by and wait. I need to continue my study proactively.

I'm getting ready and I hope I can have this opportunity to study the master degree that all depend on the university...

Using jQuery

I discovered "jQuery" since my last job. What is that? Maybe many people know that it is a JavaScript library and easy to implement DOM and Ajax with just a few codes, and let me never need to consider cross-browser issue...Of course, it's not prefect. But I think it is good enough to me.

As I said, I used it since my last job. Because I was writing a Gmail-like web application for my department internal use, it's used for only sending HTML messages within our own department. We needed to avoid sending Internet email so it is a replacement.

Recently, I have to use it for a dynamic content update without refreshing page. So I decided to use Ajax by using it. Also I told my colleague to try it out, he also said it is easy and like to use too.

I love to use "jQuery" because it makes me controlling DOM object conveniently, and I especially love it can access data by its Ajax function using just a single line. You guys check it out here... http://jquery.com/ I hope it is useful to you too.

Flex TileList...

Have you ever developed any Flash application using Adobe Flex? I started my Flex application since I worked 2 months of my current job and now I have worked here half year.

I think it is very powerful but you used to have a good OO concept and Actionscript 3.0 knowledge. I started from zero to now (I think now is okay). But still have many many problems because of there are lots of classes and methods to use.

This time my challenge is TileList. I used TileList layout to display a list of visual items (image, buttons, video and other functions in it). I'm using a "Panel" component to surrounding the TileList that can make a title and customerized buttons and functions in the layout.

I can render items from database to the TileList. Initially, I found there is no any problem because there are just few items. Once my boss asked me to add more items to test the performance that I found some items were missing...You know why? I checked awhile and I figured out that is due to my "Panel" container.

Since TileList won't render any items from out of viewable screen, I need to scroll down to show the rest of items. But why I cannot show up even I scroll down the list? I finally found out that was due to the scrollbar is from "Panel" component instead of TileList. I was disabled TileList ScrollPolicy in order to fit the layout. Therefore, I fixed the problem by simply changing TileList ScrollPolicy to auto and disable "Panel" ScrollPolicy instead. So funny...?! No! That is really easy to mix up. I should beward of that later...

Keep learning la.

Solved a big problem of NTP...

Actually, I'm a system engineer and my company is using Linux system (SuSE). Unfortunately, one of my company's server was down since last Chinese New Year...(wow, long time ago)...I recovered it due to the reason of failure is hard drive getting bad sectors.

But a big big problem didn't solve after recovered until today, what is that? That is the time synchronizing problem. The server is used for logging our duty arrival time and leaving time, so that the time accurarcy is very important. However, I couldn't synchronize the time with NTP server.

You know, I'm in Hong Kong so the time zone is GMT+8. When I set my server's time zone to "Asia/Hong_Kong" using "YaST", my web server and the database (using MySQL) are still showing GMT time. I thought that is due to I was using YaST to set the clock, but that's not.

Thereafter, I changed the timezone using GMT+8 instead of country. It's working. Good?! No! Because I need to synchronize with NTP server otherwise my system clock will graduately delay. When I tried to use "ntpdate" to synchronize it. I changed the clock to 8 hours earlier that causes the system clock becomes incorrect again. I tried many many methods... the time could synchronize unless I changed back the timezone to "Asia/Hong_Kong" but the web server and database time will be incorrect as the result.

Back and forth, trying, trying and trying. I still could not resolve the problem. Today, I tried again to change the timezone back to "Asia/Hong_Kong" (I was using GMT+8 before). It's because I found that the server treats the time as GMT even I set GMT+8. But the problem still exists... Finally, what did I do?! I restarted my web server that is WORKING! So I restarted eddatabase server and sendmail server too. All of them are working good now, God blesses me!!!!

I'm going to challenge my Flex application la....update here tomorrow la...

CSS + JavaScript...

Last two days, I was creating a web page which uses Javascript + CSS to simulate a transition to do moving slides one by one.

I'm using a <div> tag that contains the slides locating at different positions in there, and each slide has a button to move to next slide. After a whole development done, I'd just discovered that CSS can only support integer (no floating points) to position x-axis & y-axis of object that causes me that cannot move slide from a top-left corner to another slide at a bottom-right corner if distance of x-axises and distance of y-axises are not in a same proportion.

As the result, the movement is not a straight line and that become a L-like movement. Please beware of that la...