of weekends and kung fu movies:

had a nice long weekend... family time as usual. rented a couple of kung-fu inspired movies like kung fu hustle, crouching tiger hidden dragon and house of flying daggers. kung fu hustle was a good one, its like watching those popular dragon ball z fight sequences done by live actors. crouching tiger was a bit boring, house of flying daggers was much much better.


of java and the spring frameworK:

also finally managed to port some apps to spring mvc. to those using xsl as your view component, stay away from version 1.2 for the meantime. it has a bug that causes the improper view to appear.

the nice thing about this framework is there's a tendency for the developer think about modular code. for example: i use to have methods goes something like getTransactionsByDateInXML in the service layer. this is neatly separated in spring mvc via a separate object doing the DOMification.

of blogging:

read that there will be an ongoing blog summit. varying topics to be discussed seems to be fun. way back memory lane the early form of blogging was thru publishing .plan's or creating just static pages full of todo's and random notes for the day. then it was migrated to personal online journals. i think the blog summit should also emphasize on the idea that blogs are personal. a lot of blogs started that way. you don't care about traffic, and even content. you write what you want to write. if people stumbled on your blog and say it sucks, tell them its YOUR blog and you can write whatever you wanted to write. nobody should care if 90% of your entries goes like "nothing happend today, so i have nothing to blog".

but then, if your aim is to be a blog star, then by all means, study the medium. create mind-boggling, thought-provoking, etc etc content. but if its not your aim, just do it, write it, its all about freedom. but then, it only applies to you, think twice when what you write is not about yourself.


of cs teachers and profs:

sometimes i cant fathom why students complain that their teachers arent relatively linus torvald's like material. and most specially if its students of top notch universities. compared to what i have gone thru, studying cs in the province (where resourcefullness is a must to be able to keep up with the times), i think those kids are very lucky. man, look at how they write, their english writing skills are to die for. i think they are still much, much fortunate compared to the majority of the student population who has to go thru sub-standard colleges. they have the resources and facilities. i think the main problem is the lack of SELF-MOTIVATION. the ability recognize these challenges as opportunities. in reality, their diploma stating what school they graduated is already considered an ace. so heck, why dont they just ride thru it and just spend their energy on honing their skillsets thru PRACTICE. indeed, more often than not, we see students who thinks you can learn everything by reading, or, pray tell, spoon feeding. for short, happy enough they know how it works in theory, only to curse the console later in life. also, there seems to be lack of of focus on learning the fundamental problem solving skills nowadays. indeed, we have a lot of people wandering around who knows the syntax well enough, but seems to have great difficulty when, and where to use them.

*sigh* spur of the moment blogging. my apologies if its crap. its my blog... whatever....