Start from scratch – Java

 Triviality  1 Response »
Jul 132010
 

Time to get hands dirty in Java mud ๐Ÿ˜€

Lots of projects here are Java based, plus something like Struts, Spring, Hibernate, etc.ย I don’ t like the structure much but I have to understand how to get things done, or at least I need to be able to read those codes and configurations (I hate so many configuration files in Java world).

I was trying to setup Eclipse with Struts2 and Tomcat, I was so amazed by memory management in Java VM, want to know my impression? In one world, MESS. >:) After dealing with this and that kind of all sort of “MaxXXXSize” configuration directives (or command line parameters), I finally figured out “-XX:MaxNewSize=128m” and “-XX:MaxPermSize=128m” are two of the most important parameter to make Eclipse stop reporting “PermGen Space” error.

Thinking of setting up such an IDE really takes time, I was thinking maybe I should go back to my vim time …

BTW, people here developing software on local machine (I mean desktop), Java is cute in this case – write once and run everywhere.

Weird dinner last Friday

 Triviality  No Responses »
Jul 112010
 

I recalled it was a weird dinner last Friday …

One guy from US came to visit Shanghai so we had dinner together, during the dinner I found 4 people there are: myself, my ex-boss who’s working for Microsoft now, my ex-boss’ boss (the visitor, and will move to Microsoft in September), and my ex-boss’ boss’ boss (that’s my boss now).

Glad to see I got upraded – my current boss was my boss’ boss in my last project, and he was my boss’ boss’ boss in the my project prior to that. ๐Ÿ˜€

Review meeting again

 Triviality  No Responses »
Jul 112010
 

It’s 4th or 5th review meeting for my product plan, made great progress for sure, and people are getting bored as well :D.

And each presentation shrinked from 30 pages PPT in the first meeting to 6 pages for next meeting (will happen in 20 min or so), and people who were in the meeting reduced from more than 10 down to 4 last time (guess we will have a little bit more today as it’s Monday). Topic wise, I believe everybody found that there is nothing to talk about strategy now, and time to go down to execution plan so it will be boring as most senior management people don’t care about how many days each feature will take, right?

So this is why I have only 6 pages for the meeting, and I wish it can finish in 30 minutes. There is another product in my hands and I’m planning to migrate the platform to Mail product as well, let’s see.

Good food? Maybe …

 Triviality  No Responses »
Jul 082010
 

Reading from some web site saying it’s one of the best Italian restaurant in this area, so I went there to try out those dishes recommended by other people, the result is … not that good, at least.

The environment is just OK, not many people there but this could also prove that they are not doing their business well. People there are just ok, not that professional, not that friendly, but they didn’t make any mistakes which made the dinner experience not that bad.

Food is not good at all, it could be the worst bread I ever had in a Italian restaurant. Salad is good, but too little to even feed one person. Soup is so so, I agree I don’t have good taste on soup so let’s ignore this part. What else? All dishes are kind of horrible, I don’t think it is even worse than what I can cook.

Never mind then, I will stop trying western food in the coming weeks or months. I guess some place may have something good during winter time, so I will try them again later on.

Hmmm … time to give some updates

 Triviality  No Responses »
Jul 072010
 

I’ve been away from this site for quite some time, there is only one reason for thatย – BUSY.

I think I’d better put some time on this site as there may be still someone care about me and willing to read something here instead of somewhere else, so …

Actually I have no idea where to start – I rent my apartment which is close to my office (20 min walk one way) so now I walk to office everything which seems making my life healthier. I used to get some breakfast on my way to office but I may try to find something new. I’m still skipping most of my lunches, and for dinner I had it with colleague (that will be a rich dinner) or have it alone (most time, it’s just a bowl of noodle).

Weather here in Shanghai is horrible, but seems I can still live with it, since I spend more of my time in office or at home, which means I have air conditioner for almost all the time. The only tough time is whenever I went out for smoking, but anyway that’s not healthy so let’s take it as punishment.

Business wise … things are just ok. It’s a big company now so it is not the pure start-up model that I was expecting, but things are still moving forward and I’m feeling busy now – after almost 2 years of “nothing to do”. I’m hiring, but I failed couple of times to get a product manager, so I think I’m going to focus on existing people, try to push some kids to see if they can grow fast enough. Engineer wise it’s mixed – I have problem in hiring expert on mail protocol (SMTP, POP, etc) as it is not that popular now but I have no problem finding people who want to do backend stuffs (distributed storage, etc), I didn’t pay too much attention on front-end engineer as it won’t be too bad, but I need to grab at least on in the coming weeks.

There are some business deals that I’m working on but I cannot share with public, but they are all moving smoothly. The BD manager who’s working with me is really really really smart, helped me striked pretty good deals and moving things forward even faster than I was expecting. He got a girl helping him now, and I wish the rest of the business negotiation will be as good as before.

Back to product, I have to prepare product plan due to lacking of product manager. Good thing is that I can learn to prepare those stuffs though I’ve been reading those B.S. for so many times, bad thing is that it’s time consuming.

Pretty much everything that I have at this moment, I will give out more things later on, once I have some.