Lots of projects here are Java based, plus something like Struts, Spring, Hibernate, etc. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I will check all my settings again, there should be 20 or so accounts to be checked. I wish after that I can have a tidy mail setup.

By the way, I’m posting this with my iPad in a starbucks.

Now I have most of my office environment setup, which is good, I can access email, reading policies and tracking my requests, chatting to colleague over the OC (Office Communicator from Microsoft), all looks good.

The bad? The office is really crowded, well, everybody mentioned that we are going to move the the new building in weeks, so there is hope, but … it is still way too crowded here. And, because all conference rooms had been converted to office, so there is no conference room at all, then … people have to discuss around the cube, and you know technical discussion, right? Loudly speaking.

The mad? Man, I’ve applied for a laptop and seems I have to deal with setup again, and this is kind of “traditional” company that people used to work late in office, but nobody gets online after they go back home, this means if I want to chat with someone the only way is calling their mobile phone. However, I can enjoy this madness as I can spend my time looking for living place, etc.

Weather is not that bad, at least for now, I wish it can still be this kind of weather forever – not too cold, not too hot, green everywhere (better than Beijing for sure).

First day, everything is totally new. Boss told me that this is a company that is growing up, so all workflow, process, etc are still under construction, which seems to be a good experience to see things are growing up, but to me it’s not that fun .

Anyway, orientation is not that bad, since the company outsource everything to FESCO (I was almost confused with Beijing FESCO), and people from there are pretty nice, patient, and processional. It seems outsourcing is always a good solution for services, and obviously people in this city is good at doing service business, no wonder for sure.

After the orientation I had lunch with boss and 3 other people that got involved in “my” project. It’s kind of tough to me to catch up, especially in memorizing names … you know I told myself from time to time that I need to memorize people’s name, but obviously I’m not that style of people, so I’m still doing well. However, I found that I just need to interact with people, then I can make it easier – now I know the name of the HR, name of boss’ secretary, name of the production person and technical person who are currently helping my project, and tomorrow I should have meeting with them so I would behave better since I can spell out their names.

After the lunch here came the toughest task: setup my working environment, it’s really tough. I don’t know the reason but this company ask each individual, the newbie, setup machine and everything ALL BY THEMSELVES, from Windows installation to e-mail setup, and internal IM, printer, and so on. You know I’ve been in this industry for quite some time and I’ve been being an IT guy for a year or so (part-time though), but even with my experience it’s still tough. I have to say their documentation job is pretty cool, that if I have followed the instruction step by step everything should be fine, but …

Obviously they put my machine in a wrong cube so I didn’t have network connection at the very beginning (it was connected to the lab network), after moving to new cube I found that I mis-changed my password for Windows domain, while the correct thing is change everything in one run (domain, email, IM), then my IM didn’t work and it seems they didn’t enable my IM account, then I have problem accessing my email although it is just simple POP3+Outlook. After 5 hours fighting plus 4 calls to IT team, as well consulting someone else 2 or 3 times, finally I got everything up and running and it was 6pm already.

Boss came just on time, asking if I have everything settled down. Thanks god I didn’t lose my face so I was able to step into his office to talk about what I’m going to do in the coming weeks (actually, only two weeks since there will be a checkpoint after that). Other than setting up my team, digging out product direction (note, we were not talking about plan since the direction is uncertain), I still need to help some other teams, working as a consultant to see if they are doing the right thing. You know these are quite a lot jobs – hiring technical people AND production people, and some JD are still not available; doing research on current potential service provider AND looking for another alternative so that we won’t put eggs in one basket; helping monitoring system setup/development AND composing SLA proposal to customers as they asked for it, and after all I need to give a presentation in 2 weeks to show to big bosses what what we are going to do with my project and plan draft.

It will be two busy weeks to me, I also need to find out where I can rent a acceptable apartment, and I have dinner appointment with people from US (this is kind of building up network), and I will visit boss’ house.

Good thing is that hotel rental is paid by the company, so I’m thinking mabe I can leave house hunting job to the end of the month. Anyway I didn’t bring enough cash with me so I’m really poor guy now, living on creditcard .

Busy day #1, but by the end of the day, especially after talking to boss I feel kind of relax, since I know what’s in front of me and what I can do. I’m still in my old style – feeling confident after getting on board, since I don’t have any plan B so all that I can do is moving ahead.

I need to find a better way to keep connected all the time.