葬礼

今夜难得能一边享受晚餐一边听现场演唱。

我突然想起了最近一次听到的现场演唱，是在2008年初我外公的葬礼上。

当时外公的女儿们雇佣了一支乐队，他们在葬礼处摆了一大堆的乐器，在现场唱了好几首歌，都是些离别之类的曲目。歌手蛮会唱，于当时份外令人伤感。这支乐队当然另有重要任务，就是在运送外公遗体往坟场的路上演奏离别曲。

至于外公的葬礼，印象最深刻的是最后一天来了一大班“兄弟”，个个T衫短裤，其中几位带头，一个接一个的，唱了一些闽南语“江湖曲”，有点像演闽南歌仔戏，值得一提的是他们唱功扎实，从外表是看不出来的。曲终时各位兄弟齐用闽南语喊道”发啊！”，整个过程历时十多分钟，我也从头跪到尾。此环节让我印象深刻。

Busy with Web Services on WPS

For the past two weeks i had been very busy with building web services using java 1.4. Bad thing was i had to deploy them on Websphere Process Server 6.0,

I had no problem building the web services using Rational Software Architect(RSA). I tested my work by deploying to Websphere Application Server 6.1 runtime that comes together with the RSA. Everything was working fine.

However i started to have a lot of headaches while trying to deploy these web services by using Websphere Admin Consle to Websphere Process Server 6.0.2 which is running on a remote server. My web service application just could not start!

After trying out several solutions, in the end i migrated my source codes to Websphere Integration Developer 6.0(WID). I regenerated every web service related deployment configuration files and proxy classes by using WID.

This time my web service application started successfully! Well the next problem was it was unable to get database connection! It took me quite some time to figure out what's wrong with it and finally i realized that i had to get the JDBC connection from the WPS itself instead of creating my own OracleDataSource cache.

I created all JDBC connection that the web service applications needs by using the Websphere Admin Console. I also changed my code to get the JDBC connection via JNDI.
The method is simple. Just create a default initialContext, then within the context, get your JDBC connection by name like "JDBC/MyDB" will do.

How do we measure a company's financial status?

Came across this article online. I am going to try if it is really a good one. This tip is quite useful for us to identify a good company provided it is really accurate :P. Anyway it looks like the index is subjective to every country.

Run java program at backend on Windows

Normally, if you want to start a Java program to run as back end process, just type the command follow by a '&'. However, how do you do the same on Windows?

Yesterday my colleague was facing this problem and i remembered i have gone through the same problem before in my previous company. After we went through the windows command list i found something, which is the 'start' command. Then i remembered i might have used this command before when i had faced the same problem last time.

So we tried the 'start' command and it was successful.

Why IT Project Fails!

I have come across an article talking about why IT project fails!

Take a look on it!

My experience told me that business users often do not want to spend much time with the developers during the development of a system. They do not realize that it is very very critical and useful to the final result of the system by spending time reviewing developers work to find out whether something is missing at the early phase of the project! Well i do agree that agile methodology approach is very very good provided the business users are willing to allocate resource to examine the system.

Finally i am working on 2nd project!!!

Finally i have a chance to work on 2nd project after joining this company.

The first one has gone for production and it is being supported by the production support team now. Anyway there are several environment issues occurring recently. I want to help them but too bad i am involved in new project already.

To be accurate it is not my 2nd project, but 3rd one. I was involved in a 3 days proof of concept anyway and that gave me a terrible nightmares. It was a typical last minute project which everyone in the team had to work extra time! It is about to build a portal for a telecommunications client.

Now one weird thing of the WBIA running on production is that sometimes the message will be processed twice! This creates a false impression to users of the telco company that the account registration process just fails! The production support team should be quite tension right now of this issue. I think it has something to do with the configuration anyway that why certain XML message is processed twice. Why it is routed back to the adapter again!

Also today i have learned how to upload a WSDL file to DataPower and do a testing today! My teammate said basically we can replace the whole DataPower team after we learned how to configure the WSDL at DataPower. That's funny!

Working on wrong direction

One day the client raised an issue to me. That issue would not happen if the Websphere Message Broker (WMB) flow that i deployed on the server is running fine.

I checked the queue and channel status by using a tool called MQJ explorer and found out both the sender and receiver channels' status were 'inactive'. I then turned it to 'running' again. However their status will still be 'inactive' after some time. I had gone mad about this and spent a whole day trying to find out what went wrong.


In the end i know i went into the wrong direction. It is normal that after some time the status of the channels go to 'inactive'. As long as the transmission trigger is on then there will be no problem. When the next message comes in then the sender and receiver channels will be activated again.

So what actually went wrong. Argh it is because the portal team did not set the correct queue name to the JMS header of the XML message and thus no response from the whole flow!