Today as I was walking down the street I found a old woman lying on the side of the pavement, with her face turned to the side and blood coming from her head onto the pavement.

So I stopped to take a look, as other people were doing, but it seemed as if I was the first to stop to look, I have no idea what happened before this - was she hit by a car or a person hit her, I don’t know. She looked innocent lying on the ground, like a baby would, her eyes open she appeared aware, but helpless, I guess unable to move.

I immediately asked the shop owner nearby if he had called the police, ambulance, he said he had. I thought of doing something to help her, but then remembered two things, one is that you shouldn’t move someone who might have neck trauma. The other is getting involved can cause legal problems, but I wasn’t all that worried about that, the pull of responsibility to care is higher.

So people gathered around, I decided I can’t really do anything to help her as far as I know, so walked slowly away and turned back now and then. I saw the ambulance coming to her in the distance, so went to the coffee shop and sat and drank my coffee. (It just occurs to me that if I was a witness to the event I should wait around to tell police what happened, but I don’t know what happened).

Maybe that was the end of her life, she seemed so innocent to me lying there, the poor old women, I hope she had someone to care for her, I wish everyone had someone to care for them always. It will be me like that someday, hopefully more peacefully.

Filed under: Hong Kong | 1 Comment

I consider myself to be a Christian. However Christians often feel affronted by difficult questions when integrating the Bible with other bodies of current knowledge. Why should it be offensive to ask difficult questions? Here are some difficult but obvious questions.

Do you believe the Bible indicates that the earth’s age is only about 6000 years, then what were dinosaurs doing in the past 6000 years?

If you had a time machine and could go back in time, would you go back and save Jesus from being crucified?

If your answer is no, does that conflict with your notion of loving Jesus.

(this isn’t my question, I read it elsewhere)

Do you think evolution conflicts with the Bible and why?

You most likely think your point of view is correct. Imagine a world where everyone had the same point of view as you, would that be a great place to be? If your point of view is against aspects of science, does it mean - now that everyone is the same as you - they should stop working on science?

You would think that these questions would be important to consider, but Christians are always offended when faced with questions like this - so I think, the more important question is why are they offended?

Filed under: Lifestyle | 1 Comment

JDK1.5 or 1.6
JBoss Seam 2.1.1.GA 
JBoss application server 5 
Granite Data Services 1.2.x 
Adobe Flex 
Google Web Toolkit 
(and seam gwt) 
IntelliJ
Also Hibernate comes with Seam.

Filed under: Programming | Post a comment

Hi! I’ll tell you the secret. One of the problems of making a CMS (Content Management System) is you need to define the data model from what the customer told you then write lots of code to make forms and tables, pagination, input controls, ajax behaviour.

Its very time consuming to write all the code, finally I found out how to do it quickly, as long as you dealing with the customers data model and not a hierarchical page structure. For hierarchical page structure, ie - page content that reflects a menu, you need to do a bit more work, but for the type of content such as users, posts, articles, linear and tabular its good.

What I do is two steps. Firstly, make the mysql database. Secondly get seam framework and use the seam-gen to generate the CMS auto-magically. Since you cannot see the CMS, you can’t believe me, however out of all the options I’ve tried (a lot for a few years) this turns out to generate a really usable CMS from just the database. So its kind of a magical secret. Let me know if there’s a better idea!

Filed under: Programming | Post a comment

One of the most useful parts of the MAC is that is supports unix applications. If I was trying to save money I would either buy a used mac, one or two years old or buy a new computer with Ubuntu. Well thats actually what I do.

So I have time-machine on it and backing up the data all the time to a 1 gig drive which is so cheap now. The point is that if the dies, you can recover your life again. Buying new macs is too expensive.

Back to the topic, the main point is that its OSX which is very nice and friendly but then it has the unix terminal and can support many programs that run on UNIX via the MacPorts. Of course there’s lost of free open source software for the mac which is really usable.

The problem with Ubuntu and Linux is that its not as user friendly, its very close but just not completely there and I seem to have more troubles with it getting into a bad state. If I came to it as a programmer, I wouldn’t want to customize it too much for fear of killing it or having to dig deap into how it works to make it work correctly which is too time consuming. I want to program. Then again, a problem with a used mac is its not as fast as a new computer so from a programmers point of view its not so great. Its fast but dangerous.

So how I actually am set up now is I have a server which I rent, its Linux Centos (but now I’d prefer Ubuntu but can’t change easily now) and I use that to program on by using VNC to terminal to it. On my mac I use it for web development, email, documents, etc, all those daily things. The Centos server is very fast for builds of my Java as it has 2gb ram and Duel Core Intel CPU. VNC across to the Linux server is very fast since broadband is fast, so no big noticable delay (about 200 milliseconds which is fine, its in USA, I’m in Hong Kong). It builds my J2EE application in 4 seconds as compared to the mac which takes 1 minute. So in all, its a nice setup. Life on one, programming on the other.

Back to the main point, I wanted to install DIA which is diagramming software, but its for the Linux only. So to install it I use MacPorts, great! So strange, can run Linux applications easily on Mac. All in all, finally happy with a computer setup which is fast and usable.

Filed under: Programming | Post a comment

Welcome to my weblog, as you can tell I’m located in Hong Kong.

I’m interested in Hong Kong, learning Mandarin Chinese Language, creative software development, programming languages, hiking, exercise and health. From this it would seem there is an interest in being fit, but its more an interesting in being fit stemming from feeling not totally fit yet. My main interest is in software development, so most blog posts will be on that topic.

I also run a software and web design company, Orsa Studio.

Thanks for reading and I hope my interests cross with yours.

Filed under: Lifestyle | 1 Comment