So many things to do, so little time

My blog is really falling behind, yet I have little time to do catch up. There are so many things on my plate right now that I think I should just pick one, focus on it. I am seriouse. When I cannot even find time to play "Enemy Territory" in a week, I think I am trying to juggling too many balls.

Work at the client is busy as well. We have extended our work here until the end of May, which I think is very nice. It was sort of a hard deadline that we will only be here until the end of March, and we have been working hard on the transition. With our work extended here, we can finally see the product gets release and deployed rather than having to just put faith in ourselves about the successfull of our enablement.

As part of the XPE project release, and following the book Pragmatic Project Automation, I am starting building a release script in Ruby. (Ruby is a language that I have grown more and more fond of, BTW). I figure I might as well make it generic enough so that I can use it for other projects. So I have created a rubybuilder (or Build Master) on ruby forge (http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubybuilder/). Need to do some inital check-in's of the source code and the website setup.

Another project that I need to work on is the jbuilder-opentool project. That is because I have found Eclipse more and more annoying with each and every day. I don't care what people say, this is one product that just never failed to surprise me in a bad way (instead of like IntelliJ, which always surprises you in a good way. I am too familiar with JBuilder to be surprised either way). If I can just create an opentool that allows me read the Eclipse workspace and project, I will be able to do something useful things with JBuilder, starting with profiling.

Talking about profiling, another item in my list was the performance of the webapp that we were building. Somehow it just hangs whenever trying to load from database. Finally with the DBA's help, I find out that if you use "setLong" instead of "setBigDecimal" in prepared statement for a numeric column that is used for search, the index will not be used, rather, the query will simply scan the table. Converting a long to a BigDecimal is a bit hassel, so I settled for changing the query to convert the parameter using "convert" function in sybase.

On the last note, I just noticed (Thank you WebPastie, great job Bill!), that if you search on google with "Shane Duan", the first page is all mine, different stuff I submitted dating all the way back to my start-up days. I supposed an English name "Shane" with a Chinese "Duan" is an unusual combination for a name.

Anyhow, this post barely scratch the surface of what I have been doing presently, more coming up. Not this weekend though, because the snow in Tahoe is too good to miss!!!