The collaboration between Google Plus and AKB48 finally really got me into Google Plus itself. However the initial experience wasn’t very pleasant, I couldn’t comment on any status for 99% of the time and only for the 1% where I got lucky.

It’s a very frustrating experience for 2 days, and if it wasn’t for AKB I would have given up and convince myself that Google Plus doesn’t work. It’s evident that it is very buggy and barely usable if you can’t even comment on others’ status, yet they can’t fix this simple problem especially when soooo many people are experiencing it.

Then finally today I can comment around 99% of the time, I prevent myself from spamming too much in case I can’t comment by the time I really want to so I’m not sure if it’s 100% yet, but regardless I’m still happy that everything has been fixed.

So next up, I looked around at the API available, and to my surprise (perhaps not so surprising as well), the methods available is like only 5~6, and they’re read-only. This is like so limiting and they’ve opened their API platform for like some 2 to 3 months? And there’s still so few API methods available? This gives me an idea why Google Plus isn’t well adopted yet…

Anyway, I hope there are really people working on Google Plus for at least 8 hours a day… I really don’t see much improvements everyday, and you wanna catch up Facebook? I don’t quite think so.

Legacy codes are good when they work well, but a total disaster when they don’t. There’s often a wide variation in reasons as to why the legacy codes will suddenly fail. And one such reason that I have been facing recently is the lack of optimization.

In the old days, there weren’t too much data to process and everything goes well. However up till recently, the amount of data is starting to really pile up and we can’t afford to let MySQL handle all the workload, it’ll just lockup the whole database. Therefore I concluded that a rewrite is required.

Initially I only had to rewrite the SQL queries into PHP code, so that the workload is switched to PHP instead of MySQL. However, should I say thanks to this, even though the users have been complaining ever since, I have to change more parts of the code. And the more I change, the more I find that the code is totally messy and doesn’t make up much sense.

The requests from users to me didn’t make much sense as well, I fixed a problem and another request will come in, which will require me to rewrite more of the code.

In the end, I not only reduced the number of lines of code I also optimized it so that it runs faster by a little, I haven’t really get into refactoring it so that it will run even faster, and the only thing preventing me from doing that is the code structure. It’s certainly very messy, and doesn’t quite make sense at least to me.

As a conclusion, legacy codes are good until they break. Don’t touch them if they ain’t broken.

Death is something everyone has to face, it’s the destination for everybody, no one has ever escaped it. Steve Jobs said that death was one of the best invention ever, someday we will have to clear the old and make way for the young.

We all have our time, the time allocated for us is fair and equal. The difference is the amount of work you’re able to do within this limited time frame, whether you can finish everything you want to do within this limited time frame.

We all have our regrets, there are things that made us wish that we could have more time. But when it is time to go, it really is the time to go. When we arrive in this world we brought nothing, when we leave we’re not gonna bring back anything as well. Everything that’s here stays here, you’ll come and go.

Perhaps someday we might visit this place again, till then, there’s nothing we’ll be able to do.

Everything and phenomena has its peaks and downfalls. There are cases where it’s a sign that the old generation needs to pass on to the new generation, but most of the time it’s actually a sign that you can go on higher the next peak.

More than often people give up when they fall off from the peak, because they think it’s not worth their time anymore, or they don’t see anymore value in it. But if you come to think, so long as you are determined, the next time you reach the peak it will definitely be taller than your previous, due to all the experience gained and things like rethinking your plans and etc.

Many tend to neglect the fact that there are people supporting them to continue, that many of them are actually looking forward to the next peak, even if it takes time. If it was your dream to see happy faces on them, the downfall will actually be an opportunity to try it again.

A very famous example will be Apple, Apple first peaked at Apple II, then the Macintosh came along, but then it went into a downfall (read: Steve Jobs left). However when Steve once again come back, they’re once again on the road to the peak, an even higher one. They’re now dominating in at least 3 markets, mp3 player, smartphone and tablets.

There’s never a reason for you to give up. When you’re at a downfall, don’t think about it. Think about the next peak, and what you can do to make the peak higher.

…is no simple job.

Especially when it is the core part of your application, I had my DB access codes scattered everywhere, however during rewrite I chose not to unify them, with some confidence that it shouldn’t change in the near future.

Spent a whole day (1 day exactly) rewriting the code and testing, making sure common problems won’t occur when applying to production environment. This is the first time I’m deploying MongoDB into production environment, and the first time I’m utilizing it in my production code. However I’m hoping that this will lead to more future adoption.

While rewriting code to utilize MongoDB, I actually find that MongoDB does in fact has the performance advantage against MySQL at certain jobs. Jobs like constantly fetching and writing, random accessing. However jobs like SUM(), AVG() and etc does not work well with MongoDB, at one point I also wanted to do something like != (<> in SQL compliant) but this won’t seem to be efficient in MongoDB.

I also haven’t started utilizing indexes yet, the only index I have in my MongoDB collection is _id. Although it now only stores around 200MB of data, it’s still fast and quick enough. I’ll have to start indexing when it reaches a higher amount though, but the current situation seems to be perfectly fine.

This will serve as an entrance to my other project, which holds more than 50 GB data in MySQL tables and is suffering some performance problem. With the success in my personal project, I think I will be able to bring it over.

By the way, Bloody is based on MongoDB as well.

Trust is the weirdest thing within 2 human’s relation. Trust is built on top of virtually nothing, bare words or based on time. It’s very unreasonable as to why one can trust another up to the level that one can give up all the effort one has made so far. It’s also very unreasonable that why one can trust another who fail and fail and fail again, but still trust another to put up a good work.

One thing I find is that human is more emotional than reasonable. The human brain might be very weak in reasoning, it’s not built for that. It’s built to trust emotion more than its reasons. This might be why scams work quite effectively, even if it’s very obvious to a third person, one can fall into it without even realizing how or why.

Trust can be built up over time or just in an instant. If there’s trust there’s also betray, why one will trust another when there’s a percentage of betrayal? Does the benefit actually outweigh the damage taken?

Maybe this is why there’s so many dramas to make.

There are a lot of games, console games, PC games, Facebook games, online games, MMORPG games etc etc. The list goes on and on. For several years I haven’t been spending any single cent on a game (since I was born, that is), I don’t see it changing in the near future.

During the late 90s, we had a few epic games. Namely Red Alert and Starcraft. These 2 were the hit, basically every single child played this game at that age. Why? Because the graphics was great? Because the storyline was nice? Mainly because the game was plain fun. There were no internet at that time (or extremely slow and expensive), not much website to browse and nothing to really hook up your time in front of the computer.

PC games changed that, basically since there weren’t much to do, when you turn on the PC you usually play games. Let’s come back to the present. We have great graphics, great hardware, great software, great developers, great companies, yet there isn’t any epic game coming out that everyone will surely play it.

It’s really long since I last played a game and get really addicted to it. I’m really hoping that one such game will arrive soon.

I’ve finally got my hands into the long wanted Google+. It has been all around the headlines for quite a while (since it debuted, until today maybe), there’s a lot of hype and anticipation when the first batch got the invitation and made a review, would this be a correct attempt for Google at the social networking area?

As far as I’m concerned, it takes the best of Twitter and Facebook and combines them together. You can add a person without needing his permission, and you’ll be following him just like in Twitter. In short it’s pretty much working on Twitter’s follower/following idea, which worked quite well for Twitter. However this is Google, things doesn’t end there. You can further manage who you’re following and selectively let those that follow you back get your status update. Imagine you’re a celebrity, everything you put on your status is public, now that might be inconvenient if you have a non-celebrity friend and you want to communicate with him. In Google+ though, you’ll be able to do just fine. You can specify your status update as publicly available, or to just the people in the circle of your choice.

See how it works? That’s basically the whole selling point of Google. If Google+ goes well, it might actually kill Twitter instead of Facebook. I haven’t got any friends in my Google+ circle yet (I don’t think they’ll want it, they’re non-geeks anyway), but I’ll be using it to follow people who I’ll want to follow :)

I have a goal actually, that is to write a lot and a lot of posts right here. However writing posts is actually not very easy. You must come up with what to write as a start, figure how to write it and maybe do some research on that topic.

As I’ve mentioned in my previous post, I’m not very good at coming up with ideas. More than often, the ideas which I come up with are lame, pure lame. Such as the idea for this post, I don’t think anyone will have the interest to read this at all.

Anyhow, let’s get straight to the point. Generating useless contents is very easy, you can keep hitting the keyboard randomly until you feel satisfied, and there’s a content which no one knows what it is. You can just spam words until you’re satisfied as well, there’s another content with no concrete meaning in it.

Apparently, this web is filled with both useful and useless contents. However at times, useful and useless can be relative. In some context, a specific content might be useful but in others it might be totally useless. But, a junk is a junk. No matter how you look at it, this applies especially to content farms. In the real world, on the other hand, sometimes even rubbish is useful and can be recycled, meaning it’s not totally useless.

Everything has its purpose, a thrown plastic bag can be reused, a content farm can also be useful in some point. A content farm is a website abusing keywords and SEO techniques to get visitors and page views. Therefore they must hit the absolute correct keywords and sorts to be a successful “content farm”. Now in the context of searching relevant information, a content farm is a total rubbish. You have absolutely no use for it. But, think of it in another way, since a content farm aims to catch visitors, the keywords they use must be the most trendy.

If you want to optimize your website’s SEO, you can also opt to study content farms. They basically have already done the marketing for you. Learn the way they perform their SEO, don’t copy them. With the right and useful content, there is absolutely way for you to beat them down.

In conclusion, contents in general are never useless, it’s just that you have never find a way for it to be useful. Same as to human beings, every life has its purpose.

I’ve wished to have never ending todo list to work on, but my personal todo list never grow because I have limited ideas in my head…

It’s one of the problems I’ve found as I grow up, my creativity seems to be limited by the reality. Long before this, I tried coming up with lots and lots of ideas, but my conscious tells me that those are too difficult to be implemented, takes too long time to develop and makes me abandon the idea. Now it seems that my subconscious (which should be the one that is responsible for generating ideas) is already aware of my conscious’s “requirements” and stops coming up with ideas that “might” be rejected by my conscious.

This is actually quite problematic because sometimes my subconscious can be wrong itself, if it doesn’t bring the idea to my conscious I can’t even work out whether or not that idea is worth implementing. Therefore due to lack of ideas, I can’t even do developing. What should I develop? What kinds of code should I write? I have totally no idea. I have been stalling in my own skills these several months (when I’m having the most free time to spend seriously), this can’t go on. Hence comes this post.

Okay, I don’t know if my brain works like that but I suppose it does.