What Does StarCraft2 Brought On The Table

It's been awhile since I played a PC game that requires more than few hours job. If not mistaken, my last was Diablo2. Emm, that's like what, 10 years ago?

I'm excited few weeks back when knowing sc2 is going to be released. Colleagues of mine went frenzy about this, and the next days most of their MSN were tagged with sc2related status post. And for me, I don't have luxury of spare time to make up with it.

WTH.




Falling sick. Literally.

White, Orange, Black, Red and White. I wonder where's the little blue?



So the enlightment of sc2 and physical fatigue added up and glued me nicely on my couch.

Flashback. Year 2010.

Crappy year, I'd concluded.




Peanut sized pay increment, groundnut scaled bonus better-than-nothing ang pau, worse-than-expected pink form programme, tighther-than-ever working time, greater but shallower learning landscape, lousy salary and deteriorating health. I can list more, but I guess that's enough.

A phrase crossed my mind. Brain Drain. You can't beat it, You join it.

Yawl.


Time to step back. Time to let go.
Time to ignore. Time to have some fun.
Time to sleep.

Yawl.

XBRL for Dummies

After I fiddled my time with skimping through specification of XBRL 2.1, XBRL Dimensions 1.0 and XLink 1.1, I decided to get untechnical for a glimpse. Here you go, XBRL for Dummies, written by Charles Hoffman aka Father of XBRL and Liv Watson, one of the founders of XBRL.

400+ damned pages albeit pretty light materials, it took me few days to finish the reading. Although the depth is shallow since the book is for Dummies, it provides quite delicate coverage of XBRL regime with pointers to case studies, reference materials, state of the art landscape of products and services and some enlightments of how to make value out from XBRL. It's definitely one of the up-to-date introductory literature you just can't miss.

Facebook Deactivation

I'd posted up a status update in my Facebook account like few weeks back, saying that my will to stop using its services and not many people seem to believe it. And Ta Da, I deactivated my account yesterday. As a matter of fact, I can't find a link called Delete My Account, so I just settled down with Deactivation. Googled and found that you can actually delete your account but only through a relatively lengthy procedure. Nevermind, deactivation it is.

Face swelling finally subsided and I'm taking some "hard" food today. Can you imagine 2-3 days intakes of food limited to stuffs like mashed potatoes, plain congee, milk and ice creams (no complains on this!)? Cravings are crawling around.

It DO costs you to mess with Wisdom!

O ya, when I read a paper about how XBRL is being analyzed from a postsocial approach and as a socio-technical object, Facebook crossed my mind. I'm curious whether there's any similar study on FB. Maybe yes, but no time for me to look further.

Essentials of XBRL

While my recuperation from Wisdom extraction is in progress, I managed to finish the reading of this book during the dull weekend. Pains still intact though.

This book is targeted for the audience from the group of C-level, hence you can imagine how above-50,000-feets the materials can be. Nonetheless, it does provide a very important perspective on how XBRL can portrait itself as a valuable corporate asset and not just another technology.

It is only 200+ pages and with a lot of spaces in between the lines for easy sighting of old folks. Lolx.

Anyway, the book is focused on elaborating the evolutionary power of XBRL in the accounting field, particularly how it will transform accounting firms and corporate accounting department. However, I guess it would be more valuable if it can includes more emphasis on other stakeholders such as regulators and software vendors and not just a breeze on them.

Moving forward.

My Naked Wisdom, Literally

Wisdom was troubling me occasionally with residuals and inflammations and this got on my nerves recently when I can't help myself but uncontrollably flirting with its' surroundings with my tongue to calm the irritations.

DMDL!

Went to dentist that did my root canal few weeks back and taught Wisdom a lesson.

Before the extraction:



See how Wisdom collided with its' neighbour?

After the extraction (Pic at the top right):



The process took around 30 - 45 minutes with drillings, crackings and hackings sound. At one point in time, I felt like my jaw bones were shattered into pieces.


Show time. I present to you my naked Wisdom in blood (R-rated):



Post-op gonna be a PITA experience, hope no dry socket forms.

DMDL, Die Mah Die Lo
PITA, Pain In The Ass

The Telco Churn Management Hand Book By Rob Mattison

I've finished the reading of this book as part of the preparation works for one incoming POC exercise. Not a hefty one, just a near 400 pages traverse of churn related matter in telecommunications industry. It did inspired me about some direction about how to better concoct an arsenal of stuffs to tackle churn. The book is pretty high level in the sense that besides the strategic direction and some tactical means of handling churn, it doesn't really craft down any specific implementation models which directly adaptable. It is inspiring yet you will crack your head yourself to think about the how-to.

Read it here

Time is running out and I got to do more knowledge churning.. literally!

Kid me Not

Airline didn’t pay dividends before as it wanted to build up cash

SEPANG: AirAsia Bhd is now in a much better position to consider paying dividends to its shareholders after solving some issues within the group, said group chief executive officer Datuk Seri Tony Fernandes.

“Shareholders did ask about dividend payment at the meeting just now.

“Having solved the uncertainty issues, we are now at the stage where the board will actively consider dividend payment,” he said yesterday after AirAsia’s AGM.

However, he did not explain further the uncertainty issues.

Fernandes did not say when dividend payment might happen but added that the group had made the right decision of not paying dividends up to this point because it wanted to build up its cash.

“We want to build up our cash as we want to grow the airline to be far bigger than any other competitor,” he said.


AirAsia does not have a dividend policy since it was listed in 2004 and if the payout happened, this would be the first time shareholders are receiving dividends.

He added that the group’s cash balance was approaching RM1bil and its business should grow from strength to strength from now on.

For that, he believed AirAsia’s net gearing would continue to go down from the current 2.26 times.

Fernandes also said the airline would fly to the Maldives in October and planned to build a hotel there.

SOA BIAN SOA BIAN

I've attended a presentation by an architect from a well known banking vendor just now. It was about adoption of SOA thingy into new product development. I gotta admit that I'm not at all convinced how by adopting SOA in application development can entice direct buying interest of BUSINESS decision makers, other than having the nice-to-have SOA enabled logo there and appease the techno-geek never-ending appetite of playing with state-of-the-art toys. Of course, my words might be too strong here but nonetheless my point is made:

SOA makes no value to a business if you can't justify its business values.

Hardcore proponents of SOA will probably start to shout at me, I guess. :p

"It enhances business agility"
"It improves time-to-market for new products"
"It helps to make the IT alignment to business needs"
"It embraces changes"
.... many mores COMMON praises of why you should have SOA in your complex environment.

I'd agreed with all the benefits of SOA, sincerely. Most importantly I strongly seconded that SOA indeed provides a very scalable and agile platform for software product development. As a matter of fact, it shares similar qualities with methodologies such as XP, MDA, Agile, albeit at a level of abstraction higher up.

"Most businesses are not being pressured enough by its environments to move to think about SOA"

"My business generates enough shareholder value that guarantees my big fat bonus and decent dividend payout, why I bother to take this risk?"

"SOA is not for the faint-of-heart!"

Interestingly, after I typed the phrase above, I did a search in Google and found this article that coincided with my opinion. Click here to read


One of the statement made by the architect that I couldn't disagree more was the "fact" that adopting SOA doesn't change the way business is conducted.

The value maximization of SOA approach shall be realized if and only if the business leverages on it to make the business process more agile, to alleviate process bottleneck due to IT inagility and to flexibly infuse process innovation. If you are an avid reader, you realized that I mentioned the word Process three times. :p
I just want to stress how important to view the impacts of SOA from the perspective of how it could change business processes and perhaps the entire business model of the company.

"80/20 should be 80% about BPM, 20% for the rest. Not the other way around."

Here is a hilarious article you should read about. Click here to read

I need to re-emphasize here: For all intents and purposes, SOA development approach is the best option we have for software development now, but it will not be cheap and easy to adopt. Higher setup cost and steeper learning curves are just few of many caveats that warrant a big post sign "BEWARE". High risk high return?

Let's ask ourselves. If you are the CTO/CIO in a complex organization with many existing IT assets such as a large bank, how high the ranking will it be for SOA project(s) in your priority list. IMHO, it will be way too low that you might just miss it. Why? IT'S TOO F**KING TECHNICAL and your boss is shouting for corporate capability such as proactive customer acquisition management or straight-through trading thingy.

"Don't be so shortsighted"

In fact, I'm not. I've been through enough tech fads and unplesant reality to draw my conclusion and I think further enough to cover more than just the main success scenario.

The rule of thumb is anything that tries to improve an organization at the scale of enterprise wide requires enterprise wide commitments. To name a few examples:

Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW)
Enterprise Churn Management
"SOA"!
...

Any of the above is easy target for cruel reality check. I've seen EDW effort that turned out to be a huge isolated data mart used by few departments and eventually serves to be a source system to another EDW effort that subsequently failed too. Given this wonderful history of fad-goes-bust cycle, it could be a premonition for SOA initiatives.

I strongly suggest for any SOA project to deliver quick win results to convince a larger scale of commitments into its' accomplishments.

Think Business Always!
It's all about bottomline, revenue, cost and growth.

Pointed application, semantic stuffs? Emmm... KIV.
BIAN, metamodel, service landscape? Emmm... Still evolving.

Only 1 in 5 SOA Projects Actually Succeed

State of SOA Survey 2010

Only with all the critical success factors met, i.e. top management commitments of enterprise adoption and enforcement, standards-based and tools-based SOA infrastructures and clear-crispy SOA policy, procedures and best practices, we should be able to increase the likelihood of delivering an envious successful SOA project (Enterprise wide!), else it will be just another SILO, a pricey one.