HYPERAXE

It was another memorable day for all Filipinos as the boxing great Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao ended the Pacquiao-Morales Trilogy or Grand Finale with a knockout win on the 3rd round.

I think most people were suprised that the fight ended quickly. Eric Morales seems to be in a good shape as well as Pacquiao, so it was expected that they are going to exchange blows in more rounds. It was a shock though when Morales got hit by Pacquiao’s powerful left hook in the second round which made him fall into the canvas looking stunned. It was then that I guess most people realized that this fight might not take that long. On the third round, Morales’s finally met his end for this bout. A few seconds before the end of the round, a staggering left straight brought Morales down and that’s when he refused to continue to fight. I can’t really blame him, since it was obvious that Manny’s gonna hurt him more if he continues. Pacquiao showed a lot of improvement with his punching power, speed and agility. Moreover, he seemed to have grown a bit in terms of body mass making him look more dominant compared to Morales.

Oh well, this is another event that the whole Filipino nation celebrates. To Pacquiao, more power and most of all remain humble and God loving. I just hope he doesn’t get into politics. Hehehehe!

[tags]Manny Pacquiao, Boxing, Filipino, Philippines, Eric Morales, Boxers[/tags]

Today, there are some weird things that occurred to me but at the same time it makes me feel good about what I’m doing at work.

There was this problem with our continuous integration server running Cruise Control .NET wherein our team project’s build process had been failing for 2 weeks. I wish I could have fixed it right away, but I had no access to the server and I’m not really sure if I should really mess around with it since there’s an administrator in-charge. So in short, I just informed my manager about it last week and told him why I am not able to fix it. It was only yesterday morning that a senior software architect raised a flag about the problem, and then people started moving to fix it.

It was night time in our offshore office and most of the technical people are either too busy with a lot of things or had already left the office. So I decided to take on the job of fixing the server and asked for access and permission from the server administrator. I’m glad I was finally able to login to the server and was very hopeful to fix things. Honestly speaking, Cruise Control .NET is quite new to me so I really had no clear idea on where to start troubleshooting. Since my Visual Studio 2005 kept on crashing, I had to rely on command-line tools to fix things up and test the different build configurations locally. Anyway, to make the long story short I was able to resolve the problems last night after playing around with the configuration files. After which, I sent out an email to all the development teams to announce that Cruise Control was working again. And so I took a rest and ended the day.

Early this morning I was surprised to receive an email from our Vice-President thanking me for a job well done. At first, I didn’t know who he clearly was since I’m still new to the company, but when I saw the signature at the end of the email, I got confused on as to how to respond to the email, especially that our local office director got a CC of the email. Anyway, I just humbly replied that I was glad to be of help. When I went to work, I was still wandering why the Vice-President would take time to thank me? I mean, I don’t really think what I did was really a major thing or something really extra ordinary and I even think that what I did on fixing the problem on the Team Foundation Proxy Server before might be more significant than this but I didn’t get a thank you email then. While still at lost on the email I received another email from our local office director praising me for my good work and for taking ownership of the project and the initiative to fix things. Another puzzling thing about it was that, all the managers got a copy of the email. Whoah! Why? I mean, if the director wanted to thank me, why include all the managers and not just the manager I am working for? I just kept silent about the incident with my colleagues so as not to stir up any issues. I believe, it’s really nothing special.. but then I’m still puzzled about the turn of events. The big question “WHY”, still lingers on my mind.

Anyway, what my bosses did today are really very helpful in boosting the morales of the employee. I mean a simple employee like me being appreciated by the higher ups, really makes a difference and maybe improve the way we work. For the bosses, just keep it up!

Some ideas on how useful Visual Studio 2005 is to our team, has been brewing up in my mind for the last couple of days, and I was just trying to organize my thoughts to post about it, but with what happened today, I think a negative post would be on top of my list for now.

Since this morning, I had been experiencing problems with Visual Studio 2005 and I just can’t seem to figure out what went wrong. I’m not a big fan of Microsoft products but since my company is, I have no choice but to use whatever Microsoft tool they provide me. One of those tools is VS 2005 and I think we really have no choice since it provides much of the needed environment for VB or C# development including team collaboration using the Team Foundation System. Well, to cut the long story short, VS 2005 had been crashing on me the whole day. It’s really kinda weird since I tried restarting my machine, and killing all the applications that runs on my workstation, but still it crashes each time I load my team project, or change the build configuration. There were error prompts or debug options that showed up, but as if those weird mix up of characters and numbers would be helpful. These annoying crashes really wasted most of my time, and it was only late this afternoon that I gave up and started looking for other options to create builds.

As a Linux guy, I had been used to working on terminal mode and command lines. Maybe that’s one of the things I like most with Linux/UNIX.. you don’t need a GUI to get things done. I’m glad though that VS 2005 offer command line tools as well such as tf, msbuild, devenv, etc.. Moreover, I was able to download and install the VS 2005 Power Toys which added more command line tools that are very useful to me. So I just tried downloading our team project source code from our Team Foundation Server and started compiling things, using the DOS prompt. I also did a couple of BAT files to automate things for now instead of having to right the same commands several times. It’s good that I still remember most of the useful DOS Commands which I haven’t really used for quite some time.

Funny thing is, my colleagues were both surprised and amazed on how I was able to work with the builds using only command lines. They were even more puzzled on how I was able to come up with a complete package without having to open VS 2005 and most of all in an automated way. Oh well, I just told them that GUI isn’t everything and not having it shouldn’t cripple you from your tasks. There are a lot of options if you only know where to look.

Oh well, I just hope things would be ok with VS 2005 tomorrow. Oh by the way, another weird thing that happened is that VS 2005 didn’t crash when I tried connecting to my workstation’s desktop from home (remotely). I was able to work properly over the remote connection. Isn’t that weird? It’s like VS 2005 saying to me, that I could be more productive if I work from home instead of in front of my PC.

[tags]Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft, Team Foundation Server, Team Foundation System, DOS, Command Lines, Linux, UNIX, GUI[/tags]

In my job as a Configuration Manager, I am often faced on finding the right information on how to do things right or learn new things that would make me more effective. Added to that, is I am really a newbie when it comes to configuration management. I had done builds and release management before but those were minor work that I only do on the sides since I had been more of a systems architect/software developer throughout my career.

While googling around for stuffs, I stumbled upon this website that somehow provided me with much information on my new job and this is.. (drum roll please…) .. CMCrossroads!!!. The site is more of an information gateway for all Configuration Managers around the world to share ideas and get the much needed information for our daily tasks. It offers articles, white papers, a forum, and my favorite, web casts of configuration management experts. Moreover, it also provides information about the latest configuration management software out there. The best thing about this site is that you don’t have to pay anything to access the information it provides including the web casts.

As a starting point, CMCrossroads had helped me come up with a build and release management document for my company. Through its articles, and advices from the experts, I was able to come up with some initial build and release policies as well as a new standard versioning method that would be used by my team. I was praised for my work and all the things I wrote in my document is now being implemented on my team project and the bosses seems to be happy with it.

So to CMCrossroads, and the people that makes it up including those who are actively participating in the website, thanks a lot.

[tags]CM Crossroads, Configuration Management, Build and Release Management, Software Development, Software Engineering, Programmer, Build Version[/tags]

For the last 2 weekends, I had spent most of my time playing “Company of Heroes“. Well, I usually spend my weekends trying to work on a couple of mini-projects on Java or testing out some open-source APIs out there but since I got my hands on this game, I decided to take a break for a while with programming.

Here’s my view of the game. First of all, the game’s graphics is supposed to be superb based on most reviews. Sad to say, my graphics card which is a puny Nvidia FX5500, is just not powerful enough to take advantage of the game’s graphics in its full glory. But playing it even on the lowest settings is good enough for a non-hardcore gamer like me. I suppose playing it with an Nvidia GeForce 7900 would really be that enjoyable, but I don’t really want to spend that much just to be able to play a game. I’m a non-hardcore gamer, remember?

Then the plot or the game play is also cool. It is the usual World War II scenario between USA and Germany, which is more or less like Call of Duty turned into a strategy game. It actually reminds me of Command and Conquer but with a lot of improvements, of course. I think the most unique feature of this game, is that you can zoom into your units or the battlefield up to the point that you can see that of the details that first person shooting game offers. It’s really cool to actually see the details of crossfires between your soldiers and the German enemies, or your engineers planting bombs, or your tanks trying to take out enemy soldiers or buildings.

Another thing is that it excites me to slowly take over territories, but also pisses me off each time I see the enemy trying to take the territory back. I guess, that’s the main issue there, to be able to gain a balance between taking over territories and protecting it. It’s quite a challenge especially if there’s a limit on the number of soldiers, and armored vehicles you can create. Then again, it’s a strategy game so there’s no need to elaborate on that.

I hope I can finish up the game soon, as I am starting to miss those weekend programming already. For now, I just can’t take my mind off this game so I better finish it off.

[tags]Company of Heroes, PC Games, Nvidia Video Cards, Call of Duty, Command and Conquer, Strategy Games[/tags]

It’s been a while since I last played a guitar infront of a large crowd, and today I got that chance to do it again.

This afternoon, we had a singing contest in our company which has been patterned after the American Idol. Prior to the contest, I was asked by one contestant to accompany her with a guitar for her piece on the contest which is “Get Here” by Oleta Adams since she can’t find a minus-one for it. It wasn’t an easy piece considering that the song was played mainly with a piano, so I had to do a bit of classical guitar finger picking just to liven up the acoustic guitar version of the song. I only had last night to practice, and I asked Aphilo to help me out with the practice. Aphilo did a great job singing the song, so I also got the chance to put some cool stuffs on how I played the song especially on the guitar solo part. During the practice session with the vocalist for the contest, another contestant asked me to play for her as well, and she asked me to play “Falling” by Teri DeSario. It was good that I know the song pretty well, so I didn’t need time to learn the chords.

During the contest, I was so nervous seeing so many people watching the show. At first, my fingers were so stiff that I had to shake it several times just to warm it up. Moreover, the guitar that they asked me to use wasn’t really that great since the space between the strings and the neck were quite large. Nevertheless, it only took me a few moments to adjust to the guitar, but I could have played more fluidly if I brought my own classical guitar. Anyway, I think I did pretty well and it was quite a nice feeling to be admired and appreciated by people because of my guitar skills. Though it’s been a while I guess, my guitar and music skills are still good enough to please a lot of people.

Oh, by the way, the contestant who sang “Falling” won the contest and I’m very happy for her.

[tags]Guitar, Get Here Song, Oleta Adams, Falling Song, Teri DeSario, Classical Guitar, Singing Contest[/tags]