Job Satisfaction vs Pay
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
How would you define a dream job? Easy: satisfying job and good pay. Jobs should be satisfying - you should be happy at work, you should get along great with co-workers, it should be challenging enough, you should be able to work the way yout want etc etc..
But, what if you have to choose between job satisfaction and a high salary?? Which would it be?
I believe most will choose a high paying job. But for my situation right now, I’d definitely go with job satisfaction - this is mainly due to the fact that I’m not in dire need of money.. Read the rest of this entry »
Something Simple for a Change
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
Finally, after using the old “jnls.net 3″ theme for nearly a year, I’ve had enough of red. I just didn’t like the colour scheme anymore… I wanted a change.. something simple (something I can quickly finish up). Heck, I was even tired of the typeface..
To top it all up, I wasn’t in exactly in a great mood.. it was tough going.. my Final Year Project is so friggin’ tough.. it looks really easy and straightforward on the surface, as it’s something everyone take for granted.. but wait till I tell you.. Read the rest of this entry »
Unleash AJAX
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
Recently, I realized a major shortcoming with Lotus Notes. As you could probably imagine, businesses deal with lotsa transactions everyday, and to get a head of competitors, they need to make sense outta these daily transactions. These transactions can be in any form, but I’ll take the simplest example: sales data.
What I’ve learned from my industry training, is that when you give a product to a client, every user of that product would have differing requirements. For the project that I was under, we spent an hour or so discussing with the client about the reporting functions of the product (implemented with Lotus Notes). Amongst the problems are:
- Existing reports need to be updated, due to changing user requirements.
- As only a few users were involved in the discussion, we were unaware of the needs of other users.
- The “reports” in Lotus Notes are basically views (tables) that are grouped according to certain criterias. As the users were afraid that there were too many views, they had to “design” views that satisfy a number of requirements. In other words, to get certain statistic, users would need to do some simple “exploration” or “calculation”. The system was unable to spoon feed them with the exact info they need.
The worst technical limitation with Notes is that it’s entirely server based. Although users can use JavaScript, but the Notes/Domino architecture was pretty server-centric. For example, if you wanted to do some formatting on fields for display on a report, it’ll have to be done on the server. JavaScript is mainly used for data validation on a web client.
Well, this is what AJAX (and JavaScript) is developed for: to shift processing away from the server. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a JavaScript client that could allow users to quickly sort and group data according to their needs? Better still, allow the user to apply filters on the results.. That way, users are in complete power over the reporting of vast amounts of data. More importantly, it will significantly reduce server load, allowing a single server to serve more clients, and of course, each user will get better response times from the server.
Tags: hsbc
Stock is for Suckers!
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
It’s that time of the year again, when it’s PC Fair!! But seriously, there’s nothing much to PC Fair. There aren’t that many bargains anyway, just some marketing hype to get people into thinking it’s a “durian runtuh” kind of PC sales.
I did go to PC Fair anyway with my colleague, since I wanted to get a MP3 player. Besides, since I worked near Masjid Jamek, KLCC was just 2 stops away via LRT.
Before getting home with my precious MP3 player, I had dinner at Burger King. I don’t know if it’s because it’s been a long long time since i had McDonalds, but my dinner at Burger King was very, very satisfying. Though it’s a tad mor expensive that McD, but hey, it’s so much more better! It’s more filling too, McD only gives you a tiny burger that you have to struggle holding coz of it’s miniature size..
So here I am, back home, taking pictures of what I bought from my “shopping spree”:
Here’s the Sansa c250, a 2 GB mp3 player from SanDisk. I got that for RM 339. Yeah, it’s a horrible box shot..
Working at HSBC
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
It’s my 5th day at work over at HSBC, the world’s local bank. Here, they aim to be the most preferred bank, by emphasising a lot on customer service.
It’s sad I don’t have a camera phone, else I can post some pics here of my workplace. Anyway, I’m sure you guys have wonderful imagination, so here’s what I’m gonna do:
[ picture of a mosque ]
As me and Yu Bin were walking towards HSBC (along the river), I pointed to the mosque and asked him, a local Ampang boy: “is that Masjid Jamek? As in the Jamek mosque??”. All I got was a shrug. So much for having a local boy as my guide. He did know some places for lunch around Petaling Street though. Read the rest of this entry »
