Saturday, August 05, 2006

The sunshine after a stormy week? Priceless

Doesn’t it feel good when you clean up all your old mess and ready to start something fresh and exciting? Today I finished the last of my freelance projects, and ready to embark on some pretty interesting projects next week.

The past weeks had been quite rough on me. I was bugged from countless support calls for a similar problem, but it was my fault actually. Not really my fault though, it’s VB6’s optimization option fault. I add in some SHFileOperation API to perform folder copying (I tried very hard not to use FileSystemObject due to some deployment complication), and it works fine on my machine but not on my client computers (sounds like the usual support dilemma).

After countless emailing and patching and logging and some luck, I found the source of the problem. But the code work perfectly on my development environment, then it crossed my mind that perhaps it was a compilation error. I ran a compiled copy of program and Walla, the little devil show itself. I figured perhaps is the optimization causing some kind of unforeseen complication, and I was right. Not a single line of code change and the problem is solved after numerous occurrences of puzzling and headaches. The moral of the story? Always try with the compiled version when you do support.

Then I have my obsession in finding the best blogging tool out there and worries about the wonderful Ruby on Rails might be as slow as a snail and I might have to pickup a PHP frameworks out of a dozens no winner options. Just based on guts feeling, I might choose CakePHP just because it is stable, simple and powerful, and ditched Symfony PHP due to its complexity and over powerful module hammering effort (I didn’t actually tried any of them, just based on the reviews I read).

Anyway, I decide that since I am not a problogger, the “perfect” blogging tool wouldn’t be too important to me (the free Blogger + Blogspot will do, though they irratate me at times). Phew! I finally can let the obsession go, but I might be tempted with Typo which runs on Ruby on Rails.

Finally, thanks to the technicians at my web hosting company, Ruby and Rails is finally running on FastCGI and performance is acceptable. Thus I am more prone to try out Ruby on Rails rather than picking up a PHP Framework. Why? Maybe RoR marketing effort is working on me, or just because I wanna try the magic bullet and thinking that productivity miracle might happen. Or I hope to join the ranks of web hackers, using obscure language such as Ruby, Phyton, Perl or Lisp.

Anyway, I am just feeling good today. With the finished backlogs (though countless support, bug fixing, enhancement and negotiation would still come back to haunt me soon) and new challenges ahead, I just felt refreshed.

For a better tomorrow!

No comments: