HitHat - Billy Qiu's Blog

BearingPoint Global Development Center (GDC) China has achieved SEI CMM Maturity Level 5 rating on December 17, 2004.

Today, November 15, 2004, “China Business News” (第一财经日报 in Chinese) newspaper released.
It said that “In the globalization environment of the 21st century, China need an authoritative mainstream business daily.” and CBN wants to be the “most influential, most authoritative, most respected finance and economics news daily.”

It was founded by SMG, Guangzhou Daily & Beijing Youth Daily.

CBN is famous for its TV Channel in Shanghai, it is a professional finance and economics channel around Mainland China.

CBN Newspaper registered capital is 100,000,000 RMB.

It was organized by ClarkMorgan and Red8Studios. They picked the very good place for such a special event. It’s in 181 GuangFu Road, which was once warehouses and now be renovated to becoming an Creative Art Studios, where the Red8 Studios’ Shanghai office is located.

The party is sponsored by Bacardi and Hooters Restaurant in Shanghai and some other sponsors, who offered us all-you-can-eat food and all-you-can-drink drinks, really cool.

However the most fascinating thing is that it is a Halloween Party. I saw many creative people wear all different kinds of costumes. Check out my photo album “Shanghai Time Warp Halloween 2004″ for more pictures and even audio and videos of this event.

There are many greate software out there for free. Good features, while free of charge.

I’ve recently found 2 amazing software.
Today let me introduce this ScreenPrint32.

I used to caputre screen by HyperSnap shareware, but it’s not free after the trial, I can no longer use the stuff. For years, I had to use “printscreen” key and use “painter” to save as “.png” file. That’s really wasting my time doing so. When I start to find some good tools for screen capture, I find the Screen Print 32 from download.com which is free.

It’s really easy to use, it has 4 modes for you to complete your tasks of screen-capturing in differrent circumstances.
The 4 modes are:

“Capture Full Desktop or Active Window” - which you can use only one key stroke to cature the whole screen and save the file automatically in your specified folder.

“Capture Active Windows” - Similar as above but only the active window’s area are captured.

“Prompt User for Capture Area” - This is much similar to HyperSnap’s main feature, and after highlight the area, right-click on the highlight area pops up a context menu which you can simply capture to clipboard or save to a location.

“Capture a Pre-defined Area” - This feature can be helpful is you are capturing some events happening in a certain area of the screen.

Also as the software name implies, you can activate its print function, so when you capturing a copy of the image will be printed out automatically.

Please check out the download.com for download the software and you can view other users’ review.
http://www.download.com/Screen-Print-Capture-32/3000-2384_4-10188787.html?tag=lst-0-1

I’m so lucky to be select to be one of the members in the Bearingpoint CMM FAR Team. (FAR = Functional Area Representitives)

From now on, with many other colleagues I’ll getting more familiar with CMM and getting prepared for CMM L5.

Although it’s hard, especially for me, I believe we’ll definitely be there as CMM L5.

In 7 weeks, we’ll celebrate our great success! For now, let’s get over-prepared!

Quick memo here:

Eclipse 3.0 with Lomboz 3.0 can only works with tomcat5.0.25, but not 5.0.27 for now.
Reason:
Tomcat 5.0.27s updated it’s log api, also somebody on some forums suggest to remove the “/bin” portion of the path in the lomboz configure xml.

Do you believe the future enterprise web application’s presentation tier is going to be strengthened by the Macromedia™ Flash® technology?

I had that dream years before, but untill recently I never think that’s something easy to do. Although flash technology is powerful, the debugging of a flash application is too difficult, and if plus integrated with backend enterprise application framework, such as Sun™ J2EE® or Microsoft™ .NET®, things become worse.

For me, I was heard of the Macromedia™ FLEX® technology first, and later the Laszlo™. They are something in common, which using descriptive “TAGS” to auto-generate FLASH content to the user. This is really amazing for many developers who are not so familar with Flash ActionScripts®, now any developer who familiar with JSP/Servlet can create flash rich content for web presentation layer with a set of “TAGS”, similar to JSP custom tags. However if you do know some actionscript, they can still help you to accelerate your development, also very important, much easier to debug and do unit test.

Currently both Laszlo and FLEX only support J2EE framework. FLEX are supposed to support the .NET framework in the near future.

I think the biggest difference between them is that Laszlo is Free and Open Source now, but not free for commercial user; while FLEX is very very expense and focus on the commercial users. However FLEX is more up-to-date which supports many new feature in Flash 7.0, but FLEX now supports Flash 5.0 only.

More information about Laszlo:
http://openlaszlo.org/
http://www.laszlosystems.com/

More information about FLEX:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flex/

According to as far as I’m concerned, from this morning of 9:00 am (GMT+8) to the evening of 8:30 pm (GMT+8). MSN Messenger Services has been either unstable or unavailable for more than 10 hours.

This should be the longest time of msn messenger service suspension that I have ever met. During these hours, some passport accounts may be able to log on, but still unable to successfuly send or receive messages, and some accounts were even unable to sign in.

All the service is back to good order around 8:30 pm (GMT+8), Oct 11, 2004.

Is this incident related with yesterdays “Funny.exe” (Worm.msn.Funny) MSN Worm Spreading incident? Most people includes me guess so. But after many recently MSN worm incident and other security issues, Microsoft may again delay the final release of the new MSN Messenger 7.0 system.

——- Latest Update ————————-
BTW, according to the latest news from one of my friends who’s Microsoft staff. He confirmed that the fast spreading of Worm.MSN.Funny had affected core servers in the North America. The auto-sent messages to all online contacts by the worm had result in a sort of DDOS attack to the MSN servers and result in the service unavailable or suspended.

Yesterday, Oct 10, 2004, many MSN users received a executable file from online contacts, this file may be named as “Funny.exe”. And it was later proved to be a new widely spread MSN Messenger Worm, called the “Worm.MSN.Funny”.

It is reported that when you accepted and executed the received “funny.exe” file, it then created more then one process instances of itself and do the following
1) blocking 937 websites from being accessed and may sometimes redirect user to a certain website which the worm producer specified, probably in order to advertise the site
2) send a copy of the worm executables to all your MSN messenger contacts without user’s notice which undergoes in the background
3) other possible damages are being further analyzed

It is also reported that this worm used the so called “multi-process instances protection mechanism”. The multi-process monitors one another, and when user tries to kill one of those worm processes, another process will actively prevent the termination command and protects any processes from being terminated.

What else may seems interesting and astonishing is that this worm has 2 variant versions.

Except for infecting MSN messenger, it also has another variant which only infects QQ (OICQ) instant messaging system, which is another one of the widely used leading IM systems in the China mainland.

Many Chinese anti-virus companies prompted very quickly and released the free scan and fix tools within less than 48 hours.

Rising (one of Chinese Leading Anti-Virus Company) had released specific tools for MSN Messenger.
And anther fix for the QQ (OICQ) IM can be download here

And TrendLab, Kingsoft Duba also reported this worm.

Most chinese people is “lucky” to have a 7-day long holiday (from Oct 1 to Oct 7) to celebrate china’s national holiday, which is on October 1st. China government called this the long-vacation policy which they intend to boost the China’s tourism business and other entertainment and service business in China.

However the 7-day long holiday isn’t really that “long”, coz the legal holiday for national holiday is only 3 days, then you may be very curious to know where do the extra 4 days come from? The answer is simple, weekend shifting policy is the way now in practice. And This means now at this weekend and for the whole next week business days ( from Oct. 8 to Oct. 15), we have to work continuously for 8-day long without any chance to rest.

However I can understand this policy’s benifits absolutely, but side effects do exist. It really bores me and made me thinking toward a less positive attitude sometimes. And it physically did harm to my performance during business hours and the degrade work quality and effectiveness.