Month: September 2008

Food Terrorists in China

Food terrorism has got to stop. Fake food is a terrible thing to do, and unfortunately, there are some unscrupulous individuals and businesses who take advantage of this basic human need. Capitalism has seriously reared its ugly head when people’s lives are risked for the sake of earning a buck. I do not wish ill upon those who have profited from their sick and twisted dealings, but I hope that their conscience will strike them. Hard.

Note that I did not specifically mention that Chinese were the culprits. Without having any first hand information myself, it might even be the case that the Chinese are the victims of some inept or unethical overseas management! Who is to say that some big-shot manager from outside of China did not force the Chinese factory into adding melamine to their food products? Until investigations are complete, 三鹿 should be assumed to be innocent until proven guilty.

Being a parent myself, I can understand the anguish and turmoil that the Chinese parents are facing. Regardless of whose fault it is, the Chinese government should tighten up food safety laws and prevent people — their own citizens especially — from suffering due to the selfish motives of others. One death due to food poisoning is one unnecessary death to many.

Friendly-HTTP is unfriendly when testing

If you’re involved in the testing process for a web application and you use Internet Explorer for testing, one of the first things that you will need to do is to turn off “friendly HTTP error messages”. This option is turned on by default and I can understand why Microsoft did it because most people are ordinary consumers who won’t be bothered with deciphering the error messages that the server throws back.

Turning this option off will display the error message returned from the server in all its techno-geek glory that only IT people can decipher. Incidentally, these error messages are also often useful when testing. For instance, Weblogic Server Developer License only allows 5 unique IP addresses and it will inform you via the error message if you should exceed that. However, if friendly HTTP is on, you will only know that access has been denied without knowing the reason.

If you have trouble finding this option in your IE options, I’ve reproduced a screenshot below.

 

Friendly HTTP Error Message option
Friendly HTTP Error Message option

Passing the Hot Potato

During the course of your daily work routine, you will probably come across certain tasks that I would term as a “hot potato”. These “hot potatoes” are tasks that do not require much of your time to handle, but you risk being the bottleneck if you do not respond promptly.

Literally, no one wants to hold a hot potato for too long (unless you’re masochistic). If all it requires is just a small diversion from whatever you’re doing, then just handle it quickly and pass the hot potato on. Of course, it will require some skill and experience to determine whether a task is a hot potato.

A “hot potato” is a task where:

 

  • You hold up progress if you do not act on it
  • It does not take much of your time to do your part and pass it on
  • Once you pass it on, you can forget about it and continue with whatever you were doing in the first place

The case of rice weevils

When I was young I was always fascinated by rice weevils, otherwise known as “bee gus”. Being the curious sort, I caught a few from the sack of rice and kept them in a clear case that used to contain Hello Kitty chops (They belonged to my sis. Really!). Of course, being the humanitarian sort, I also left some rice inside.

As you know, children have very short attention spans, and I was no different. I promptly forgot about my collection of rice weevils until months later. I chanced upon it again and I was shocked to find that the rice weevils were still alive, but most of the rice had already been turned into some sort of powder. Cool…

BTW, around that age, I also did some experiments on rice weevils by keeping them in the freezer for longer and longer periods of time to see how long they could withstand the cold. They’re pretty resilient and go into some sort of hibernate mode when you take them out from the freezer. After warming up for a while, they would start moving again.