道、德、仁、义、礼、智、信

老子《道德经》三十七章：

上德不德，是以有德；下德不失德，是以无德。上德无为，而无以为；上仁为之，而无以为；上义为之，而有以为；上礼为之，而莫之应，则攘臂而扔之。故失道而后德，失德而后仁，失仁而后义，失义而后礼。夫礼者，忠信之薄，而乱之首也。前识者，道之华，而愚之始也。是以大丈夫居其厚，不居其薄；居其实，不居其华。故去彼取此。
老子认为，上德近道，下德近仁。以大道立天下，不讲德自有德；以仁爱为旗帜，好讲德常缺德。以自然为本，由本及末的顺序是：自然、道、德、仁、义、礼、智、信、愚，称为“天下式”。

while we were discussing project requirements, suddenly someone talked about this... thought provoking when you try to apply this to your tender specs lol 

my obsession with the buddha

I had never read Buddhist books in Chinese before. I tried to read those free-to-distribute chinese books, but not one held my attention. The books I had read before were all english translations and interpretations. From there I concluded that Buddhists do not believe in a god as creator, but was more a believer of existence and reincarnation of beings, each reincarnation cultivates the self to a higher order being. Buddha was hence a state of an enlightened mind. Nirvana was the heavenly realm where the scriptures call the after world, or literally translated from chinese, western world. That has been the faith I had since 1999.

When I read a scripture in Chinese, I was surprised that there was mention of a god whom we seek wisdom, but that god isn't Buddha. Buddha was usually interpreted as an enlighten state of mind. Some interpret that Buddha as an end destination. Some interpret the Buddha as path free of material needs. Whichever the interpretation, it can't be too for from the truth, as we can see the monks all over the world believing in the same faith.

This moment, my interpretation of Buddha is life without material needs. This life co-exists with what we know as reality. Some believe that if we remove our material needs from our reality world, then the reality and Buddha world is one. Whether we choose to remove our material needs from reality is a choice. Some believe in giving away their wealth to help the poor as a gesture of removing material needs. Some see material needs as greed.

The reality is that we live in a material world where everyone, even monks, need to eat, sleep, work for money. The monks work in the temple, teach Buddhist classes, and if their salary don't go to themselves, it's to the temple, to buy food for him to eat, to pay the utilities bills for his temple lodge, the chair he sits, the books he uses, the clothes he wears, so I feel that the whole chase for a life without material needs is purely symbolic than practical or purposeful.

Assuming a dualistic nature, and descartes 'i think, therefore i am', we will be able to come to terms with a material reality coexisting with a life without materials and at the same time experience the life without materials as reality. The concept of life without materials could be seen as reality as you feel it, moments where you are free from material needs such as your bed time, prayer or meditation time, a time where you feel in tune with the universe. It could also be seen as the spiritual realm/dimension that exists with the physical reality realm which we all convince ourselves to be living in.

Assuming a non-dualistic nature, then only one realm can be the reality, and the only way to achieve a life without material needs is to have a life without material needs.

I believe in duality. I live a life in the physical reality, and enrich my physical life with the insights gained from the spiritual realm. I can't remember what the actual words were in the book, but it was something along the line that says, the buddha is outside of you, but at work, it's with you.

And I am not a buddhist, I have multi faiths.

never trust old birds no matter how convincing they sound

I know I shouldn't be laughing at others, but I just found it a little unbelievable for a manager to not know how single sign on works. It started with an innocent question whether we can test single sign on on ipads because so far we have been testing on windows machines. He said, with conviction, that there was no need to test because the login module is disabled after single sign on is enabled.

We were awe-struck. After explaining to him that the login module wasn't being disabled, he thought that the login prompt is something triggered by the active directory (AD), and after more explanation, he still said that there will not be any log in prompt. Windows authentication was an alien term to him, after explaining to him that windows authentication is a windows client to windows server single sign on mode, he was completely lost.

Not laughing. Few months ago, I said something noob-ish. I always remember such moments because it sticks out like a sore thumb on my report card. The infra team could be bitching away over how noob-ish I was when I asked them to convert a database cluster from an active-passive mode to an active-active mode, but it was because this unbelievable manager told me that it could be done! I had learnt my lesson not to listen to what he says, because even google is more reliable!

The road to a good reputation is to always to verify my sources.

a day of self discovery

Yaya adapted to her school within a week. She walks to her classroom by herself, doesn't even say bye bye to me in the morning! In the evening, she will obediently go home with me. She is in the childcare for 11 hours, mondays to fridays. I ferry her to and fro everyday as well. So far she has only been out of school for one day because of a diarrhoea. The school wash the kids' hands every hour, so I would say I had a relatively stress-free life. (stress = yaya sick + i need to take leave)

Every night we repeat the same routine. Shower, eat dinner, sit around and watch us go about our household chores, then we will give her a milk bottle, leave her in her room, shut the door, and she will sleep. As yaya is now in childcare, as opposed to previously being at home, I am now able to focus better at work. When yaya was at home, she slept late, which made me more tired in the day. Now she sleeps by 9 pm, so I get more rest. So I am an advocate for childcare lol...

As she has been very obedient with her sleep routine, I had been able to do more reading at night. I realised that I had been a little outdated in terms of technology. Recently I had been reading up on google analytics and RSS feeds as I cannot understand the terms my users use lol. She knows google analytics and RSS feeds more than me, I felt that I had to keep up. I was also reading up on databases. In the past, I relied a lot on my DBA to tell me what I need to know, now I don't have that luxury, my DBA is a DBA, database administrator, not a database designer, not a database architect, not anything else, just an admistrator who executes scripts, and day to day operational tasks.

It was only after 3 months, did I manage to convince the infra guy to upgrade my database. 3 months ago, I complained that the memory usage is >70% and requires upgrade. He said it's no cause for concern, and it's due to settings. Fine, I  let him change his settings, he insisted that we must monitor for 3 months, fine, I can wait, the moment 3 months was up, I asked him, so is it more than 80% now? He said, close, not yet 80%.

Work wise, more work, that's something expected. But what's new? Being told that I can still do my own work in my project's user requirements gathering sessions. I was quite pissed off when I heard that, but I am quite sure he wasn't thinking, as he is prone of that. It started with a very harmless question from my supervisor:

Him: How's your work now?

Me: Tiring. I spend an average of 2 half days every week on the user requirements gathering for the xxx project for the past 3 months.

Him: But you can still do your own work when you are in the meeting right?

Me: I wish! Not one time did I ever have that luxury, every meeting my user and vendor are arguing over the scope.

Him: Then what do you need to do?

Me: Decide what is to be done.

That was one week ago. This morning, one of my bosses asked me what type of work I do for my projects. I never really thought about it because my supervisor calls it operational issues, but he drilled down further to the specifics, that was when I realised that everyday I am always arguing with people because I was deciding what should and should not be done. For me, it is a very subconscious activity, I can easily tell people yes or no, to the extent where I feel that I am hired just to argue with people, but that's basically what I had been doing in my previous job as well, which I didn't realise, because it was so natural that I didn't know that I was making decisions.

Another point brought up this morning was that my bosses were talking about themselves "trivialising" work, e.g. saying a certain task is simple, or can be done very quickly. It never occured to me that they were "trivialising", because I saw it as not paying attention to what's going on.

Once in a while, conversations like these make me discover myself.

the active directory login that wasn't

One of those things that frustrates me at work is not having enough time to go through the systems, simply because my job scope doesn't require me to understand the internal mechanisms of the systems I manage, and coupled with vendors of questionable quality, many problems never get solved.

I took over an applications from a project manager (PjM) some time back, but I had never really looked into the system because it is a system that is only used in december every year. Last december I was helping her to troubleshoot problems with her system, and also cover the helpdesk tickets when she was absent. She was really stressed out the whole time because of login issues. When I tried to help by probing more into the design of the system, she told me that it's her problem, don't bother, so I didn't interfere.

She was the PjM from the very beginning of the project 4 years ago, saw it through the development, and then finally maintaining it. The vendor developer quitted after 3 years, got replaced by a 2nd developer, who left after supporting 1 december, and then replaced by a 3rd developer when took over, who also left after doing a few rounds of testing and resolving login issues. The 4th developer who took over was the one who discovered that the application wasn't using active directory (AD) login, when it was declared to be.

On hindsight, it was suspicious during the 15 min handover session I had for this system. I know it sounds crazy, but I only had 3 hours for her to handover 2 systems to me due to the short notice of handover assignments. I tried to log in the production with my AD credentials, but couldn't log in. She said it's always like that. There are a lot of login issues, so she just uses the admin account to log in. As we only had 15 min, I didn't dwell too much on the login issue.

Last december, I remembered supporting a case of a director who couldn't log in to the system. She escalated the issue, and about 5 people were activated just to help troubleshoot her login problem. We resetted her AD password countless times, and in the end, the developer deleted the account (need to raise service request to execute SQL query to delete account), then add the user back into the system, then she could log in.

And upon further recall of my memory, login issues were usually resolved by deleting the user from the database, and then adding them back into the system. For the longest time, that didn't make any sense to me. When I asked the vendor, (back then it was none of my business but I really pitied the PjM who was so stressed out by the login issues), he told me that he didn't know why, he was handed over the instruction to delete the user and add it back to resolve login issues.

The key to the mystery was that this application stored passwords in the system, and the password it stores, is the password that the user typed in the first time he accesses the system. As we need to change our AD password every 90 days, and we cannot reuse past passwords, it's no wonder why the passwords don't match, and hence face login issues every december when people use the system.

Sad is the life of that PjM. This is not the only mess I took over though. This really made me "dunno what to say", so I had to blog.

9 months at work - when you cant trust

It's quite unthinkable that I have survived 9 months in my job, and when I look at the amount of work I have, it was easily twice as much throughput as my previous job for the same time span. As the months go by, I am getting more and more challenging work, not that I am complaining, just that I don't want to end up stealing other people's work and being called the boss' pet.

Recently, I have been working on a single sign on project which had been preambling for half a year, and then one fine day, the AD (active directory) guy told me, "next month we will implement one-way-forest-trust". My immediate reaction was WHAT!!! only give me 1 month's notice? After making a huge fuss, the project was jammed, and then for another 3 months, the witch and wizard re-chanted their spells and kept getting ingredients from us. However, we didn't know what they were brewing until 2 weeks ago. One-way-forest-trust is the name of a type of AD setup that enables single sign on.

Everyone, well almost all the vendors, felt that they had been given wrong information. As for me, I had never trusted them because of the multiple versions of stories they had been telling us, so I didn't feel cheated. *evil me* While they were brewing their soup, I was asking google to impart knowledge of the whole alien topic of one-way-forest-trust to me. Servers, domains, network connectivity, connection protocols for AD, internal mechanisms of AD, etc... almost everything that I never had to know.

It was only 2 weeks ago that they scooped out the soup for us to drink and let us see the pot. We only had 4 weeks to figure out how to get the whole single sign on to work. Everyday we were trying to decipher the code because it was new to all of us. As I had a few systems to work on, I focused on my monster scampoint because that's the most important to everyone. For scampoint, I am very lucky to have a vendor who listens to everything I say. I tell him what I want him to code, he codes it in a few hours, I check, tell him the changes I want, after a few rounds and within a week, we were done.

After he completed what he had to do, we were just short of doing thorough testing, and I am quite sure that we are almost done for our scampoint, I decided to give him a 5 min motivational talk. ... You see, now that we have more or less tested our code and know it works, what risks do we face? We face the risk of an incompetant AD team who may bring us down. If they fail, all the apps will suffer, including us, because we are assuming that they are going to go a good job. If they fail, no matter how good a job we do, people see that we failed, they won't see that the AD team or the SSO project team failed. Do we really need to be at their mercy? We are definitely better than them, so to reduce the risk of us failing because of them, we will need to have a back up plan that can take over their work. And you must also not trust me, you must also think because I may be wrong. After that I told him to code more things for me and he was willing.

As I can only trust myself when I am faced with the ticking clock, I inadvertently create work for myself, like this one. I decided to make a call to the other vendor who was managing other scampoint apps, I didn't have to, and he will most probably fail if I didn't ask.

Me: "Are you assuming that we will be doing anything for you?"

Him: "We are assuming that scampoint will continue to sync users from AD."

Me: "Are you assuming that we are going to sync the users for you?"

Him: "This one we haven't thought about it because we are just using scampoint to build our app, we are not maintaining scampoint."

Me: "Ok, so now I am asking you, are you assuming that I am going to populate the users for you?"

Him: "We don't intend to change the sync mechanism, so we just need you to point to the new AD."

Me: "Do you know that it won't work?"

Him: "Why?"

Me: "Think again, then you tell me."

Him: "No change is needed."

Me: "Are you sure? You will need more than that."

Him: "Oh..." then he yadda yadda yadda, he got it.

Me: "I am not going to solve that problem for you."

Him: "It's not in our scope."

Me: "You didn't tell me that it's your assumption, so it's also not in my scope."

Him: "Then you need to bring it up to your boss."

Me: "It's your app that is affected, but nevermind I can bring it up as well. If it's anyone's fault, it's definitely not my fault for asking you whether you are assuming anything."

Him: "Yes, I know, it's our mistake, we didn't think of that." 

But I still helped him after scaring him over the phone... lol

transcending to paradise

Today was the final day of the funeral and monks were engaged from this organisation called Heart for Peace. The lead monk is Bhikkhu Buddha Dhatu, who led the prayers with his team of 9 - 3 men, 3 women, and 3 young boys. As there were a lot of preparations to be done for the prayers and many people moving about, that strange chill suddenly came back, and I knew that something was clinging onto me again. I engrossed myself deeply in the prayers by the 9 as I felt that the monk was emitting energies. He believes that he helps human beings go to paradise. Throughout the session, I saw his paradise. It was a space with a lotus and many bright spots of light around it. As it was the first time I saw this image, I was quite sure that it was from him.

Those shivers continued and a feeling of uneasiness swarmed over me. The prayers required us to walk around the coffin 3 times, and each time, I had the strong urge not to look at the body, so I briefly glimpsed, as a form of respect. It was as if I had wandered off for a few days, and then suddenly got called back, and I don't know why. The prayers were indeed effective because at the end of all the praying, I felt that I was back to normal, so I know that the grandma's soul must have transcended to paradise.

I was grateful to be part of the experience, and wonder whether the others felt the same. I felt extremely serene and at ease. After everything ended, I went to read the monk's book, because he said we can learn more by reading his book. After reading, I refreshed my memory of what I used to tell myself, that I need to do good deeds, for a better next life. Of course we may say that we are what we are now because we worked hard for it, but I believe in karma, and that a past life of good deeds results in a good present life. For example, if your past life was a nurse, and you served many patients, then the good karma accumulated results in a good present life, less hardship and burdens. However, if we take advantage of the good life and forget about serving the community, then our next life will not be as good. So then we wonder why we bother about our next life... It's just so that we have a peace of mind when we leave our bodies, that we have done many good deeds in the present life, and we are moving on to a better next life, with no regrets.