There is a drawback when using mobile phone for browsing the net. Apart from having to pay for the data charges (that is assuming if you are not not subscribing to any data plan provided by your mobile carriers), the screen is just to small to look at all those amazing design and features a normal web browser can provide. Nevertheless, when using these tiny little small screens, we only want to read text or maybe some resized pictures or images.

Because of this, it would be best to provide your blog with tools to help people who loves your blog but only have time to read them on their mobiles. There’s a solution for this, Onbile.

Whenever a mobile user logs, the javascript provided will detect whether you are browsing using a mobile phone or a normal browser. This would really help your mobile readers and encourage them to visit your blog more often.

The only issue I have is:

• Only 2 pages of your title list will be available (I am guessing this would depend on your feed setting)
• You can’t revert back to your original layout once it’s loaded on your smartphone

I am still going to try this tool for a while and see if suits my need or else I am going to remove it and search for another tool or WordPress plugin.

Enough of the comparison crap. Last week, I represented my company to attend a brief presentation by Oracle Malaysia about Oracle’s Enterprise Single Sign On (ESSO). I was a bit surprised to find that Oracle Malaysia has moved from Citibank building near KLCC to The Garden Midvalley City since my last visit there.

There were a handful of people already arrived when I got there. Had a cup of coffee before the presentation started. The presenter for Oracle Single Sign-On was Peter Rajnak, Solutions Specialist Director, Identity Management Fusion Middleware APAC from Oracle Corporation. What a long title for a job title.

Which Single Sign On (SSO) is right for me? I’ve heard about single sign on before, simply saying you only need to remember 1 username and password. The presenter did a very good job at explaining how the mechanism work, he somehow manage to balance between the technical aspect and the business aspect.

The next presenter was Swapnil Mehta, Director of Global Access Management Practice of SENA Systems of AurionPro. A winner of the Oracle Titan Award, the firm has taken a lot of identity management jobs for enterprise level of Fortune 500 companies.

Let’s look at some brief “About Enterprise Single Sign On”:

1. Too many users IDs and Passwords
2. Security Risk
3. Enterprise Single Sign On Must Be Easy to Use

In order to solve the issue above, Oracle has come out with Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Suite Plus. As usual, enterprise level product would require an enterprise level of implementation and that would involve some initial investment.

If your organization would like to lighten the IT department hassle in managing IDs and password, this would be a solution to look forward to.

The Iron Man 2 storyline for me is quite fast pace. The movie reminded me of Transformer 2 where there were too much action going on at the scene. My wife who watched the movie with me didn’t understand the story in the beginning and asked me a lot many questions. I then told her bits and pieces and told her to just enjoy the movie rather than trying to figure out the story. Since one the sponsors of Iron Man 2 is Oracle, I noticed a number of glimpse of Oracle logo. There was also Larry Ellison the CEO of Oracle himself shaking hands with Tony Stark.

Back home, I did some Googling and found out that Oracle and Marvel created a webisode titled “Two Worlds” highlighting the Oracle technology being used at Marvel. It’s quite entertaining and contain a lot of information regarding how Oracle is being used in the business world.

Check out the 3D illustration which includes Tony Stark (the animated version) as Iron Man.

Truth to be told, there aren’t any ideal environment where everything you need is just at the tip of your finger. There are other efforts and factors to be counted as well. However, having a positive thought is good enough to keep things moving forward.

Back to Iron Man 2 movie. I love the action pack battle between Iron Man and the drones. I love the technology being used by Tony Stark. Overall, its a great movie to watch.

The best part about POD is this business model has produced a few extra hundred ringgits per month for me. It’s one of the easiest “making money on the internet” business model that I have ever tried. In matter of 2 weeks, I’ve already seeing some flow of money coming into my PayPal account. I can imagine if I strategically built some dedicated tasks without procrastinating, this business model has the potential to match my current monthly salary. My only issue is within me where I am not able to leave ‘the comfort zone’ and the habit of procrastinating.

Enough complaining. If you have ever heard of Cafepress, it is one of the most popular “Print On Demand” website on the internet. You can make your own design and have them shipped the product to yourself or anyone else. The best part about POD is, your product doesn’t have to be available right now for you to sell. Your job is just design and promote your custom made product virtually with no physical presence. How neat is that? Once your product is ready, the product will be sold over and over again every time someone purchased it online. Kind of a like a passive income once you reached certain level. But don’t get too excited, this is a part time business so if you work more, you earn more. If you are lazy or can’t get rid of procrastinating habit like me, you only get what you deserve..haha..

Here’s to my own T-Shirt store on Cafepress : “Aisy T-Shirt House”

P/S: This store is completely brand new. I have another online store which is currently making some money for me the past several months without too much effort needed. The idea and money is exciting but the work is not…I need some motivation though..

My trustworthy red Proton Iswara Aeroback 1.3 is currently being used by my wife. I never drove the Mercedes when my father was around. Being the eldest son and the named driver based on the insurance policy of the Mercedes 230E, I was the most eligible person to take care of the car after my father’s passing. The car cannot be sold yet because it needs a trust handler’s authority to issue an authorization letter before changing changing ownership and being sold off. Because of that, I’ll be driving around with the car until all of the other stuff relating to my father’s death has been cleared.

Front view of the Mercedes 230E

Rear view of the Mercedes 230E

Some good review about this Mercedes Benz 230E, apart from being huge, it’s much more comfortable from the cars I’ve ever own. Since the car’s front hood is so long, I am guessing the Mercedes logo in front of the car is a good indicator about the length of the car’s front end, if not you’ll be kissing the bumper the car in front of you. The interior is roomy however, I seem to have trouble with the air conditioning being too cold. This car is has automatic transmission so driving short or long distance is a breeze to drive. Other than that, the raw engine power and the driving experience better than the Proton I’ve been so used to.

Interior view of the Mercedes 230E

The downside of having such a big car is the always, the fuel consumption and more money for both parts and car services. My Proton Iswara only consume around 15 – 17 cent a kilometer of fuel while the Mercedes would be using 20 – 24 cent a kilometer of fuel. That would translate to an extra RM15 – RM25 of fuel in a week since I drive to work almost 500km per week. If fuel consumption is not a problem, I would definitely keep this car for it continental driving experience. It reminded me of the old Volvo 240GL my father handed over to me when I was studying my Diploma in Mechanical (Automotive) Engineering.

I’m not a big fan of old cars anymore, therefore I would settle for a new car once I’ve finished off my car loan 2 more years to come.

Anyway, no one knows when or where your final moment would be so it might be best to accept fate that god had written.

Al-Fatihah to Syed Azizan Syed Hashim Al-Idrus..

After a week of learning all there is from the SOA/ADF Oracle training, I found this job advertised by a big multi-national company that matches what I have learned so far. Before I write about it more, I wanted to share with you some screenshots of what I’ve learned from the Oracle training I attended, here you go:

What you see above is a screenshot of Oracle Jdeveloper tool in designing a work flow of a credit card process. At first, following the step by step instruction in the tutorial was easy. Not until the end part when you have to test to see if the work flow application you’ve just created could run or not. It was sort of a relief when it run successfully. But when you see an error message appears, there is where you start to scratch your head opening up every little components which you’ve thought was so simple and realized it has become so complex. It’s like doing math problems during school but with some visuals added to it. For those people who loves the challenge, this is an ideal job for you. I can’t really say it is for me although I do like it once in a while.

This is a view of Oracle Enterprise Manager. It’s a heavyweight application which I believe involves BEA Weblogic application server. My laptop couldn’t take that application therefore I had to connect to the instructor’s laptop to view. If you are familiar with online dashboard, PHPmyadmin or others, you’ll get the hang of it. All of these activities I’ve shown to you requires a lot of ‘experiencing’. It’s not something you could just read and digest. So if you are lazy ‘doing’ but love to just ‘read’, this is not something for you. I love experimenting (up to a level where I don’t see too much disappointing error messages) so this might be a suitable task for me.

Alright, enough about my ranting, here is the job description of a Oracle BEA Weblogic Portal Consultants:

Job Description

Systems Integration Consulting professionals are responsible for delivering large-scale, complex programs that marry processes with technology to help our clients achieve high performance.

Oracle Weblogic professionals design, implement and deploy Oracle Weblogic Portal and Oracle Weblogic Integration solutions to achieve defined business goals. They maintain skills in Oracle Weblogic Portal and WLI solution architecture, design, configuration, development, integration, testing and deployment; and Oracle Weblogic Portal and WLI technical architecture.

Key responsibilities may include:

• Supervising functional and technical design activities
• Creating functional requirements as an input to application design
• Developing and testing detailed functional designs for business solution components and prototypes
• Supervising application build, test, and deploy activities
• Planning and executing data conversion activities (e.g., test data)
• Driving test planning and execution

Qualifications

Well versed with Oracle Weblogic Portal skills.

1. Portlets, Page Flow, Web Flows
2. Weblogic Portal Configuration, Administration and Performance Tuning
3. Weblogic Portal Clustering Design and Implementation
4. Web Services Integration
5. Portal Content repositories
6. Content integration and management
7. Access Management Integration or Single Sign-On
8. Rules-based personalization
9. RIA technologies such as AJAX / Adobe Flex

Well versed with Oracle Weblogic Integration skills.

1. WLI Clustering Design and Implementation
2. WLI Configuration, Administration and Performance Tuning
3. Human Workflow Design and Implementation
4. Process Integration Design and Implementation
5. Synchronous (e.g. SOAP, Web Services, EJB, RMI, CORBA) Integration Architecture, Design and Implementation
6. Asynchronous (e.g. JMS, MQ) Integration Architecture, Design and Implementation
7. Batch Integration Architecture, Design and Implementation
8. Canonical Data Model and Data Transformation including XML, XSD, XPath and XQuery
9. Service Orientated Architecture
10. Oracle Database Integration (JDBC, SQL)

Other Related Skill Requirements

• Knowledge and experience in implementation of Oracle WebLogic Server based solution
• Knowledge and experience in implementation of Java Open Source Framework (e.g. Spring)
• Knowledge and experience in full application development and implementation lifecycle
• Recognized Degree from good universities

Experience Preferred

1. Manager: 8 years and above of relevant experience including Project Management and Solution Architect roles
2. Consultant: 4 years and above of relevant experience including Team Management and Web Architect roles

Professional Skill Requirements

• Proven success in contributing to a team-oriented environment
• Proven ability to work creatively and analytically in a problem-solving environment
• Desire to work in an information systems environment
• Excellent leadership, communication (written and oral) and interpersonal skills

Phew!! That’s just too much to handle for me. I can’t imagine myself learning all those skills just to become an Oracle BEA Weblogic Portal Consultants. I know that this job can offer triple or more the salary I’m earning right now. However, I am missing a lot of requirement in becoming one for instance, a degree. So I guess my only option at the moment is to work closely with my company to maybe provide services for this role. Although my boss would not probably give me triple salary earning, at least I can still make use of what I have learned so far.

By the way, the product line my company is selling can be used with BEA Weblogic server. I think I’ll try and find some time to fiddle around with that one first. Hope you get an insight of what my job is at the moment.

Have a nice day everyone.

It doesn’t really matter which product is the best or not, it is a matter of preferences. If I can afford to buy a BMW, I would definitely owned one. Unfortunately, I can only afford a basic car at the moment but I can still dream of a BMW nevertheless. Back to my Oracle training of course. The training was held at Oracle’s HQ up in Level 38, Menara Citibank Kuala Lumpur. Check out their front desk:

I can only wish I am working with a huge corporation such as Oracle. It must be really tough trying to score a job there, don’t you think?

Anyway, my trainer is a guy name Sachin, I am guessing he’s from India from his thick Indian accent. Prior to this training, I have no idea what SOA or the longer version Service Oriented Architecture means. Even after reading Wikipedia, I still couldn’t picture what SOA is all about. My trainer tried to give some clue on what SOA is all about but all I see is a bunch application pool represented by jargon linking with each other. I must give credit to Sachin although his presentation was a bit bored, he’s quite a tech nerd when it comes to hands-on training which came in late in the afternoon since the Oracle JDeveloper installation file was almost 1GB and had to be copied manually from person to person. The requirement was 3GB of RAM for the training laptop just for the VMWare containing the SOA suite to run while I only have 1GB of RAM. Lucky there was an alternative.

The training class became more livelier when the hands-on approach began. With Nescafe coffee served, it was very enjoyable to crunch the tutorials given. Right up until my developed SOA scripts got corrupted and could not be deployed apart from the wireless networking changed setting. The journey continues tomorrow morning.

Since doing sales job is not one of my strongholds, I’ve always been interested to become a systems analyst. It may sound geeky but it is something that I like to look upon. Nevertheless, since I don’t have a diploma or degree in IT or Computer Science, I’d better stick with becoming at least an engineer role such as a web engineer role.

I just wanted to share with you some notes that I’ve gathered on what a job of a systems analysts is all about:

What are the responsibilities of the systems analysts?

Here are some of the responsibilities that System Analysts are expected to deliver:

• Provide creative source of ideas, solution to address problems to the existing implementations.
• Perform internal testing and debugging.
• Produce project progress reports, including project details, schedule, milestones and resource allocation.
• Ensure projects are implemented and completed successfully within schedule.
• Conduct technical feasibility studies, evaluate user requirements and recommends solutions and resolve issues.
• Prepare functional and technical specification and provide production support.
• Design, analyse and code programs for system development according to user specifications.
• Support user testing and be responsive to user queries, request for assistance.
• Participate in the full software development lifecycle (SDLC) including requirements study, analysis, design, coding, testing, documentation, implementation and user training.

What are the types of knowledge and skills possess by the systems analyst?

Knowledge and skill needed to be possessed:

• Up-to-date with the latest IT in specific areas of their scope
• A keen determination in problem solving
• Excellent communication skills with various level of management level

How are these knowledge and skills acquired by the systems analyst?

Knowledge and skills is normally acquired:

• During on-going job, tasks and projects
• Daily routine of work and communication internally and externally
• Internal training by senior personnel and top management
• Own effort of obtaining the latest information

Are the knowledge and skills possessed by the systems analyst adequate for him to perform his responsibility effectively?

Knowledge and skills are hard to be determined whether it is adequate or not. It is all depend on the individual performing their responsibility and the motivation and drive that they have.

If you are a job seeker, hope this information would be a good guide for you.

This year, not a single physical Hari Raya greeting card for me since I never sent one to anyone. Most probably because people are saving up for other stuff. The price of goods has risen drastically over a year and the economy for most people doesn’t look that good. Myself included I supposed. So, SMS wishes and Facebook are now the preferred option nowadays.

This year’s Raya would be my final year celebrating it as a single guy. Next year, hopefully I’ll be celebrating Hari Raya with my future wife or if lucky a child as well. There are also plans for next year’s Hari Raya, I would be celebrating it elsewhere instead of being stuck in KL all these years.

Okay, here’s my Hari Raya digital card for this year’s Hari Raya 2009:

Have a nice Hari Raya celebration, drive save and happy holiday!