Singapore & Jakarta Trip 2008

I took 3 weeks annual leave and flew to Singapore and Jakarta to visit some friends and relatives. My friends accompanied me for the whole weekend in Singapore (thanks heaps!), and the days in Jakarta were mostly spent with my parents.

Here are some pictures from the trip:

The view from my room at Sleepy Sam’s. Rather shabby, I know, but I’d much prefer it rather than staying at some fancy hotels.

This part of Bugis is my ‘hood in Singapore :). I think I can navigate the area blindfolded.

We visited National Museum of Singapore. Call me boring, but museums tend to have unexpected interesting exhibitions.

The front porch of my parents house in Kelapa Gading, Jakarta.

After the nightmarish Jakarta Flood in 2007, my dad raised the floor by a meter, I could easily touch the ceiling.

Traffic has always been beyond terrible in Jakarta. That bus in the picture eventually broke down and suddenly moved backward hitting my parents car (the bus driver ran away, gosh).

As much as I love travelling, this first time trip with budget airlines (Tiger Airways and Valuair) really took the comfort away, though the money saved was definitely worth it.

If I could recommend one thing to the Singaporean and Indonesian governments, please make your customs officers smile to the visitors. Seriously, I was given suspicious looks and frowned at each time I passed their areas. Maybe next time I should wear a t-shirt saying “Dude, I’m neither a terrorist nor a drug mule. Res-pect!”

Random Project Updates

Haven’t made any project related post since July last year, so here’s a list of little things I spent some time on:

• While playing around with Firefox Web Developer Extension, I found out that some Maven reports generated invalid HTML which could break the reports layout with non-default vm templates. Hence MFINDBUGS-29, MCHECKSTYLE-74, and MCHANGES-83.
• After integrating Kaptcha in SCode Plugin 0.5, I spent some time working on the Kaptcha project itself where most of the effort was on refactoring the original SimpleCaptcha code. That, and some other patches have made it to Kaptcha 2.1 and 2.2 .
• I replaced all usages of JMock with EasyMock on all of my Java projects (I know, a stupid thing to do because EasyMock-ing is also no fun). Looking forward to giving Mockito a try at work. No, there will be no effort to replace EasyMock with Mockito regardless of the outcome.
• As mentioned on my Slicehosted post, I rewrote Wish using Rails. I also spent more time playing with Ruby/Rails and I could see why some people love them. Personally, I’m still leaning towards Java. I think static typing is better in the long run. My take on the whole Ruby vs Java fiasco… people have different perspectives and opinions, there’s not one true programming language nirvana, Ruby and Java communities will learn to co-exist peacefully.
• Since this blog is now using WordPress (damn, I hate upgrading WordPress everytime there’s a security fix), and because there hadn’t been any activity in Blojsom development, I decided to stop following Blojsom mailing lists for now. Nabble shows that I’ve been posting since July 2005 to February 2008, it didn’t feel that long at all :). I will still maintain the Blojsom plugins I created and I still have some patches to contribute to Blojsom core.