Today is the first of Ramadhan, a month in Muslim calendar where all healthy adult Muslim and Muslimah are required to fast. From dawn to dusk, we are prohibited from consuming foods and drinks.

For me, the biggest challenge is caffeine withdrawal. Usually at office I consume two cups of coffee, one in the morning and one after lunch. The caffeine helps me to keep alert and prevent drowsiness. So today was really bad, my eyes felt so heavy. I lost count how many times I ‘accidentally’ fell asleep.

I think tomorrow I should to drink coffee in the morning. As I mentioned before, caffeine will remain active in your body for at least for 4 hours.

Our house also have this roster duty to prepare food for Sahur (early meal before dawn). For me, the trick is to prepare all the raw ingredients the night before. So in the morning I can quickly cook them. It is also a safety measure, because you might injure yourself when you use knife when preparing the ingredients.

Apart from above technicalities, Ramadhan is a month for self reflection and introspection. The teaching is that whoever able to go through Ramadhan “successfully”, he or she will come out as a better person.

As a closing, I pray for all my Muslim brothers and sisters, and myself, hopefully all of us will be “successful” in our Ramadhan and come out as a better person.. Amien.

Few days ago, me and two of my colleagues attended Mix It Up session at Microsoft Building at Marina One Boulevard. It was my first time around that vicinity :D. Yeah, after 8 long years in Singapore, I finally walked into Marina Boulevard. I don’t know it’s so close to Lau Pa Sat!

Anyway, it definitely exceeded our expectation. The dinner was good considering that it is a free conference 😀 There was a XBOX 360, and Internet Kiosks for killing time while waiting for the conference to start. That building is brilliant, the view from level 21 is beautiful. You could see the sea, the Esplanade ‘durians’ Theater, the floating platform where the recent NDP was held.

The session opened by a keynote from John Fernandes. He is definitely has a good sense of humor. I think it’s going to be difficult to not remember him with the way he introduce himself to us 😀 His short keynote highlighted Cloud Computing as the direction of the future system architecture, with Software plus Services at its core. With emphasis on how Microsoft Tools will help us the developers to build such architecture.

The second speaker was Apurva Lawale. His session, titled “XAML: Enabling Designer and Developer collaboration”, shown us how Microsoft Expression can be seamlessly integrated with Visual Studio 2008, to produce a rich and stylist content with Silverlight/WPF. He exhibited impressive examples like the Grid Girls Website, Taiwan’s Library Website, and a real-time Airport monitoring system used in Germany (my bad, I totally forgot to take note the URL of the last two examples). He also demoed the ease of combining the artwork created by the designer, with the program created by the developer. At the end of his presentation, he opened up a QA sessions and offered books as a prize to whoever raise a questions. It was pretty amusing QA session with interesting questions such as “How to use XAML without Silverlight?” :D, “How to apply XAML to dynamic objects/control at run time”, etc. The last question raised was from me, yes, myself. I raised my hand, then my brain went blank. I know I had this interesting question on my mind. But somehow the one that came out off my mouth was, “Is Silverlight is Microsoft answer to Adobe Flash?” *Blush*. Okay, I lied .. it was worst than that 😀 So to redeem myself, me and my colleagues thrown more qualitybetter questions to him after the whole session finished.

The third session was a showcase presented by a group of Temasek Polytechnic students that used .NET 3.0 with WPF to build Coral Monitoring System. They were the winner of Singapore’s Imagine Cup. They call it Coral Tellus. Pretty impressive project. Unfortunately the more interesting details such as how .NET 3.0 interact with the Temperature Sensor/Controller, Salinity Sensor/Controller were left out.

The last session was presented by Maung Maung Phyo (Anyone knows where is his blog/website?). His presentation titled “Visual Studio 2008: The Swiss Army Knife for Web Development”, introduced us to the new interesting features of Visual Studio 2008. He highlighted features such as:

1. Better designer. Faster loading, with a split view between designer and code
2. Javascript Intellisense. Impressive CSS handling
3. LINQ
4. Integrated Testing Project
5. AJAX
6. WCF

His presentation was superb. The transition between explaining the concept and the hands-on coding was smooth. He covered a lot of materials within relatively short time. If you want to download his presentation it’s available HERE. His session apparently a rerun from the previous Mix It Up session.

When we thought it was over, another speaker stepped up and shown us the new Grid Girls website. Very enticing and attractive, especially for guys. OK, maybe also for girls that into pretty girls. He highlighted that the Grid Girls website was build only in 4 weeks. From the initial concept to the final delivery, all in four weeks. And he said he will walk through with us the process of building Grid Girls Website in the next Mix It Session. So I think it is going to be very exciting and you should not miss it. Book your seat by Online Registeration. See you there!

One of my flatmate bought this interesting book about Psychometric Test. It consists of succinct explanations and concepts, with more emphasis on training your skill. So if the job that you’re applying requires you to have Psychometric Test, make sure you get yourself prepared by not missing out this book.

The book covers 5 interesting subjects.

• Firstly, the book will introduce you to what a psychometric test is all about and how to prepare yourself against such test. It also will give you tips on how to improve your performance during the test.
• Secondly, it covers about Numerical Reasoning Tests. Numerical Reasoning Tests assess your ability to reason with numerical information. The book explains many types of question that you might face in this type of test. Then it will give you a plenty of practice questions for you to jog your memory.
• Thirdly, the book explains about Verbal Reasoning Tests. Topics such as spelling, word comprehension, word analogies and text comprehension are all well covered here. The book also kind enough by pointing other free resources in Internet, should you need more practice questions
• Fourthly, it covers the Abstract Reasoning Tests. This is my favorite subject. Why? Because this test assess your ability to identify patterns within diagrams, and I love searching for patterns :D. The practice questions is very similar to those that you find in your IQ Test.
• Lastly, it discussed about Personality Questionnaire. I learned a lot from this chapter. It taught things like there is no wrong or right answer in a personality test, marking up your scores might punishes you by landing you a job that is not suitable. In short, you should be honest with your personality test. Also, making yourself ‘too good’, also might not necessarily land you the job. Because certain type of job requires certain type of personality.

In the last chapter of the book, there is a Personality Questionnaires. I have make available here. You can calculate your personality score here. Btw, you need to enable Javascript to make the question appear (I generate them using Javascript). To calculate your score, just click the button after the final questionnaire.

Free Psychometric Test

Now that you know your personality scores, you need to interpret them. You could find the interpretation of these scores in the last chapter of this BOOK 😀 (Please don’t be angry .. I just want to practice my Javascript-fu. Not intending to receive a cease & desist order)