(c)numchucks77

It is indeed a sad moment for us. An Education institution where pupils learn from their masters has been tainted with blood. In United States, we have another school rampage that resulted 31 people dead and dozens injured. Meanwhile in Indonesia, a government-sponsored School caused a furore by covering up a student’s death.

United States with its gun ownership law is not foreign to school shooting. The Columbine incident, the more recent shooting at Amish elementary school and the latest shooting at Virginia Tech. Hopefully US will introduce a better gun-law to protect its citizens.

Meanwhile in Indonesia, many bloggers are expressing their anger and emotion with the latest killing from Institute of Public Administration(IPDN). The government-sponsored school has been known for its semi-military education style, and its students who are killed by their classmates/seniors. An online petition to close down the school has been created.

Hardono’s take

US Federal/State Government should put a metal detector in every school in United States. They could change the budget, instead of allocating so much money for Iraq, the money could be used to fortify every school in US. If the shootings are moved from schools to malls, the malls should also be fortified with metal detectors. If the same thing happened to the beaches, the beaches should also be fortified with metal detectors. Hmm.. shouldn’t they do a simpler approach by making the public access to firearms difficult/near to impossible?

STPDN should be closed and rent the building to other school such as UI/Binus/IPB, this way we won’t waste the investments that government has made in IPDN. And I believe the Indonesian government should hire more professionals with management education background. This way, we will have a government with a better management qualities, and with more resistance to corruption.

And lastly, my thoughts and prayers are for families of the victims. I pray for your strength and your well-being, bracing through this remorseful moment. For the rest of us, I hope we could do something to make this world a better place to life.

Notable bloggers with their opinion on IPDN Scandal:

1. Kang Kombor
2. Bro Fertob

List of management school in the region (replacements for IPDN?):

1. Singapore Management University
2. Institut Pengembangan Manajemen Indonesia
3. Magister Management – Univ. Gadjah Mada
4. The Complete List

The online petition to close down IPDN:

1. Petition to close down IPDN

Reading on School Shootings in US:

1. Columbine High School Shooting
2. Amish School Shooting
3. Virginia Tech. Shooting
4. List of other School massacres

During the course of time, I often required to write solutions which involve reading CSV (Comma Separated Values) Files. After repeating the same thing for a few times, I decided to write a component that will parse the CSV file and return a DataTable.

To use the the component is really simple. First you need to declare the object,

    CsvDataSource.CsvDataSource src = new CsvDataSource.CsvDataSource();

and then read the CSV file. There are three possible way to read the CSV:

    //Using comma as character separator, first line is NOT treated as column names
    DataTable dt1 = src.ReadFile("input.csv"); 

    //Using comma as separator character, first line is treated as column names
    DataTable dt2 = src.ReadFile("input.csv", true); 

    //Using pipe (|) as separator character, first line is treated as column names
    DataTable dt3 = src.ReadFile("input.csv", true, '|'); 

The complete source code as follows: Download the class source code.

Simple demo using Command Line Application:

/* Demo of CsvDataSource using Command Line Application
 * (c) 2007 Hardono Arifanto
 * http://sodeve.net
 */
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using CsvDataSource;
using System.Data;

namespace CsvDataSourceDemo
{
    class Program
    {
        private static void printHelp()
        {
            Console.WriteLine(@"Demo for CsvDataSource.
    Usage: CsvDataSourceDemo [inputfile.csv]");
        }
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            DataTable dt;
            if (args.Length > 0)
            {
                CsvDataSource.CsvDataSource src = new CsvDataSource.CsvDataSource();
                dt = src.ReadFile(args[0],true,',');
                //Display the DataTable content
                foreach (DataColumn dc in dt.Columns)
                {
                    Console.Write(dc.ColumnName + "t");
                }
                Console.WriteLine();
                foreach (DataRow dr in dt.Rows)
                {
                    for(int i=0; i < dt.Columns.Count; i++)
                    {
                        Console.Write(dr[i] + "t");
                    }
                    Console.WriteLine();
                }
            }
            else
                printHelp();
        }
    }
}

Internet has now became inseparable factor of my life. I could mindlessly browsing slashdot, digg, lifehacker, blogs@ikastara (which later leads me to other indonesian blogs) and burn hours of my ‘precious’ time.

And this has to stop. For example today, I was supposed to be writing code to create an email relay, and completes the dotnetnuke project. After 10 lines of C# code, 1 hour testing telnet to connect SMTP and POP server, and 4+ hours browsing through websites mentioned in previous paragraph, I ended up hating myself for not doing what I supposed to do.

There’s a saying “the poison is your cure” (I hope I’m not made up that one :P), which fits the situation when I read this Article @ Lifehacker.

On average, I spent 4 hours to read blogs. I definitely need to curb the number of hours into somewhere 1 to 2 hours. What about you? How many hours you spent reading blogs? Do you plan to stop/reduce the number of hours?