Coco is curled up like a ball

My head rests gently on her back

My cheek cushioned by her short black coat

She feels soft and warm.

I look up

Rosie is sitting high above on my torso

Protective and guarding

She looks down on me with her big brown eyes

Her face edging closer

Here she comes

Big licks

I wonder if she mistakes me for a dog

or a giant icecream!

Such beauty is bliss!

My girls are calm

Intuitive and playful.

There is nothing quite like it

How can two little dogs

Make me feel so peaceful and happy at once?!

~phyllis

Joy

How does it feel to experience Joy?

To be caught up in one of several moments

Taking snap shots of my surroundings

Reflecting

Like being inside a vaccum sealed bubble

Paul is on the couch reading a book

The girls are sleeping

The sun is filtering through the windows

The garden is pretty and green

It is blissfully quiet.

I am sitting on the red ball

Taking in all 360 ‘ views

Breathing softly and

Smiling widely

~phyllis

Recently my hometown Urumqi was in the news for all the wrong reasons.

What was initially a protest by the local Uighur community turned into a riot. I didn’t want to get into the details of this incident as I myself was not there and therefore the best I could say about it was how sad this made me feel.

Instead I wanted to tell you my experience growing up in Urumqi, XinJiang. My parents were part of the Chinese government’s initiative at the time to encourage Han Chinese to migrate to XinJiang in the 50′s and 60′s. It was interesting that I saw XinJiang being described as a ‘desolate and arid’ place, because when my parents arrived in XinJiang in their 20′s it was a lot emptier then.

I spent 14 years in Urumqi, and went to primary school and 3 years of high school in this beautiful city. Urumqi the name translates into ‘a beautiful prairie’. It’s laced with the snow-capped TianShan mountain in the backdrop, which you could see in the distance regardless of where you are in the city. Surrounding it were clusters of pine forrests and pristine rivers and lakes that formed from the melting snow.

I remember many fond memories of going on summer camps to escape the heat with my school friends. We would load up on the water-melons and leave them inside fishnet bags and cool in the clear water that runs down from the mountain. This is what I really want to tell you about. My high school class was filled with students from many ethnic groups. One of my best friends is A’setti, he is a Khazak. The photo below was taken when we were in year 8 on a school excursion during the summer. He is the one on the left of the photo. I joked with him that I should call him ‘Lenin’, because I thought the shape of his forehead bore a remarkable resemblance to the leader of the Soviet Russia. We spent a lot of times together, playing soccer, at the local bazaars, in school studying and going on camping trips. All this time, I always knew that A’setti’s background was different to mine. I met his parents, both were school teachers working at the local Khazak high school teaching in their own language.

A'sseti, Zhang Din and me on Summer camp

A recent photo of my friend A'sseti in 1994

There were many others, Ton’nur, a lively girl that shared a desk with me for 2 years, she was Uzbek, their language shared some similarity to Uighur, but with its own very distinct culture and customs. She told me that her grandmother made her learn their alphabets by writing them in an exercise book. She opened the book in front me, and I remembered seeing the familiar cursive Arabic alphabets, and thought how good her hand-writing were. There were Kuza’ti-jian, and Kudu’si-jian, two Uighur brothers with curly brown hair and large eyes. They had relatives living near my home in a small village. They were naughty, taking out their relative’s donkeys, and riding them on the main road. We were just kids doing what kids do and growing up in what we must thought was the best place to be.

There were tensions between the Chinese and the Uighurs. I remembered the odd fights and quarrels in the streets. I dare say it was no more frequent or violent than anywhere else in the world. One thing I would however say that there was always a pang of regret in me for not learning more of other cultures than my own, for the Chinese culture at least in Urumqi was dominant.

In Urumqi, you could get by quite easily if you just spoke Mandarin, apart from the odd swear words that you learn in Arabic, I really didn’t learn other much of other cultures. I think to a large extent, while there were high schools taught in their own languages, there was a tacit recognition that learning Chinese was imperative for the ethnic minorities to do well in the society at large.

I am sad to see the escalating ethnic violence that is going on now in Urumqi, seeing my home going up in flames, I wonder what A’setti would have said about that too. He is now an electrical engineer working in BeiJing, I manage to get in touch with him in 2002 when I was travelling in China. There is no doubt in my mind that we both want to see everyone in XinJiang to live in harmony and peace.

~paul

Since the age of 9, I picked up a camera and never looked back. To me, a  photograph is like moving images in a film. When I look at one, either physically in my hand or on a computer screen, I can see, feel and experience things as if they were unfolding before my very eyes.

Enjoy

Please note: Photographs and text are copyright Phyllis Li

My fascination and love of food flourished at a very young age, where I would eat til I burst and then start all over again! We’ll nothing much has changed apart from fine tuning my photography and documenting how dishes are prepared, cooked, presented and consumed in my home and that of my family and friends.

While I was born in Australia, my parents herald from Malta, a small old world place in the Meditteranean. I grew up accustomed to stewed rabbit, baked or fried fish, minestrone soup, baked rice, macaroni, egg stew, chicken noodle soup, pastizzi and meat with crispy potatos.

Through Paul, his mother and my family and friends, I have learnt the Joys of Cooking and Eating. I hope you enjoy my photographs and commentary. Some of the asian dishes have come from my mother in laws kitchen and others are a result of my own adventures.

It is my dream in the near future, to provide a resource on asian cooking that I have experienced from my husbands motherland ~phyllis

End Note: All photographs and text copyright Phyllis Li

I have been on a Data Management team for almost 9 months now. I am part of the technical team that complete many of the requests initiated by the business. When I first started, the choice over tools to produce reports are fairly standard, upstream teams populate a number of staging tables in an Oracle database in a schema belonging to our team.

We, the technical data team use either Toad or sqlplus to extract and data from tables and produce the necessary reports based on requirements. Sounds pretty straight forward right? Well sorta.

Now some other context for the team. The infrastructure we use is shared amongst many other teams whose activities often take priorities. Often we notice instances of instability with the Oracle database which in turn cause frustration and delays with our work. Unfortunately this is something we had to live with for the time being, and I believe this is often the case for many projects out there.

Around early December last year, it was decided to provide DataStage access to my team. This was intended to help alleviate some of the strain put on the Database, and hopefully migrate some of the intensive processing to a Sun Grid environment where DataStage jobs are executed.

This brings me to the Agile part of this post. As a technical team we are faced with a number of tasks to do while at the same time maintaining standard operational duties (i.e. keep those reports coming). DataStage as a tool and an environment was newish to the team overall, but not completely unfamiliar of.

So the team is under some pressure if you could understand. We are given a new tool to learn and use, we need to convert some of the existing reports in SQL to DataStage, and at the same time re-structure (at least the Data part), so that we can better utilise the infrastructure as to put less load on it.

At the time, I thought some of the Agile methods I have learnt may be relevant in this instance.
So this is what we did do:
1. All reports are analyzed, with an aim to streamline the overall process. Due to the time constraints, we thought to ‘pilot’ some of the most urgent and pressing reports. This is similar to identify the ‘must-haves’ features for a software.

2. Reports are assigned to individual developers with the aim to convert them to DataStage jobs. Every day at the start, we did a quick stand-up (~15-20 minutes), to track progress. I had all the development tasks on a whiteboard, and I encouraged developers to update them instead of emails. This actually helped the conversion process a lot, as we start to discover synergies amongst the reports which helped with 1. Whole iterations are about 2-week long, with concrete deliverables.

3. We failed early, a couple of things that we did in SQL was deemed technical challenging to do in DataStage, so we decided to have hybrid jobs where much of the heavy lifting of data processing is done in DataStage, and the remaining is done in SQL.

4. We adopted pair-programming. Initially when we first started on developing DataStage jobs, we generally have 2 people work on the job at the start. And when it has progressed to a degree, the team members may be inter-changed as to foster knowledge sharing. This seems to happen naturally for us, we already have a peer-review process in place.

Now the outcome, over the past 3 months I find things go a lot smoother for us. We still had the occasional database downtimes, but we were still able to mitigate much of the risks around that. There have been times also when the DataStage grid environment was heavily used, so we had delays there too. But the redundancy of data being available in both the database and the Grid environment, meant that we have more flexibility. But this is more a by-product of what has changed in the team not a direct result of being Agile.

Some of the real benefits of Agile for our team are:
1. We seem to have a far better understanding and visibility of what is available to us and what we could provide. Silos of knowledge in individual members are now shared much more readily and willingly.

2. We take far greater ownership of the work we have, comparing to the ‘spoke-model’ where work is directed from the team lead. We seem to have more parallel streams approach to work.

3. Mistakes and errors are detected early and resolved early, this combined with 2. meant we achieved higher quality in the reports that we deliver and in shorter timeframe.

Development of DataStage jobs follow a ‘promotion’ model. Where individual developer’s sandbox is used for much of the development activities, and when the job is peer-reviewed and deemed good enough for prime time, it is then ‘promoted’ to the released folder. We also have a ‘deprecated’ folder to renew some the jobs.

The next activity I’d like to focus is to concentrate on further align the data we have with well designed reporting schema that suite our needs to further reduce the load put some of the common data we use.

As always your comments are welcome, and would certainly love to know what you did or tried when your technical team is faced with something similar like ours.

~paul

It was a night on a typical weekday. I relaxed on my couch, and Phyllis my wife trying to upload some photos to Facebook, she had been on it for well over half an hour now.

Haven’t you finished yet? I asked casually.

It’s going, it failed once before, now I just have to make sure I have no other windows open, and it will work.

You sure about that? It’s never failed on me. Naturally like all helpful and somewhat sceptical nerds her response received the typical retort. I leaned over to peer over her shoulder.

Look, it’s all going fine, leave me to it, don’t you touch anything! Phyllis put her hands out, covering the laptop’s screen, at the same time shoots back one of those sharp stares that all sensible husbands ought to know better than to interfere.

This brings me to the topic of today’s post. Yes, why can’t I just trust her to it? Is it paranoia? Is it the fact that I know I can probably do it faster than her, and her reasons to me made no sense? Is it the feeling of hurt that she knows I just can’t trust her with it?

I think conversations like this take place everyday and at a greater scale, conversations like this occurr in boardrooms and stakeholder meetings.

The divide between the IT and business in most organisations are still there. The mistrust is obviously not always ill-founded. We all remember occasions when someone from the business side had this brilliant idea and only to be turned away because the voice of doom (wait replace that with the architect) said ‘you wanted to do what?!’

This attitude has to change on both sides mind you. I draw an example from my current work, where I work very closely with my business stakeholder. He has a report to present to the business, and I am here to prepare that data. What is the best way to present the data? He is best placed to answer that, but he can’t answer that alone, he needs to know what data is available for him to use, and timeliness of it too, and that’s where I come in. We had 2 weeks to hammer this thing right. I released about 4 versions of the report to him in 2 weeks, each time seeking direction, and deciding what to keep and what to lose.

He is informed every 2-3 days, after the presentation of the report, I always touch base again to see how the last report is received with the business. This rapid and regular feedback cycle is key to us bridging that trust gap often seen between IT and the business.

There is clearly benefit in us co-operating, and invariably this helps the business to ‘care’ about how I get things done, because there is direct benefit in getting involved. I do borrow many good practice Agile development in this respect, and part of that Agile story involves a lot of talking and listening. This is part of that journey between business and IT that both side need to partake.

So Phyllis you should trust me with it

~Paul

Recently I was given a number of sites to look at.

I felt the time dial winding backwards. A cursory glance of the source revealed that it complied with HTML 4.0, hang on or was it xhtml 1.0 transitional? Anyway it probably didn’t matter.

There were some standard meta tags in the header, fairly vanilla, I assume to make the search somewhat easier, which means that the search was not based on the content of the pages but just with the infos in the meta tags. (I could almost hear someone say how 1990 is that?)

It was a fairly standard affair as for the layout, a header menu, a side bar of navigation links, a copy-right info down the footer, which are of course done with a minimal of table and div tags. It had no dynamic content as far as I could tell, no javascript doing asynchronous pull of info, no flash widgets no nothing.

The search seems to be calling a CGI routine which seems to pull a standard export of crawled content. Again, no page ranking, no what others have clicked on, no similar pages, no sorting of content by say the newest page to the oldest, FYI the first link was from 1990, while the 2008 link was on the 9th. The search layout and styling is not consistent to the main landing page, in fact I should say it is completely different

And here is the clincher, this site is open to the general public, you would have thought they could make this at least a little bit friendly and a little bit more … well ‘up to date’.

That aside, in this day and age, if you have even but a tiniest presence on the web, then you are your own social media company. Everything that you put up there is a direct representation of you, whether you like it or not. So be it you are a private company, a government agency or a self-starting entrepreneur, you need to be aware of what is going around you. A half-hearted treatment on any site just won’t do. (Ahem, especially those important government sites) Your site is the new social marketing tool for yourself, your agenda, your goals, and social it certainly needs to be.

This blog for example, I had friends telling me what I write up here during casual catch-ups, its content, its presentation, I as myself is in full view of the general public, to their critique, their scrutiny, and most important their support. (Maybe that’s what I think too long before writing anything hehe)

~paul

Today is 1st March 2009, it marks a psychological point in my mind that 2009 has well and truly started. (yes for some of us, it takes a little more prompting than others).

Only last week, the haze of smoke that swept through the suburbia of Melbourne reminded all of us that, lying beneath its stunning beauty, there lies another side of Australian nature, forever untamed and relentless.

Houses burnt, dreams shuttered, but the human spirit soared.

Gripped by fears, jobs lost, factories close, leaders pledge their visions and money, countries forge their pact.

I am trying to spend more time in my garden, growing vegetables, and reconditioning the soil. The ferns are growing well under the shade of the trees in the front yard. Our neighbour helps us with some tomato seedlings. We have had several good harvest of bok-choys and the beans are looking good. I got some sea weed fertilizers putting them deep in the soil, as I listen to Ruper Murdoch’s Boyer Lecture

And I wonder the ramifications the world climate might have on my tiny garden, listening to those postulate on the implications of a climate war on countries.

Somehow the fact I managed to recycle half bucket of water from the weekend lunch for the garden made me feel that little bit better.

All is well and life goes on.

~paul