Back in Business

Covalent Technology is back in business. My goal is to turn this company around – solve the financial crisis that has long haunted my Excel spread sheet – before the end of this year, before I move on to another venture.

Our Covalentia Community Portal is back, newly hosted at VPSLand.com. Like I mentioned previously, the price that they’re charging is relatively cheap and they provide excellent support and fast response. I’d recommend this company to anyone who wants to try out Virtual Private Server. But if you just need a simple ASP.NET hosting, well, you can come to us. It’s not FREE, but it’s so cheap that it becomes negligible or relatively FREE ;) Contact us at support@covalentia.net (we have a new e-mail now, it's no longer support@covalent-tech.com).

On the MOCCIS Trading project, I managed to sort all the problems out. In fact, I’ve learned a lot about IBM DB2 and I might consider putting it in the next release of Covalentia. NOT!

And finally, my Enterprise Innovation Fund (EIF) from the Ministry of Science, Technology & Innovative Malaysia, has been approved. It took them 5 months to evaluate and I don’t know how long they’ll take to disburse the money. 6 months perhaps? I asked for RM 250K (~USD 71K) but the total amount approved is only RM 177,020.00 (~USD 50K). I’m not sure how they came up with that figure, on what basis etc. But why not just round it to, say, RM 177K or 178K? Oh well, in any event, I’m just glad and I hope that the fund WILL be disbursed. This money will be used to buy me a lot of lunches and dinners that I’ve skipped. And the rest will be used to further develop FREE Covalentia. I’d say, may be, 10% of the total amount. Hmm that should be more than enough eh?

Oh, and if you guys would like to donate, to add up to this amount (help me fill my belly with food and more food), DO NOT hesitate :)

New Hosting For Covalentia.Net Community Portal

We are in the process of moving the contents of our lame server to a real hosting provider, from BolehLand to VPSLand.com. The previous provider wasn't real, our server was hosted under a FREE plan not available anywhere else in the world :) Unfortunately, some network guy in the company which happens to be the largest ISP provider in Malaysia, audited the network and detected our unused-and-not-supposed-to-be-there network and decided to close it down.
Fudge.

Oh well, in any event, this migration process will take awhile, perhaps a week or so. I've never used a Virtual Private Server before, and I think that it's kinda cool. So, why not try it out. And the price isn't that expensive (I can still afford it, well, may be I have to skip a few breakfasts and lunches in a month, that'll do) at USD 38 per month, equivalent to approximately RM 136.80 per month.

Donation anybody? Help us out so that we can continue to provide FREE Covalentia. Stay tuned ;)

To Err is Human

To really fuck it up, you need a computer :)

Well, we got a new job at MOCCIS Trading (Malay Officers Cooperative Credit And Investment Society). But, it's not the kinda job I had in mind. The previous developer, Meridian Diversified, which provided a Java solution for day-to-day operation at MOCCIS decided to pull out two weeks ago and refused to hand over the source codes properly. However, the biggest problem isn't the source codes, but the complex month-end back-end reporting services executed via scripts which sat on one of their workstations. And the workstation was taken away.

Hmm. So, Covalent was called in to solve these problems by performing some miracles. Reverse engineering in less than 15 days? Yeah right. Whatever source codes that they left were not documented. The codes really suck. And, I freakin' don't understand their naming convention. Some LF_SHIT, SF_SHIT, what the heck is LF? SF? The connection strings and schema names were hardcoded which have to be changed and recompiled every single month. And guess what, they're still using Corba, and IBM DB2! Oh geez, it couldn't get any worse. Tell me, how do you truncate a table in IBM DB2? You can do it easily in MS SQL, MySQL and PostgreSQL. Just one sql statement "TRUNCATE " or "TRUNCATE TABLE " would do. Oh wait, IBM DB2 doesn't support this. We have to drop and re-create the table or load it with an empty fuckin' dummy file. IBM DB2 costs around RM 50K, and it can't even do a simple truncate function. Fuckin' hell.Do you know how much this Meridian Diversified which apparently doesn't even have a website charged MOCCIS Trading? RM 50K a month since 2004, just to execute some silly back-end services that they refused to automate. And the development work? I heard a fuckin' RM 3 Million for such a lowsy java solution (with hardcoded connection strings, fuckin' stupid developer) using IBM DB2.

And how much would Covalent charge? Well, we're going to charge 'em, let's see, hmm... RM 15K a month for performing miracles, and redeveloping the whole thing using ASP.NET. Cheap eh? Yeah, we are cheap mofos ;)

If anyone of you out there thinks that I haven't done enough community or national service, well, think again!

Bull

We're in the news - Software giant to help local ISVs.

First of all, The Star spelled the company's name wrongly. It's supposed to be Covalent Technology Sdn Bhd, not Covalent Technologies. And, secondly, we're not a public listed company (Berhad).

What help? The only thing that I got was one free lunch with that Microsoft Malaysia Managing Director and that Boyd guy at some lowsy restaurant. That's about it. And I had to listen to all the entrepreneurship bull plans which will never materialize for an hour or so. And let's not go into MDeC. I will not waste my breaths on this super bull organization. The way I see it is that we're the one who's helping them to come up with some bull events and programs (which some other people make a lot of money) and to show the rest of the world, and their bosses that they're doing something to help (bull) the ICT industries in Malaysia.

So, who's helping who? You're not helping entrepreneurs. How can you tell entrepreneurs what to do when you're not successful entrepreneurs yourselves? You rely on the government, and get paid every bull month.

Stop this bull, and find us some real jobs.

Mr IP Address 66.249.65.171

The upgrading work for Covalentia Portal is pretty much done. However, if you encounter any error or missing links, please do not hesitate to e-mail me at support@covalent-tech.com. I plan to add more features, but that can wait. I still have other things to work on, especially the Danial Portal (a local cartoon series in Malaysia, please tune in to RTM 1 every Tuesday at 7:00 PM GMT +8).

Now, I received a lot of errors from this guy, Mr. IP Address 66.249.65.171. If you do a look-up here, you'll find that he's from Alma, Michigan. And I can't seem to reproduce these errors. The portal is working absolutely fine on my laptop. So, what could go wrong? What exactly is going on here? What version of IE or Firefox is Mr. IP Address 66.249.65.171 is using? My outlook is clogged with e-mails (error log) because Mr. IP Address 66.249.65.171 doesn't seem to wanna stop browsing Covalentia.Net Portal over and over again (man, he must love this site so much), even as we speak. Well, I don't mean to be rude (no pun intended), but for the love of Mother of Ganja, could you please tell us what you really are doing oh dear Mr. IP Address 66.249.65.171 so that I could fix these errors? Sometimes, the IP Address changes to something else like 65.55.209.141, 65.55.209.140, 65.55.209.133, 65.55.209.134, 60.51.164.249, 207.46.98.74 and so on. Anybody?

But, if you're a web crawler, hmm, well then just forget about it :)