Malaysia Today

Last week I had the opportunity to meet the legendary Raja Petra Kamarudin (aka Pete / RPK) of Malaysia-Today.Net at our office in Phileo Damansara. I was so excited that I forgot to give him my business card. I mean, RPK man! I’m one of his many fans, so addicted to his site that sometime I spent more time reading than doing work. I know so many people out there who’d want to meet this man in person but could only see him from afar when he gave out speeches at talks or political events.

Anyways, the objective of this meeting was to figure out how to enhance the site which clocks a few million hits every day and make some money out of it. We realize that not many people would want to advertise in his site due to his outspokenness and anti-government nature. Fear is a factor. But, my partner, Philip Lee still believes that he could somehow make it work, ie. make some money from advertisements, and he already managed to convince certain people. Well, maybe we can pull this off and my job now is to come up with a mock-up. Let’s just see how it goes eh? ;)

On Covalentia, we have to delay the next release, Version 2.6 due to lack of resources. We’re working on our Enterprise Business Solution (EBS) at the moment and also upgrading TD Aziz Valuation Management System (VMS). But, in any event, we’ll try to do it before the end of May 2008.

Oh, by the way, I’ve moved my blog site to cozta.blogspot.com for a very simple reason: Microsoft’s Spaces.Live.com doesn’t allow Google Adsense and I want to make some money from Google Adsense. So, what the heck. It’s your lost Microsoft ;)

Death Comes To Us All

The person who inspired me is dead. James Oliver Rigney, Jr. (Robert Jordan) left us on September 16, 2007 and I've not been writing since. The Dragon is gone, but life has to go on I suppose. Oh well. To Robert Jordan, "May you shelter in the palm of the Creator's hand, and may the last embrace of the mother welcome you home."

Now, let's get back to business. For the past few months, we, at Covalent Technology, have been struggling to meet deadlines and looking for new contracts:

• PetroProjek - Enterprise Business Solution (EBS)
  This marks our first entry into oil & gas industry. Originally, we played around with Compiere, ADempiere & OpenBravo and decided to customize one these open-source ERP solutions to meet PetroProjek's requirements. However, after 2 months, we realized that they are full of bugs and unreliable, and since we're no Java experts, we've decided to abandon all of them. We don't want to take any risk and run into trouble later in the development or deployment phase. As a result, we'll be using Covalentia instead to develop PetroProjek's Enterprise Business Solution.
  
  
• Covalentia Version 2.6
  Covalentia Version 2.6 is in progress. We've delayed/postponed the release date due to lack of resources. In addition, we're also waiting for the next release of Mono so that Covalentia can be deployed on Windows & Linux platforms easily without having to change so many things. We've scrapped Gaia and fully utilize Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax instead regardless of whatever platform Covalentia will be running on.
  
  
• TD Aziz VMS Upgrade
  TD Aziz has finally agreed to upgrade its Valuation Management System (VMS) that we developed back in 2004/2005 to our latest platform, Covalentia Version 2.6. We're slowly migrating the entire application and targeting everything to be ready by May 2008.
  
  
• MOCCIS & Cagamodal - Enterprise Loan Management System
  This is another work in progress. The solution is ~70% completed and we're waiting for the clients to execute the User Acceptance Test (UAT) before proceeding to the next phase to refine the existing modules and adding reports and financial modules.
  
  
• Asia Move Machine - ProperTrack.com Portal & Support System
  On behalf of our client, we're pleased to announce the release of ProperTrack.com portal. Feel free to visit and use the services provided.
  
  
• InnoFund
  This is going no where. We've completed our part by successfully reaching 3/5 of the milestones, but the government fails to do their part, which is the most important part - to release the rest of money to us so that we can continue developing Covalentia. It's a terrible thing to stop half way. What if I hired more people assuming that the money would come in? Well, luckily I didn't. So, never believe whatever that the government say. They are just unreliable. May be it's time to change the government. They don't deserve free salary.

That's pretty much what I've to say this time around. Later.