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.

Covalentia Version 2.4

Business is as usual. Covalent Technology is back on track, and soon I should be able to see positive numbers on my spread sheets. I don't wanna sound optimistic because I am not (I am known to be very pessimistic, negative and evil), but I believe I may be able to turn this company around as planned. I've pretty much completed the 1st phase of my job here at MOCCIS Trading Sdn Bhd, and payment is so far very good. I'm working on my 2nd phase at the moment which is to revamp their current Loan Management System using Covalentia. It's going to be a pain in the ass, but a valuable pain in the ass, for it marks my first entry into the financial industry. Well, sort of.

I'm supposed to release Covalentia Version 2.4. I am already using it to develop three applications. On the contrary, it's probably better not to release it until I find and fix all the bugs. For your information, Covalentia Version 2.3 is quite buggy, and I don't recommend you to download it (say what?). It's a transition between the old version and the new one that supports Oracle, and I didn't have enough time to test it. But, the latest version should be very stable and I will freeze further development of Covalentia after this point so that I can concentrate on tweaking it to run on Mono or Grasshopper framework. The dateline is September 2007.

Now, where the heck is my grant money? The government hasn't got back to me for such a long time, and I wonder if I'm ever gonna get the fund. It's been almost 2 months since I last submitted the agreement to be signed by the Chief Secretary of Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation and it’s most probably sitting at the very bottom of a very thick stack of documents. Oh well. No hope there. Forget about it.

I will release the latest version soon. I just don’t have enough time to come up with the help files. I'm supposed to meet this one programmer who has a Master of Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon and is gettin' much higher pay than myself. He's my junior, so to speak. And, I'm planning to hire him to help me out. Hmm, does it make any sense to you?

I now realize that I am underpaid. I made some calls and found out that junior programmers out there are making more. Seriously.