Homeland

Created the following image in my mind after reading two articles almost one after another. Please let the violence stop and cease targeting civilians, especially children, with military attacks!

Certification update

Had a job interview last month and I was posed a difficult requirement which I want but have no confidence to fulfil. The interviewer has asked me to upgrade my Java certification with a score of 90% within two months and the job is mine.

Age has been catching up and my brain no longer functions as efficient as ten years ago. Memory leaks and only "open-book" tests can save me from failing. Passing will already be a huge task, let alone scoring such a high mark.

Oh well, I should do it as soon as I am prepared and get it over with before I am too old for all these certifications. Please do feel free to give me any advice on how to prepare for it. Reading resources and brain tonics are equally welcomed.

Anyway, I managed to get two other certifications recently to give my résumé a little boost:

• Certified Security Analyst v4
• Titanium Certified Developer

Why isn't Singapore govt giving local developers a chance?

Sent the following letter to Reach Singapore and Today Online in hope that it can make a difference, though I doubt I would even get a proper response...

Dear Reach and Today,

I am writing in review of the blog post "NDP Website an Embarrassment" by Lai Zit Seng.

It is disappointing to learn that the government, in order to save cost, has resorted to letting a third world country to work on something that Singaporeans should be proud of working on. Outsourcing should only be done by private companies but it is a shame that our own public sector has no loyalty to Singaporeans.

It is no wonder that software developers and engineers have pay that do not reflect their value here and are either leaving or not entering into computing related fields. Even our own government is not valuing local IT people and giving its citizens a chance to develop.

Furthermore, the website owners do not even bother to conduct audits and checks to ensure that the website has no potential security and information leak risks. The programming does not adhere to the latest web development standard too. It really does not bode well for Singapore's reputation of having high standards in work.

Hopefully the personnel involved in future public projects does not made such an embarrassment again.

YouTube playlist no longer sortable automatically...

and this is making it very difficult to create or modify a playlist by the number of views or title alphabetically, especially when the playlist contains a large number of videos.

So I am limiting my music video playlist to 30 videos (one for each day of a month) and embedded it in the right panel of this blog.

Feel free to suggest videos to add or remove from the playlist. I want visitors to my blog to enjoy good songs :)

[Update (3 June): The playlist settings now has an option to sort!]