Police Academy Stunt Show

Today I went to Ancol, Jakarta's largest recreation park, located in the North of Jakarta to see the Police Academy Stunt Show, featuring 18 stuntmen and women from Italy. According to the event's coordinator, some of the group's members were involved in the stunts of the latest James Bond movie. The show was quite entertaining as I saw a man jumping off a building, cars drifting and motorcycles flying. Although the sound effects, the set, and the fireworks were not as spectacular as you would expect to have at similar shows in the US or Australia. Here's the most disappointing things:
1. Besides that it's ugly, the sound effects do not match the stunts' actions
2. Fake helicopter :(
3. All the explosions were replaced by tiny, unattractive fireworks.

All in all it was an entertaining 45 minutes of show, and the stuntmen and women are highly experienced - the car stunts were amazing!

One thing that got me amazed, though, is how dedicated these people are to doing their jobs, doing the same stunts every day for nearly 3 months (3-4 times a day!) as the show has been going on since the 18th of May, and will be over on the 20th of August. I had a little chat with the event's coordinator, who explained to me how these people have shown their dedication and discipline throughout the 3 months period. They even have curfew! :)

ICT Advancement in Indonesia: Technology or People?

According to infoplease.com, referring to Transparency International, Indonesia is listed at number 144 out of 180 countries of The 2007 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. It also listed Indonesia's 2nd President, M. Soeharto as the #1 of the World's Ten Most Corrupt Leaders with $15-35 BILLION of funds embezzled. For over 31 years of dictatorship, under Mr. Soeharto, Indonesia has been seeding its corrupt culture rooted into almost any government institutions. The infamous bribes accepted by the traffic police catching law breakers on the road, the "speed booster" to the official duration of the time it takes to process official documents (e.g. passport, driving license, etc). I can almost bet that half (if not more) of the driver's license document holders in the entire country have not gone through all the official procedures.

I am not gonna have a whole discussion about corruption here. But what had inspired me to write this post was what I had to go through this morning. I was at the immigration office to process the extension of my passport. The last time I went there was four years ago with my sister to produce both of our passports, and we actually needed them done "quick" for visa purposes. This time I have the whole month of the rest of my holiday, so I thought I'd give it a try doing it the official way (besides it costs a lot less! ;P). So I got in there, asked some people about the procedures, went to get the extension form, filled it in and proceed to the counters to submit the form. Now this is where they used to tell the person submitting of the official duration of the process and the cost for a "faster lane". Apparently the higher institutions have realized this and have implemented a new queuing system. So basically they now have one of those machines that produce numbered tickets. The system is Microsoft based as I could notice clearly the 'click', 'ding', and 'windows on and off' sounds as I was waiting ;P. This new system seemed to me like a good answer to fight those "line cutters" as everyone holds their unique continuous numbers depending on when they produce the ticket. So I touched the machine's screen, produced the ticket written 89 on it, and I looked at the digital screen showing 59. I thought oh well ive got the whole day for this.

An hour later, in the midst of my boredom starring at this two French boys playing their Nintendo DS's infront of me, I heard the 'Windows off' sound. And all of a sudden the digital screen restarted! I was devastated.. I asked the lady at one of the counters and she said "yes sir, we are having a lot of trouble with the new system.. please have a seat and wait while we try to fix this, meanwhile we will still keep calling out the numbers.." Apparently this problem comes and goes after that point and in the middle of every pause, they were calling out what I heard to be random numbers, and there were always a lot of people standing in front of one counter, not queuing.

I ended up waiting for 2 long hours....... And that's only to submit the application. It is going to take 7 days before I can come back for a photo and interview, and another 4 days to produce the passport.

I am not pointing anybody or thinking negatively, but could this be just another trick pulled out by the corrupt people? Or is it simply caused by failure of the implemented system? I had the chance to have a little chat with this guy whom I believe has a greater authority in that office (he was signing all the foreigners documents when I went to his office, and everyone coming in were calling him 'boss'), and he complained that the system that the government has given them is not working properly or has failed to deliver the promised capability. He actually told me that it was faster to process passports before they implemented any automations! As an engineer I had to disagree and was confused at the same time.. didn't they automate things to make the process quicker, easier and hassle-free? So what is it that keeps holding back the automation advancement in this country? is it the system/technology/infrastructure that's not capable of handling the cases here? Or the people that are just not trained properly to operate the system? Or is it just another effort of the old corrupts to preserve the classic, bad Indonesian habit?

PRIMA error!!

I have been struggling to avoid the Internet for the holiday, but as a junkie, my body shivers if I don't have access for more than 24 hours ;P. I have been trying to occupy myself with my family whom I see only once a year for the past 4 years. I have been playing a lot with my sister's baby, Rania (6 months old), who is also the coolest baby I have met so far. When she cries there is only 3 possibilities: 1. She's hungry, 2. She pooped or pee-ed (not sure how that is correctly in English spelling), 3. She's tired. Any other time, as you can see on the picture, she's very happy and active :)

Anyway, I was home after a haircut and a visit to my grandma's, I went online and checked my email inbox. I was delighted to see an email from my ex-supervisor/Scrum master/mentor, Eric D. Schabell, from my last internship. The content of the email, however, was not that delightful as he was informing that there was an error occurred in the application that my colleague and I were developing, PRIMA. The application was developed for my graduation project at SNS Bank, for approximately 5 months (Feb-Jul '08). Development tools involved Adobe Flex 3 and ColdFusion, and the end product was a huge flat screen monitor displaying project information over the ongoing projects within the Java Domain department where we did our internship at. As you can see on the picture, the application is showing project information such as: Test Quality, Daily Builds, Hours Realization, Code Quality, Issues, and Weekly Score, of one of the ongoing projects; 'Webagenda'. This application also involves XML files that filter the large amount of information gathered from multiple data sources. The complaint was that the administrator, who saw that PRIMA was not working as usual, found out that one of the XML files was suddenly empty. This has caused the system to complain it was not able to find the correct XML file. Before the internship ended, I was busy developing the configuration panel, which enables users to add/remove projects. During testing, I had found out that the 'delete project' function was not working properly as it was always trying to overwrite the content of one XML file to the other after a change. I discovered that it was only due to a mix up of path and file names, and it was fixed before we left. But an empty XML file was highly unexpected! The cause of the problem is yet to be discovered, but the XML file was replaced with a backup so the application is now running normally. I had advised them if the problem occurs when trying to add/remove projects, then try to manually access the XML file and do the changes there. That way there is less chance of XML contents getting mixed up.

It is really difficult to assess exactly what the problem is since I do not have a direct access to the infrastructure, plus the fact that I am in Jakarta, Indonesia and the office is located in 's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, makes it even more difficult to communicate.
I do not know if its just me, but it worries me to know when the application I created encounters an error! grr! just makes me wanna jump in there and fix it!