Resemblance of the late '90s Bulls in the Lakers this year

I have been watching the NBA Finals this year between Lakers and Celtics. And I cant help myself thinking back to the Jordan era back in the 90's.

My first resemblance is when I look at Ron Artest. His playing style and his eccentric behavior and appearance reminds me a lot of Dennis Rodman.

Second, Lakers' sixth man: Lamar Odom. Odom contributes a lot to the Lakers from the bench, and has become one of Lakers' key factors. This is so much alike Bulls' Toni Kukoc. Not to forget, they wear the same jersey number ;)

Third, Kobe's wingman: Pau Gasol. Gasol has become one of the stars of the NBA, and he is working together in a team with one of the league's leaders, Kobe Bryant. His presence in the Lakers' lineup complements the greatness of Bryant, and they have great connection on the court. This resembles Scottie Pippen and Jordan in the good old days.

Fourth, obviously Phil Jackson, who was coaching the Bulls throughout their six NBA titles. Together with MJ, Pippen, Rodman, Kukoc and the rest of the team, they won three straight NBA titles ('96 - '98). He certainly has been the man behind the scene in the Bulls' golden time and the Lakers' of today.

Lastly, without any intentions of comparing, Kobe Bryant. Despite LeBron James being this year's season MVP, Kobe sits on the 3rd in the league's point per game list. Kobe has always been compared with MJ since his career started in the NBA. Although my personal opinion says MJ is still the best there ever was, but the fact is that Kobe has proven to be one of the best players in the NBA and has brought the Lakers the NBA title four times (2000,2001,2002 and 2009). Is it just me, or am I seeing a similar pattern here? I mean Michael brought the Bulls winning the championship in 1991, 1992, 1993 before his first retirement. And when he came back, he won three more NBA titles in 1996, 1997 and 1998.

Kobe won three before he had his personal issues and injuries. He won the title back in 2009. The question is..Will Kobe repeat MJ's history and win 2 more championships? Or will he be even better? Very interesting..... But first, we shall see if they win this year's finals.

......see what i mean?

Interning at ABN AMRO's Dialogues Incubator

Been a while since I last posted something up.
So I started to follow a Masters study at the Delft University of Technology in fall 2008. It is a 2-year course of Management of Technology. I see this study as a facilitator for me to bridge between my technical knowledge in the software engineering realm and the managerial aspects of technology. I decided I need to do this because of my personal experiences looking at the clash between technical and business people. I figured I'd have the best of both worlds.

As the study nearing its end, I am to write a Master's thesis based on a research study. I opted to perform the research at a company of my own search. The search led me to a couple of interesting companies with interesting projects. At the end I had chosen to go on with ABN AMRO. The department I am interning at is ABN's Incubator, the Dialogues House. It is a business incubator that captures ideas within ABN AMRO and assesses them for their feasibility to be turned into new ventures.

My role here is to investigate the decision criteria for the decision makers, when they make the decision of whether a new idea should go on to the next stage or not. In parallel, I am also developing a decision support tool for the decision makers. This tool will give an overview of the on going projects and their position in the portfolio funnel (a funnel adopted based on the New Product Development Stage-Gate model of Robert G. Cooper). The decision support tool will also give project's information such as the resources it needs vs the overall resources available for all projects. Most importantly, this tool will require innovation managers to post answers to the criteria (my research focus) they are confronted when inputing a new project, which will be a decision support for the decision makers when making their go/kill decisions.

This project is really interesting from an academic point of view as I have to try to generalize all kinds of different ideas, which might or might not be strategically fit with ABN AMRO's strategy as a financial services institution, and formulate a generic decision criteria for these ideas. There have been some research in the past on this area, but my research will be specific to a business incubator environment, more specifically ones that are like the Dialogues House ;P. Whats more interesting for the business is the Decision Support tool that I'm developing. If this is a success, we might be looking into scaling the application to fit all business incubators ;) (ambitious)

This might all seem a bit blurry but I intend to label this topic on this blog to document the progress of this project. I hope a lot of people can benefit from this. Especially those who are dealing with portfolio selection complications or similar issues ;)

I'll keep you posted!

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!

Alicia Keys Performs in Jakarta

Yep, Alicia Keys is performing live in Jakarta tonight, July 31st, 2008. There is nothing IT about it, I'd just like to share it because I am going to go see the performance with my sister :). I actually was not planning to go, but apparently my sister is quite a fan and do not want to go by herself so she asked me to come join. Fortunately, her credit card company is giving out promotions to 'buy 1 get 1 free' on the tickets and studying in The Netherlands has taught me enough to never miss out on 'goedkoper' opportunities! ;)

Diving Into the Phenomenal World of ICT

The idea of having a blog has been going around in my mind for a while. I did not decide to have one earlier, because I always thought people who write blogs are those who do not know how to spend their leisure time, or they simply have too much free time. Besides, I always think that I am not worthy enough to write something useful for people from anywhere in the world to see. And I would not want to write something useless. Anyways, today I had an inspiring experience, which had encouraged me to, at last, create my own blog and start writing something. It may not necessarily be useful for everybody, but it might just be an insight to particular group of people who are seeking for similar topics.

One of my high school best friends has decided to step it up a little in his commercial life by creating a small company of 2. Teaming up with one of his family members, he developed an idea of a new media for company's advertisements, which involves an IT system (I am holding back details to keep its originality) . He had found a software developer who managed to develop a system that enables network filtering for advertisement purposes so that people using internet connections at 'hot spot' cafe's/restaurant could "elaborate further" through their internet browser. Having zero knowledge of ICT, he then turned to me, who had just graduated a bachelor's degree in software engineering and fortunately enough is on holiday in Jakarta, for a second opinion. Although I am just a fresh graduate, but he thought it might be a good idea to have someone who is actually into "these things" to have a look at the system that has been developed, before concluding the deal.

Anyway, what I wanted to spot out in this post, which by the way also the kind of topics that I'd like to keep posted around this blog, is the IT elements of this story. When I was first told of the idea, I went "Wow! that's actually a really good idea! I think that's gonna work really well. Really nice prospects on the commercial side as well", but when thinking of the development of the system, I immediately thought of writing a project plan, a little bit of tools research, sketching up some design, development, testing and boom... we're talking about at least 2-3 weeks. But then my friend went "..yeah I found this dropped out IT guy who has developed the system and I want you to take a look at it. Oh and by the way, he did it overnight..". I was in shock. What a waste of 4 years of software engineering study! I thought to myself.

So I went to this meeting held at a cafe with my friend, his uncle, the "IT guy" and his middleman. My friend started out by stating again the whole idea of the system, then followed immediately by a demo of the system by the "IT guy". The system is actually not as complicated as I thought. A machine (Linux based) acting as the server would catch all port 80 requests and reroute them to a dedicated port. Using a particular mechanism, the server would then fetch the objects contained in the request, add desired contents into to the objects, and then hand them all back to the users (browsers). A little bit of HTML designing, and boom! you have your desired contents visible on every browser that tries to use your connection.

What I can highlight from this story is how amazing and easy system (software) developing is nowadays. With all the open source software available, cutting all production costs (no license required), giving the "IT guy" the power to sell his product at whatever price he wants his skills to be valued. We had a little chat and he told me that he finished this project in approximately 6 hours. I was quite amazed at first, but then I came home, did a little research myself on the available tools and I thought, hey, its not that difficult after all. I mean, I am sure this guy is highly talented and experienced, but it got me thinking, how many people with a little bit of IT background and an internet connection could do that? I do not know if this idea has been developed anywhere else in the world (I believe they have it already in The States?) but I can almost say that this post could endanger the originality of my friend's business idea. Well, my intention has only been to share the IT perspective of the story. And I am sure people who read this are polite enough not to copy other people's ideas. Cheers! ;)