File Sync'd App

Akhirnya selesai juga satu project saya, membuat file sinkronisasi applikasi buat kantor saya. Applikasi ini saya kira lumayan sederhana untuk dibuat, tetapi saya ternyata menemukan beberapa hambatan selama proses pembuatan.

Applikasi ini akan mengambil data tentang semua client dari database, terus melakukan sinkronisasi antara server dengan semua client yang ada. Terus saya juga membuat simple scheduler untuk mengatur banyaknya proses sinkronisasi yang bisa berjalan pada saat bersamaan. Jadi, semua client harus memalui queue list (antrian) sebelum memulai proses sinkronisasi dengan server.

Dari pengalaman ini, saya belajar menggunakan thread untuk menampikan sinkronisasi status di Windows Form TextBox. Pada awalnya, saya tidak menggunakan thread, dan alhasil, tidak ada text yg muncul di TextBox selama proses sinkronisasi berjalan. Textnya baru muncul setelah proses sinkronisasi selesai. Threads arefun if we can manage them :)

Project selanjutnya akan melibat penggunaan teknology nirkabel Bluetooth untuk file transfer. Yuhu :)

Automating Powerpoint

In July 2006, I started a small project for writing a software to generate a PowerPoint file for our church 'Responsive Reading.' It's painful to see someone actually has to copy and paste bible verses to PowerPoint for generating the Responsive Reading' every week. The software has been developed and used for a while now.

I grabbed all bible verses from http://sabdaweb.sabda.org/bible/ by writing a Perl script. Initially, I saved each verse in a file, and use combination of Perl and C# for generating the PowerPoint file; Perl for finding verses from files and C# for generating the PowerPoint. However, I found out that Windows are extremely slow at processing folders that contains thousand of files. Hence, I moved all those verses' files to SQL Express database, and also eliminate the use of Perl. Now, the application is basically C# app that utilized COM object for PowerPoint.

This project is half a year ago, why am I writing it now? I am going to start a new project that will manage church's song databases. Since most of the songs are currently saved in Powerpoint, I need to write a C# app that will go through all the files and convert it to plain text format.

The problem is when I tried to reuse my previous code, I got the following error:

The type 'Microsoft.Office.Core.MsoTriState' is defined in an assembly that is not referenced. You must add a reference to assembly 'office, Version=11.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c'

Then, I went back to my reference site, and I followed all the instruction there step by step, but still got the same error. After googling around, I finally managed to solve the problem by re-installing the Microsoft Office XP primary interop assemblies (PIAs). Here is the link to download it. Hope this will help someone who encounters similar problem.

Richard's Birthday

Vina's brother, Richard, was having his birthday two weeks ago, and we went to Sun Sui Wah Richmond for the party :) Waow, the food is just amazing, I couldn't stop eating. Anyway, here are some of the photos from the event.

Liong, Hosea, Sundoro

Richard and Lovely Sister

Appetizer, cause hand is dirty and busy eating, no more pictures after this food :)

Main Dishes, taken before appetizer came :)

My Church

Last Saturday, while waiting for my girlfriend to finish worship team practice, I went out and took some pictures around the church. My church name is Indonesian Evangelical Church, in Indonesian, it is called GII (Gereja Injili Indonesia). Our service is on Sunday at 10.30 am, and our current pastor is Rev. Stefanus Theophilus. The church is located at:

IEC/GII Location

And here are some pictures around the church:

PHP in Nutshell

What a week ... I just finished coding my brother's company website. The site is developed using PHP which is totally new for me. I could just use some free e-commerce software, however, I want to get some experiences with PHP, as well as adding another ability to my programming skills.

I have experienced with ASP before, so it's actually not that bad to learn PHP. Previously, I learned ASP and finish my company content management system project in a week. This time, I also learned PHP and finish the website in a week.

Based on a week of experience :), I will say that I felt like I have more control with PHP compare to ASP. PHP is more tedious in some ways, because programming ASP in Visual Studio is really easy with all built-in controls. While for PHP, you need to understand more in order to start the programming. Anyway, I might be wrong since this is based on a week of experience.

One bad thing about PHP is that I still could not find an IDE that is as powerful and easy to use as Visual Studio. Following is the screen shot of the website. It's still simple, but it's very dynamic and easy to update. More features will be added in the next release, not sure when :)

Xtremespot Website