Chinese work harder?

As I mentioned in the previous post, recently I have been stressed over this one huge course project. Java based, student scheduling assistant. Well that's not the point. The point is, we are a four-man group..ok, three-man-one-woman group.

And out of the 4 people, one is a non-Chinese dude, who appears smart, and somewhat hardworking. I didn't know him that well before the project; since my friends picked him, I assumed he was at least OK.

The result was: for the past 4 days, he contributed to around..let's say...7.5% of the entire project. I'm being polite here.

He did appear he was trying hard: he came up with a clever idea of how to test this standard input/output intensive program by creating mocking projects so we only needed to do it in Java. ok ok. Except my another teammate built an ingenious tool for command line testing and the mocking part was entirely unnecessary. Today he finished the user manual, which we had to read over and correct the mistakes and add in the content he forgot/missed.

On the contrary, the other 2 teammates and me worked HARD. Every day we worked since the time we woke up, non-stop (and communicating via MSN) until 2am. EVERYDAY for the past 3 days. I adore how hard they could push themselves, and consequently I had to push myself a lot more too since I didn't want to let them down. We were like a bunch of perfectionists who would drain the last drop of our blood to make this project clean, beautiful, extensible, well structured, and matching industry standard. (I'm serious: we've had enough knowledge to make this happen)

At the end, I remember what the non-Chinese dude responded to a question we raised for a spec related question: "Who the fuck cares."

Well we did. And we worked harder.

I have another example to prove this cliche. CUTC - the Canadian Undergraduate Technology Conference, had a TechTeam challenge. We were given a task to design a whatever crazy-ass computer that worked in the wild. My group was consisted of 5 people: me, Dave, a Chinese girl, and 2 other non-Chinese dudes. We had 2 days to do it, and for almost 1.5 days, the 2 non-Chinese people were missing. When we met for the prototype details, a guy(deceivingly talkative, but full of bullshit) said "who the fuck cares, I don't care."

Again, we cared. In order to complete the task that met our standard, me and Dave ended up not sleeping all night to finish the presentation slides and prototype. We lost - for 2 people working for the amount of 5 people's work. I thought we did a decent job though.

One more - last semester's business software project. Group of 5, 3 Chinese, 2 non-Chinese. The 3 of us did almost all the work while the other 2 slacked or produced non-acceptable results. We all got a good mark.

I don't know what the moral of the story is. I'm not trying to be discriminative, but I do notice the difference. We have the tradition to be perfect - sometimes too rigorously following the standards. It could be the ideal we share; or the expectation of life. We ought to be more practical. Maybe this explains why the rate of education is much higher in Chinese here, why there are a lot of Chinese doctors and lawyers, and why Engineering/CS/Commerce programs are flooded by Chinese students.

I can rant about how non-Chinese groups are different, but I'm feeling weird for slacking and not doing any work. Oh well...

"create a repository that lets you store, search, and extract ODF documents in a standards-based manner."

So I was intrigued by this article on Slashdot which used lots of flashy words such as "Document storage", "OpenOffice", "Apache Derby", and of course, the most attractive words: "hot, hot, hot! ".

So I was tricked, and got linked into what made me feel all nostalgic: an IBM DeveloperWorks page. (It's notable how the Slashdot article never mentioned anything to do with IBM). It turned out this "new" feature Slashdot is mentioning is actually about the new DB2 V9's XML feature. Since IBM had DB2 V9 out last summer, IBM is definitely trying to grab all sorts of resources to let every developer know how great it is and how useful it can be.

So I decided to give this fancy thing a try. Initial system requirement: DB2 V9 Express-C (The free DB2 version for local useage), and DB2 Developer Workbench. Each product is about 500MB. Although I worked for DB2 for 16 months, I never used a non-developer DB2 build before. The personal DB2 version didn't look too bad though: downloading took about 20 mins and installation was almost seamless. It also happily picked up my Chinese language setting and converted all menus and instruction into Chinese. (This is the component I worked on before. :))

The Workbench was a pain, however. It is essentially an IBM-ized eclipse, with a bunch of fancy stuff, plug-ins you might never use. Download took about another half an hour, and installation wasn't that bad either. Setting up Derby was another story. I had to follow another link only to find out the Callisto Discovery Site is broken (or say, doesn't support) for eclipse 3.1.x so I couldn't install the Web Tool Platform; and to find out that I didn't at all need this WTP.

Another error with the document also made me ponder why the heck I couldn't connect to a Derby database. Long story short: 4 hours later (Including an episode of 24, an episode of Heroes, and a bunch of assignment work), I finally got the environment set up.

Then.... I got tired of it. Did have a glance of the explanation of how OpenOffice stores data and how to search through it. And how DB2 can help with its XML feature. And how the code works. That's the rest of the 8/12 pages of the document. Wahaha.

I'm sorry readers. I could have tried the thing out and wrote a review about it. After all the hardship with installation and fighting with all sorts of eclipse, plug-ins, I really should have.

Moral of the story: Don't let your readers/users spend 4 hours just to set up the environment (regardless if they are watching TV or not). Sad to say this happens A LOT at IBM - setting up a Windows build DB2 was a nightmare of all developers. Yes and I did it twice...

Of course, DB2 is a great tool. Once you get it all set up, you can enjoy all the convenience and beauty it brings you - just you have to be patient enough to find out. :)

How many wires are you carrying?

Following yesterday's craze, I started to seriously think about taking pictures daily. No matter what I use - cell phone, or a digital camera, I am facing a problem: If I want to upload pictures on the go, how many damn wires am I gonna carry?



So let's see. Currently I already have the following wires/cables in my backpack:

- A laptop power cord
- A power cord extension cord (because the above item is just not long enough)
- A mouse (you get tired of the trackpoint at some point)
- An Ethernet cable (wireless in BA sucks)
- Cell phone headset
- ipod earphones

- Camera/(optional)phone USB cord....

So this is it. In addition to the 10 pound textbooks I have (and the coins in my wallet), I need to carry these lovelies around. We are so bound to the electronics and their accessories that they are invisibly, subtly and powerfully tying us up, not talking about the added burdens to our young shoulders.



Untie me!!