CORPORATE ELECTION

Something rather new happened at my office which was re-organizing the ORC Committe of company and appointment of a representative at the CIIN body of Nigeria. The same person was suppose to act as the ORC Committee leader in-house.

Due to the recent political development in Nigeria, there was a resultant political air in the entire company which has over 26 branches across the nation and somehow I was nominated to design an election system (online) for the exercise.

There are many such tools on the internet to help me get my job done but because there was a request that voters must be authenticated using the our internal active directory server, I chose to write my own voting system. Another reason being that I was told less than 24 hours to the exercise and I didn't think I had the luxury of time to learn something new.

Quickly, I wrapped up a four pages web application to for the voting exercise and also to release the results online as well. I relied on JNDI for connecting to Micrsoft Active Directory and jsp, jsf and servlets for the web applications not mentioning oracle for the database. Everything was done in time. My team members in other project hard-tested the application - they broke it once and I had to fix.
The application scaled quite well and users comments were quite impressive.

The election went quite smooth except for so branches that couldn't connect for some network failure during voting. Results were release online as expected.


The best thing of the day was that a major management staff asked me after the election, "WHY CAN'T THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT IMPLEMENT SUCH A SIMPLE PROCESS IN CONDUCTING ELECTIONS IN THIS COUNTRY?". There were answers.


I seem to have a new nick name in the company "JEGA" - the name of the current chairman of the independent electoral commission in Nigeria.

gNigeria 2011 is over

gNigeria 2011 is officially over and it was really a great time with google.

The entire atmosphere was graceful and the presence of googlers (as we were taught to call google staffers) increase our lookout for hands-on sessions. Developers in and around Lagos came with great expectation and I don't think there was a let down except for the epileptic internet connection that plagued most of the first day.




Breakout sessions had different topic but I was able to make two

Cloud Computing with App Engine
Web Development with Google Web Toolskit (GWT)

The hands-on sessions were great and they really reflected what it should be. I have my head first introduction to GWT and feel that I could get some projects done with it. Tom Hofmann (our instructor) did a great job, Michael Springer and Obum Ekeke where really of help in assisting him.



The competition was cool and full of adrenaline as the grand finale of our sessions. I had my share of belief but the winners were just great. The had the ideas and were able to implement it to the latter. I congratulate them.



I really appreciate Google for the time and resources they put in not only educating developers but also reaching our to educational institutions in sub-saharan Africa. It is really an effort worth applauding.

I guess it is time to learn AppEngine and GWT to real expert level and begin deploying commercial applications with/on it.



Weldone Google!

gNigeria: Expectations

Yes! Tomorrow, some developers in Lagos Nigeria will be having a technical session with Google. I have known and registered for this since April (link is here) and I'm really eager to see what it's all gonna look like.

Personally, I am looking towards the tech sessions on three different fronts but I can only be in one place at a time. So, till tomorrow I don't know where I am going to be among my three preferences of

Mobile Web and Android
Cloud Computing (I take this to be about Google App Engine)
Building Web Apps (I take this as GWT)

So I will know when I get there.

I missed Google DevFest (google developer event organized last year) by a day and I could tell how much I missed. But surely not this time.

My eclipse environment has been set up and I am ready to go.

To cloud or not to cloud

In the past two weeks, two persons separately came to me asking me about taking their businesses to the cloud. And my first answer was "How has your system performed outside the cloud?".

There are indeed many reasons to cloud but one good reason not to cloud is trying to do it because the topic seems to be a big buzz on the internet.

It is quite a sad new but the recent failure of the Elastic Block Store (EBS) will again throw more questions on exactly how are we supposed to go about "cloud"ing our businesses.

Considering a situation where a client doing a non-internet business is having her entire system in the cloud. The advantages of such are well numbered but downtimes like this could really suck. Therefore, I will advise company who must go cloud (because of the well numbered advantages) never to put their life entirely in the cloud but keep a copy in their hands as well. This would mean local copies. But can we have local copies of cloud services?

This in itself brings up the issue of service and data synchronization. And of course, unless we have to completely take faith in our cloud company, is another big science which we will all one day need to answer.

Happy Easter.

LONG TIME NO PHP

It is more than 5 years ago I did a medium-scale project in PHP and coming back this time to lay my hands on the language again really tells how fast time flies. Varieties of Content Management Systems (CMS) were available for work. In 2005, I was only privy to systems like Mambo, Joomla and Drupal and PHP frameworks like Zend and cakePHP. Now, I cannot count how many such frameworks that exist on the internet.

The most noticeable change in the language for me was the standard OOP feature that was built into the language. Back then in 2004/2005, my knowledge of java got in the way of building OO classes in PHP, though I built many of my components in OO fashion. Now the OOP in PHP in my opinion is mature and can allow for wide-scale flexibility in the language. It is even more lovely to see that I could build php codes with my favourite used-to-be-only-java IDE - Netbeans.

Now I know I got more to learn because PHP is ever more powerful. Combining such power with AJAX has made the web what it is today. I most run now as I have so much to cover about this beautiful language.

I am the worst blogger there is....

Yes this is true: I was just in my bathroom today when I asked myself "when was the last time you blogged".. and I thought to myself.."surely like years ago..

Officially, I am the worst blogger there is on planet earth and I accept that in good faith. I am hoping to change because for real, there is a lot to blog about software (java, oracle, bi and databases, web development, python, php and soa), music, history, travels and my countries national election. Yes, I am officially back and don't hope to stay away for such a record time.

Good to be back/

Long Time .....

It is really not an easy thing to blog. I always thought that I have a blog, I will update on hourly bases but now reality has donned on me.
Although I have a lot more to say than I ever did, I hope to constantly bring them even by event.
Ranging from my various research in web and enterprise technologies to new songs that I have written, projects I am currently handling at work to my latest love - Trading. I will begin to unfold various gist at different times.

For now I must get back to work with a better hope of getting my blog very updated.