Alvin Lai

Looks cool, check it out here

Ever been in a situation where you’re with a group and suddenly everyone starts talking about an unpopular person?

“He’s a good guy, but someone needs to tell him how how insensitive he can get”.

*or*

“He’s a great leader, but he needs to better his people management skills”.

And most of the time, no one wants to play the bad guy in letting the poor guy know about it..

It’s only human nature, living in a high-context Asian culture doesn’t help too.

Think about the potential

Ever wondered what kind of information went around you, stuff that you really need to know but no one is willing to tell?

Questions like:

• What dumb, avoidable things do I constantly do?

• What disturbing or even hurtful behaviours I have displayed that I do not even know about?

What a better and self-aware person I would be if I got to know a fraction of all those unspoken truths about myself.

So what can I do about it?

Blogger Scot Berkun has a blog post on how to better access these unspoken truths about yourself and I think it’s pretty well rounded up.

In short, 4 points:

1. Ask for it – you have to start at some point and you have to make the first move and graciously handle and evaluate everything that ensues.

2. Reward those who give it – other than family, it’s very rare to have friends who tell you things no one else will say. Go out of the way to emphasize how important you value this quality and reward them for their feedback.

3. Act on it – If someone goes all out to risk his limbs and friendship to express his frank opinions then see nothing happen, they’re unlikely to take that risk again since advice has fallen on deaf ears. If you can act on the advice, even in a small way, you would have built a stronger relationship with that person.

4. Make a pact – reciprocation works best and having a pact in place to try and tell the other person what they should hear works wonders.

In the end, humility and graciousness gets you reaping the most

Came across this interesting site where it teaches you how to remove these dangerous pests whilst camping in a completely non-toxic way.

Might be useful for those planning for expeditions during this holiday

Check it out here.

What’s a Cocoa Application? You might ask.

To put it simply, its a Mac Application!

Followed Apple’s Introduction to Cocoa Application Tutorial Using Objective-C in getting started.

In the introduction chapters, it says that Cocoa programming is object oriented and makes use of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm, which is nothing new to me since the wonderful Ruby on Rails is also based on MVC.

Then off I went in creating a new Currency Converter cocoa application project in XCode2.2..

Once that was done, it was down to creating the GUI interface with Interface Builder.

Interface Builder is wonderful I tell you.

Not only can you drag and drop window components like checkboxes and textfields ala Delphi style!

it also has very very sweet alignment guides which awesomely snaps in place nicely.

Assigning Labels to have it snap in line with the TextFields is also just as sweet.

And talk about micro positioning.

Enabling TextField focus changing via tabbing is also just as easy via a control dragging and clicking some checkboxes in the Inspector. You have to try it out on your own!

Next up was to create the CurrencyController controller duh and the Currency model.

When it was time to specify how the specific Models (A Currency class which specifies data), Views (The GUI Components like TextFields) and Controllers (The CurrecyController class which is the business logic) communicate with something something new to me called Outlets, it became a little fuzzy, but you can easily accept it as some sort of message passing mechanism like MPI in Parallel Programming.

Then coding the actual controller and model classes..

After that was done… Build time!

As excitement got the better of me, I made some mistakes, but thankfully XCode was smart enough to pinpoint the exact lines with errornous code.. Great!

Finally done!!

And a raw sense of achievement ensued.