Faith & Prosperity

What a week. First, I attended my job's care group last Thursday (10729) and the topic was about prosperity. Then. my boss gave me and one of my coworkers a ticket to a financial seminar about debt, investment and setting up a business. The seminar was today, and it went well- all three of the speakers were both emotionally moving and very knowledgeable in their topics. After the seminar, I attended the Saturday mass with another coworker, and the homily was about, take a guess: wealth. See the pattern yet?

"Owe no one anything, except to love one another..." ~ Romans 13:8

Dr. Dan Lachica's talk about debt was very inspiring, and although I'm not in debt (except maybe from my parents) I still learned a lot from it. However, what really striked me was his short segue into how cheating somehow affects what happens to you in the future. Dr. Lachica's example was that, if he holds a scalding hot bottle of water, his hand will blister right away- therefore, he immidiately knows that the cause of the blisters is the hot bottle of water. However, if he holds the hot bottle now, and gets blisters after a few days, it would be harder to connect those two events.

Now, let me tell you what happened to me just last week. Yes, a week before my whole week of faith and prosperity-talk with practically everyone.

A week ago, Saturday, I was at the office working as usual with very little care about cash except saving enough for a copy of Final Fantasy 14 come late September. One of my friends asked me if I have time after work, since a new movie that looked interesting was in the theaters (No, not Eclipse, but Sorcerer's Apprentice w/ Nicolas Cage). Since I didn't have anything planned except my weekly Saturday mass at the nearby mall, I agreed. Turns out that the same mall had a screening of the movie we want, 30 mins. right after the mass (coincidence? I didn't think so then, but...)

I met with my friend after work, and we went to the mass together. Before the mass ended, the collection basket was passed for those who'd like to share their blessings with the church- I usually pass it on because... well, I don't really have an excuse. But until then, I don't remember ever putting any of my own money into the collection basket. However, my friend took out his wallet and drew some coins when the basket neared. Feeling a bit guilty, I also looked at my wallet and got some coins out- about six or seven pesos, I'm not sure. We dropped the coins into the basket and the mass continued.

We ate at a fast food, watched the movie (it was good, btw) then went home- a bus then a jeep. Here's when I first noticed something: I had the exact amount of coins left for my ride home, and since I don't like breaking my bills to coins, I decided not to stop at a convenience store for a quick bite.

The next work day, the same thing happened at my workplace's canteen- exact change. Nothing extra to spend on luxuries that I want, but don't need. The week trudged on, and the same things kept happening, up until the weekend came- which I normally spend some extra cash (I had quite a lot, to my surprise). I had quite a fun and I enjoyed hanging out with my friends, until I noticed that I left my jacket at a coffee shop (Town Center's Coffee Bean). It was a favorite of mine, and quite new too- I immediately sms'd my mom about it just in case I never get it back, since me and my friends are already a bit far from where I left it. An hour passed by, almost two hours, before we got back. Lo and behold, I got my jacket back. The shopkeeper's staff kept it for me, and I was really grateful that they did so.

It was an amazing string of "coincidences": starting with a guilty offering of only a few pesos, into saving some cash, into finding my lost jacket, and finally capped with a series of seminars that explained everything. It took me a while before I saw which caused what effect, but I'm sure- 100% sure, that my whole week was planned by Him. I really am blessed, and I'm writing this as way to spread these blessings, to inspire, or at least convince you, that the Lord, our God, is really a generous God.

I don't really like quoting from the bible (it almost always feels like its out of context somehow), but since I started with one, I'll end with another. Until next time, Sayonara!

"As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease." ~ Genesis 8:22

“Are we really going to use these theories/principles at work?”

While teaching in Letran, or even while studying there a few years back, one question almost always pops up when a professor wraps up a difficult topic: “How do we apply this in the real world?” I have asked this question myself a few times, and now that I'm working in the industry again, I have this rare chance of showing you exactly how the theories are actually used in real applications. I will tag these series here as 'Theory + Reality', and the posts would be about how we can apply the theories we have learned to the software that we would create.

Reality: 
Click the Pic to Enlarge!

One of the most common task that we're going to do at the industry is to maintain and improve upon existing software. Look at the code above. This is a small piece of code from the Business Logic (BL) Layer that basically shows some collection of information about the customer. According to my previous blog post about the N-Tier Architecture, the Second Tier is basically a bridge/police between the User Interface and the Data Store, transferring while verifying the data through a set of business rules/policies. Now, let' analyze the code line-by-line.

Line 174: The Business Logic code asked for a ComboBox as a parameter. The alarms in your head should already start ringing- there's something not quite right here. A Combo Box is something the user interacts with, and the bridge/police shouldn't have anything to do with it. Theoretically, what we need is the data- what's inside the ComboBox.
Line 175: It's normally unnecessary to put an entire function in a Try-Catch block. We should only catch errors that we can fix- errors that the business logic layer, or the layers below it, actually creates. Everything else should just bubble up to whoever can resolve the error. Of course, sometimes you need to do this when debugging the code, just to be sure.
Line 176 to 184: This is simply an initialization phase for the parameters that would be used by the next process. Trivia: It's almost impossible to have a runtime error here that the Business Logic layer can resolve.
Line 185: This is the connection to the Data Store. We should hold on to the data that this returns until the User Interface needs it.
Line 186: Here, we use an external object (service as clsService) to bind another external object (the ComboBox), passing the data that we got from the Data Store, which is readily available since the scope of the Set_Get_Lookup property is Public. Obviously, this doesn't belong here. It has nothing to do with any Business Logic, and has everything to do with the User Interface. Take note that one of the features of the BL layer is that we should be able to interchange different UIs easily (this design pattern is known as loose coupling) and by binding the combobox here, we are tightly coupling this part of the code to the current interface.
Line 187: Catch ex as Exception means you would catch ALL exceptions. I will say this again: It's good programming practice to just specify which errors you catch, then let everything else bubble up. The user interface usually has this kind of Try-Catch block, to notify the user that you've done everything you could've done, but the error is still there.
Line 188: This is an impossible line of code. Business Logic layers are normally compiled in a library (a DLL) and libraries, by their very nature, are “headless”. They should never have a User Interface, so calling a MessageBox here is a logical error.

Theory + Reality
 
Click the Pic to Enlarge!

You can see in the sanitized and Diff'd code above the design patterns and theories which I applied. Specifically:

• Single Responsibility Principle. The business logic layer should have one, definite responsibility only: to act as a bridge/police for the data traveling between the UI and the Data Store. Don't let responsibilities bleed into other layers, or even other objects (also: avoid tight coupling).
• Load Once, Use Many Principle. You can find my blog post about the Lazy Initialization design pattern here.
• Better Exception Handling.

That's it! The first of the hopefully many posts in this series is complete, and I hope we've both learned a lot from these. Until the next post, sayonara :D

Post@Posterous? Or Not?

I have been reading Michael Scott's novel, The Alchemyst this last few weeks, and it inspired me to write a short story in the same vein- about teens using magic in the modern world. Aside from posting it in my DeviantArt account, I have also decided to post it in a new blog which has far more editing capabilities. Posterous.com has been making waves in the internet world this past few weeks due to their new features, and I decided to give the service a try.

First things first: The signup was mixed bag. On one hand, all you have to do is email your first post to post@posterous.com and you're automagically signed up. On the other, geeks and experienced bloggers usually set the site up before posting- and it took me a couple of seconds to figure out that the sign up form was on the login page, and not the front page. After that's done though, Posterous accepts OpenId which makes logging in a breeze.

After playing with it for a while, I realized that the site is a far, far cry from Wordpress, or even Blogger. While most Blogging platforms have focused on ever-expanding features, Posterous have focused on Simplicity (a bit like google). They sticked with a simple WYSIWYG interface for posting & editing- there's nothing new in post-by-email, and their autopost to social networks is subpar with what Wordpress offers- for example, you can't choose which link shortener you can use. Also, the initial Themes, while very customizable, are limited to about a dozen.

If the only service you need is a place to put your notes, thoughts or stories into, then you can't get any more simpler than what Posterous offers. Signup, then everything's ready to go- post away!

Note: Sorry I can't post more often and more concise. I don't have Internet Access at work (yet) so I don't have the same amount of resources as before~ I'll still try my best though, gambatte! w00t~