I’ve been doing ABAP for almost 3 years now. Despite the fact that focusing in SAP can yields a promising future in my career, I feel that ABAP alone is not enough to satisfy my daily programming job’s satisfaction. I started to explore PHP around 1 year+ ago, it’s frustrating…yet fun. Learning curve is steep and now I started to get the hang of it.

I am actually more interested in software development or web development, more often I’ve thought of quitting my job as an ABAPer and take up another job that I’m more interested in. Here I am, in a new company in Singapore, which requires me to do ABAP and .NET C#.

I’m quite happy that I can finally venture into web development. I started to read up a lot, following feeds from technical blogs, tech news. I read, read and read. The next thing I know, I am lost in the big pool of choices of programming languages and frameworks. I could not focus on a single programming language. I looked into and toyed with PERL, Phyton, C++, .NET, PHP and ABAP. I was busy reading documentations of frameworks like jQuery, mooTools, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, BluePrint, YUI. I started to demoralize myself, because the more I know, the lesser I understand.

Jack of all trades, master of nothing. I identified where went wrong, I know I should focus now.

For now, I will focus on ABAP ( trying to go the OO approach way[pdf] ) and .NET using C#.
It’s nice that Microsoft decided to ship jQuery in Visual Studio!  Finally…open source library in Microsoft product!

Its the first time MS is shipping an open source component they didn’t write with one of their products. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but its almost nuclear in its implications.

Think about it… They are saying “we support this.” In an OSS product, MS has no control over the code. So, they are putting their livelihood (in some small way) into the hands of people who don’t work for MS.

I think jQuery’s popularity, the fact that it’s not mission critical code, and that the codebase is so small all came together to make for favorable circumstances for MS to dip their toe in the water.
Will @ Stackoverflow.com

P/S: Good read: Teach yourself programming in 10 years

I learned this ABAP debugging trick to add, edit, delete or update a table record during my stay in my previous company. This trick will work as long as you have the authorization to force value into variables during debugging, which, usually an ABAPer will have in Development or QAS server.

Let’s go into SE16. Take Sales Order table VBAK for example.

Double click any line and goes into the details single record view, type /h and hit enter twice.

The variable CODE was originally having a value of ‘SHOW’. You can edit the value of the variable to ‘EDIT’, ‘INSR’, ‘DELE’ and ‘ANVO’. The name of the value is quite self explanatory, ANVO is for editing the record including the keys ( which I’ve never used ).

Hit F8 and there, you’re in the EDIT mode. Remember to hit the Save button when you’re done thou.

It’s useful to use this trick when you’re trying to maintain a table when you can’t use SM30 to do it. This is one of my favourite ABAP trick

Here’s some interesting stuff I’ve come across these few days! The Poignant Guide to Ruby is highly recommended. P/S: Ruby is a programming language.

Oh, today I just discovered that Google allows color search.
For example, you search for Fire. Your query looks like this
http://images.google.com.sg/images?q=fire

but but..I want much hotter fire I said, I want blue fire!
So you add a imgcolor=blue to the query.
http://images.google.com.sg/images?q=fire&imgcolor=blue

And there you got your blue fire.
You could also combine colors search with comma.
http://images.google.com.sg/images?q=fire&imgcolor=blue,pink

Alternatively, you can just query for blue fire
Anyway, my point is I discovered Google could do that today!

Ok, I find the fire option a bit lame. Let’s have another more pratical example. Say I wanted to search for a laptop with erm..pink color, rather than browsing through a whole 10 pages of search results, I specify pink color and I get what I want, I’m happy, Google is happy.

P/S: If you’re curious and interested in how Google’s image color recolonization algorithm work, visit this paper(pdf) published by Google engineers Henry Rowley, Shumeet Baluja, and Dr. Yushi Jing.

A lof of people have been writting review for IE8, they installed it, surf the net, and claimed “holy mad cow, it’s faster than Firefox, it renders things faster! It’s more secure!”.

Doing a few search on Google reveals a lot of things that prove IE8 still has a long way to go. But anyhow, applauds to the team IE8 in Microsoft for heating things up in the browser war

IE8 passes the Acid2 test, which renders CSS2.1 correctly now! Lesser head ace for web developer yes!

IE8 failed the Acid3 test, which focus on the ECMAScript ( Javascript is a variation of ECMAscript) and DOM level 2.

Microsoft is making much of its security enhancements, which Ms Barzdukas said makes IE 8 “hands down the most secure browser on the market.”

In the recent annual Pwn2Own contest, all 3 major browsers have been exploited. Safari on MAC is one of the fastest to exploit, followed by IE8 and Firefox.

Miller also added that Firefox on Windows is easily the hardest of the three browsers to crack, despite Microsoft’s claims that IE8 is “hands down the most secure browser on the market.” – Infoworld.com

I was surprised. For IE 8, I’d give him a 9 out of 10. For Safari, maybe a 2. It’s just too easy to pop Safari. For Firefox on Windows, I give him a 10. That was the most impressive of the three. It’s really hard to exploit Firefox on Windows. – blog.zdnet.com

Anyway, click on the links above to read more in details.

I am really surprise that Google Chrome was the one target left standing. Way da go Google.

Firefox is famous of the massive list of extensions available, and for now I can’t live without them, and moreover I’ve had really bad experience styling webpages with CSS in IE…I have had nightmares, waking up during midnight dreaming about a misaligned navigation bar in IE6. One day(years later)…who knows, IE will dominate in the browser war again.