French Roast (Starbucks)

Very strong flavor, and smoky taste. Best cup of coffee in a long time.

My Rating: 4.9 / 5

* Based on dripped coffee maker

Italian Roast (Starbucks)

The roasty smell is actually quite weird. It does remind me slightly of shrimp paste. Maybe because its so aromatic that it has the lingering effect like how shrimp paste does on me.

Although it is rather acidic, the coffee does have a very strong intense boldy feel to it.

My Rating: 4.0 / 5

* Based on dripped coffee maker

Best Bak Kut Teh

Ng Ah Sio Pork Ribs Soup Eating House
208 Rangoon Road
Also order the shitake mushrooms, quick blanched kidney and spinach soup. These folks are synonymous with the blessings of bak kut teh.

Rong Chen Bak Kut Teh
Blk 22 Sin Ming Road, Eng Hup Ho Hup Coffeshop
The boss of many "disciplines" that hv ventured on their own. His pig trotters (ter ka) is dangerously addictive. Remember to order the kungfu tea set to complete the meal.

Joo Siah Bak Kut Teh
Blk 347 Jurong East Ave 1 #01-220/221
Cook learnt his craft from relatives at Rong Chen 20 years ago.

Founder Rou Gu Cha Cafeteria
347 Balestier Road
Very spicy and peppery with little herbal taste.

Ah Peng Bak Kut Teh
3 Seng Poh Road, Soon Soon Huat Eating House
Good teochew style. Ter ka so so only.

Leong (Klang) Bak Kut Teh
269 Geylang Road, Cheng Cheng Eating House
A robust KL dark herbal version. Sell offals and mutton versions too.

Outram Park Ya Hua Rou Gu Cha
7 Keppel Road #01-05/07 PSA Tanjong Pagar Complex
From the famous old Outram Park blocks. Very crowded on weekends. The ladies are from a family of bak kut teh specialists.

Teochew Muay Bak Kut Teh

5 Mohamed Sultan Road Singapore 239014

Favourite place after Double Oooo

Ya Hua Bak Kut Teh

593 Havelock Road

This bak kut teh here is the peppery type,clear soup.. I am not a fan, but the flavour is good. The ribs are so so only, not enough meat i find. But this place opens late night esp after clubbing at zouk

Working around envers

When using envers for in our implementation, on the simplistic implementation, it does not provide much information on what the transaction is about. To get around this, we had no choice but to input the transactional information at the action level. This will also allow all information to be in a transaction table, in this case the "MA_Transaction".

The transaction table shall also be audited to tag the revision number to it, when envers audits it. This finally "MA_Transaction_AUD" table will contain the revision + Transaction, giving a consolidated table of all transaction information.

The key thing to note is that both the entity persistence and the transaction persistence have to be done within one transaction to ensure that the revision is properly replicated in the "MA_Transaction_AUD" table.

Though, this design is not a clean and straightfoward one, this was necessary to get this it working the way we need to, when we were supposed develop an enquiry facility.

How envers can work for you

Recently, i was using envers as a quick method to perform logging for my application. I have some positive and negative thoughts at this method.

It works in the following way:

Advantages

• Simple to implement transactional information.
• Audit Reader to query the audit records to find entity at a particular revision

Disadvantages

• Creates multiple Audit tables
• Very hard to document function that has modified the entity
• Need 2 Audit Reader queries to retrieve the before and after values
• Need to query all entities when trying to find out which table each revision has impacted.

Scrum (Software Development)

SCRUM is a methodology that is used by a team to manage development of features for a product, or generic software development.

In the scrum development process, it involves people of 3 main roles. Scrum Master(coordinator) , Product Owners (stakeholders/customers) and Team (analyst, designers, developers, testers).

It starts from the Product BackLog Listing, i.e. a documents that contains all features, enhancements, wishlist. That defines what are the necessary features are to be developed. This list have to contain rough estimates of the time required for development of these features. It should also contain the rough business value of the feature. It will give the product owner an idea/gauge of how must business value it will provide versus the 'cost' of developing the features. Allowing these features to be rated and prioritized in order.

A features of the highest priority in the Product Backlog, will be chosen by the product owner in a sprint planning meeting. The team will then decided how much can be accepted to be completed during this sprint. A sprint is typically a timed period when the team will develop the promised features. During this time, feature will be defined in detail of how the team will implement the features in a sprint backlog. Features will then be broken down into tasks, and small chunks of less than 16 hours of work each. These tasks are also ranked in the sprint logs by priority. The interesting thing is that the tasks are not assigned out. The team members will picked from this list based on priority and skill set for the task.

During these sprints, it relies on verbal communication, cross disciplined collaboration between the team. Hence the team needs to be on location to perform these sprints. Also a daily scrum needs to be held on the same time and location daily for a short 15 minutes period. Everyone in the team will answer the following questions:

• What have been done yesterday
• What will I do today
• Is there any problems preventing me from completing my job today

When there are problems encountered by the team, the scrum master is to help facilitate and resolve any problems that are raised and get back to the team members.

A burndown chart needs to be maintained, showing the work left from the sprint backlog that the team can visually see to be aware of the progress to completion.

"A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements churn), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team’s ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements." - so very true

The process of selecting features from the product backlog for each sprint process will be iterated until the product backlog has been completely cleared.

Caffe Verona (Starbucks)

It has a full creamy and sweet flavor. The fragrance, as it brews is incites an aromatic, delightful and provoking expectation. The versatile, complex blend of Asia Pacific, Latin America with a touch of Italian coffees is intriguing and tasty.. Caffe Verona is satisfying from the time it grinds, as it brews and then the reward that is anticipated throughout the experience is complete.

(Get a free tall coffee too :D)

My Rating: 4.5 / 5

* Based on dripped coffee maker