Happy 2024, Everyone!

"Spartans never retreat. Spartans never surrender." - Leonidas.

Good day, everyone, and to all those who have been following this blog ever since.

You might be wondering why I don’t write stories here as much as I did in the past. Over time, I’ve found myself exploring other ways to share experiences, and blogging has taken a bit of a backseat. It feels like the art of storytelling through blogging isn’t as popular as it once was, but I still believe there’s something special about it that will always remain timeless.

Occasionally, blogs can reemerge as a refreshing medium—offering us a chance to connect with writers whose experiences resonate with our own. They provide something uniquely personal, even in a world now brimming with other entertainment options.

While it seems that platforms like TikTok and YouTube have taken the spotlight, I think they bring their own exciting ways to tell stories. Through videos, people can enjoy seeing things unfold visually, creating a different kind of connection than what text and photos can offer.

To keep up with the changing times, I’m happy to share that I’ve also started vlogging. I’ve discovered that editing videos and presenting myself in them is just as rewarding as writing. Still, I plan to keep this blog alive and will continue posting whenever I find the time.

If you’d like to check out my YouTube channel, feel free to visit: ReynaxisSolutions.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope your 2024 has been amazing, and I’m wishing you all the best as we head into 2025.

Indoor Plants and an Update About My Life

Darkness is the absent of light. While it’s a pretty straightforward understanding that our primary need for light is to see things around us, there is a much higher purpose for its existence and one could simply think of it as the existential ingredient for which lives on Earth could thrive.

But in a room that does not receive an ample serving of sunlight, how does one’s plant be able to appear green and stay that way? 

Fluorescent lights, and a few led lights. Just a couple of it actually.

After six months in the cold and dark corner of my room, one of my orchid plants had shown resilience against the gloomy odds and it bloomed with quite a handful of purple flowers. 

Quite a spectacular sight to see.

The secret to making the plants grow and bear flowers without the real sunlight is for them to get artificial lights that have at least two of the colors from the spectrum of light. To stimulate growth, it needs to have a cool white light and a red light to encourage flowering.

It’s like decades ago since I last made my school projects. But a couple of while ago, my boss had asked me to make the covers for these two Minecraft costumes. I’m not particularly a fan of Minecraft and have never played it on PC. 

I hope the kids who would wear these costumes could forgive me if I didn’t get it right.

Here’s John, our newest IT staff. He was an OJT when I took this photo. Here, he was tasked to put a plastic sheet on the cameras because the contractors were painting the metal ducting to which the camera was attached. 

The person on the left is Dickson, another one of our IT Staffs and John is the one seated. Here they are preparing the cameras for one of our clients. If you ever come and work in the IT Department at our company, you’d be learning nice things and installing CCTV’s is one of them.

John graduated with an IT course and Dickson didn’t. But this is a good example of why experience is sometimes better than having a degree. In this case, it was Dickson who was explaining to John a few technicalities in network cabling. If you ever wonder how Dickson has gotten so good with IT stuffs, I guess he has a good teacher.

Well, who could that teacher be? Ahem. 

So, in the eyes of their humble teacher, they are now worthy of being called the masters of CCTV installations. 

Hey wait a minute! Why is John smiling broadly in almost all of the pictures? 

This printer was sent to us from one of our departments for repair. They say that it’s ON but it refuses to obey what they ask it to do.  

Now what were they asking it to do?

Anyway, I suspect that a mitigating factor is a faulty board. In this photo, I’m showing Dickson how to use a desoldering pump to remove the power module from the faulty board. Later that afternoon, we replaced the board with a reliable one from another faulty printer of the same model and reattached the power module.

It worked like a charm.

Here are some of the corrugated hoses that I would always buy from Leon Hardware. If you ever wonder what I use these for, I use it for protecting cables and speaker wires. As generally presented idea with evidence, rats will have a hard time chewing on them. 

And the insurance company will be more than happy to see us using these.

Here’s Ivan, my nephew. He just recently joined our company as the IT replacement for Raffy who resigned last year. In this photo, we are at a client’s house doing inspection in preparation for CCTV installation.

Ivan is tall person, and is visibly taller than me. I’ve seen him grow from being a small toddler up to that size. I think that if the new generations continue to outgrow the former ones in terms of height, the Earth will be repopulated once again by giants. 

Until next time. Happy weekend everyone!

Merry Christmas

The year 2019 has brought us a concoction fun, hard work and mind-crushing challenges, but it also came with a couple of good rewards which I should talk about later in the upcoming posts.

They say that if a dragon or a "lion dance" has come to pass by and dances nearby, and someone happens to be present at its path, well not necessarily directly on its path, but somewhat closer to where it's at, then luck will come to that person.

I'm not sure if touching the lion costume will double that "luck" but it doesn't hurt to try.

Anyway, I just want to greet everyone a Merry Christmas and I wish you all good luck in 2020. Cheers!

A Busy Life and A Little Experiment

A golden rule that I've come to learn over the course of my life is that there is no harm in trying. Thus, I and my IT staffs have gone to extra lengths just to try and test for a very common information that a Hikvision IP Camera will not run by a UTP cable of more than 50 meters away on a POE supply. While some people with glimmering technical background in this field will probably agree with it, I am not ready to jump on the bandwagon just yet without putting up a little pillow fight and proving how correct that information is.

So it has come to pass that I have asked my two staffs to cut an approximately 100 meter of CAT6 pure copper cable and to help me run a test of our own. Oh by the way, the person on the left side whose two hands are gripping a roll of orange cable is Sylvester and and that's his cousin Dickson on the right.

If Discovery Channel has Adam and Jamie for MythBusters, I have the back of  these two guys here to help me perpetuate an unscrupulous plan of busting some myths for fun; and to whom I had promised a bottle of cold Coke should we emerge victorious in the end.

The camera location is perhaps around 30 meters close to where we have set up our NVR (Network Video Recorder) so we still have the remaining 70 meters of CAT6 coiled under the table.

And look at that, it works! While it is not in my best intention to prove other people wrong, I do acknowledge that I wanted to prove something to myself. Things could be better understood if one chose to tackle the subject in an engaging manner.

Here's the detailed summary of our mini-experiment:

Success rate                             :  100%
Hostilities met along the way   :  0%
Casualties                                 :  0%
Minor Injuries Sustained          :  0%
Satisfied people                        : 3

 Oh we did go and drank some cold Coke afterwards. Happy weekend everyone!

Confidence in the Workplace

Having a job and doing the actual work is like being in a beach, trying to walk our way past against a series of waves. The water is your work environment and the waves are the problems you encounter each time.

Life in the workplace isn’t smooth, and you need to face the proverbial waves. No matter how small or big the waves are, you still take the courage to face them head on, even if they swat you like a bulldozer. But like the waves, those problems will come to pass, whether you’ve solved them or not. Like the waves, if you’re not able to stop it, something else will (thanks to the big rocks on the shore).

Or somebody else will.

The good thing however, is that each time you have courageously stood against the incoming waves, you gain experience. You build character. And those characters become you. You can even say, “Hey look, I’m The Hulk!” But I’m just kidding. What I actually mean to say is that the more problems you overcome, the more confident you may become.

Confidence is actually about thinking and saying, “I’ve done this before, and I know I can do it again.” That is, if you’ve been through that situation before. But when you’re about to face something that you have previously never come across of, confidence becomes believing in yourself.

So confidence is really about knowing what you can do and believing in yourself that you can do more. Apply that sense in the workplace, you won’t become unstoppable, but you’ll become adequately and confidently capable.

If not, then at least you become a "Papable."

Payroll Software for Papua New Guinea

From the word "Cinch" which means, easy; and from the word "Productivity," the CinchPro payroll came out with an aim to ease out the tediousness and the painstaking workflow of working on payroll reports that HR does every fortnight to meet the payroll deadlines. Designed to be a straightforward and to be a very user-friendly program, CinchPro is the robust solution to challenging payroll procedures.

Here are some of the examples of what this payroll program can do:

Main Menu. Sleek ribbon menu and big icons and a dashboard display that keeps track of the current workflows.

Employee Masterfile. Easy look-up of employees. With picture and a history of pay rates. It also shows the OFF day schedule.

Absences Reporting. Easy viewing of absences incurred by employees with display of used up Medical Certificates, off days and actual time per fornight from attendance software.

Item Booking Module. CinchPro payroll comes with a module for distributing bread booking if the shop using this program are also selling bread or any items that staffs can sometimes book for salary deduction later.

Item Booking Module in actual operation (with pos printer).

Sewer Jobs. This payroll comes with a module for paying staff that are paid not by the hours but by the pieces they make. This is perfect if the shop that is using this payroll has a factory that produces school uniforms or the likes where some employees in the factory are paid by the number of uniforms they make.

Timesheet Module. Quickly view employee's time records with CinchPro's timesheet module.

Biometric Connection Module. Easily download attendance logs from Fingerprint Biometric stand-alone readers and upload to Cinchpro's Timesheet module.

Supported Fingerprint Biometric Reader. Cinchpro supports the use of TX628 stand-alone fingerprint reader.

Supported Fingerprint Biometric Reader. It also supports the use of T480 stand-alone fingerprint reader.

Loans. CinchPro payroll comes with a module for handling loans by employees to the company. It's automatic deduction/pay features makes it easy for the company to take back payments through salary deductions.

Leave Pay Reports. CinchPro payroll can produce many reports and it can also generate reports for Leave Pay Candidates at one's whim.

Payroll Sheet. Easily export formatted reports to MS Excel for customized printing.

Leave Planner. CinchPro payroll comes with an Annual Leave Planner that makes it easy for the HR to create and approve leave requests. It has an easy to read graph and month views that highlights the days of leave.

Help/Manual. CinchPro program comes with a help file that has an easy to follow instructions, making it easy for the user to operate the system.

Our company is using CinchPro Payroll version 3.0 for more than a year now and a biometric attendance system bundled with it for over four years now. We have two business locations where this program is installed and serve more than 250 employees and by far things are going well and easy for us.

Demo Link Below:

CinchPro Payroll Demo

Note: Once you download the demo file, send me an email (My Email) so I can send you the password for the zip file and let me assist you with the installation.

Requirements:

1. Windows 7 or later version

2. 180 MB of free disk space.

Third Party Software Requirements:

1. We will need to install SQL Server Express to your server or to your pc.

Some Programming Stuff

When time permits and I'm in one of my agreeable moods, I usually write a piece for my technical blog called Through The SQL. That blog is all about software programming and a few bits of troubleshooting stuff. Anyway, here's a post that I wrote for that blog sometime ago with its original content.

In Visual Foxpro 9 (VFP) and it’s lower versions, there exists a logical field with which a programmer can use to have some kind of a digital flip-type switch that we regularly use in queries or in a control, like a checkbox, for example. If one can imagine how a light switch works, the idea behind is the same with that of a logical field. The apparent difference emerging from the point being that is, the usual ON and OFF status that we regularly see on a common household light switch is omitted, the logical field in VFP uses a boolean value of either .T. or .F. instead, with “.T.” representing the value for TRUE and “.F.” for FALSE.

So it’s kind of like when your dad asks you if you have left the garage lights on overnight, you may probably hear, “Is it TRUE that you have left the lights on last night?”

Anyway, Creating a logical field in a VFP cursor is as simple as this.

Create Cursor curTest (field1 l)

Select curTest

MODIFY STRUCTURE

But in MS SQL Server, with versions like 2008 or 2012, there is no Boolean or Logical field type. This is probably the reason why I see many software developers turning their trust to characters and integer types just to work around this inadequacy. 

For instance, a programmer can use several of the INT (integers) type field just to represent a value of 0 or 1. Because 0 and 1 can both respectively represent the ON and OFF nature of a basic switch. The idea makes sense until you add another value, like “2” then it loses the foremost characteristic of being a “flip-type” switch. 

The Workarounds in SQL Server

I’ve seen programmers use the int type, which has a range of -2^31 (-2,147,483,648) to  2^31-1 (2,147,483,647) and can take up storage of 4 Bytes in the table. Others use the smallint type, of which range is shorter than the int type but takes up 2 Bytes of storage space. There is also the tinyint that has a range of only 0 to 255 and takes up one Byte of storage space.

One thing to consider when you are feeling a bit determined to use these INT types for a simple switch is that each column of int created in a table will take up the storage space that I mentioned above. For example, if you have two columns of a tinyint field, each column will respectively take up one Byte of storage in a table.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are also those who use a character field to represent a switch in a similar fashion. These programmers, like I do in the early stages of my programming career, have liked the idea of using CHAR(1) type field to mimic the purpose of a logical field. The reason being is that it’s a straightforward solution and it’s easy to read. All that one needs to do is update the char field with a string having a value of “T” or an “F” character. 

The downside of using a char(1) field, however, is that it can take up other characters as well like “A” for instance, aside from the “T” or “F” characters. Also, each char(1) type column’s value in a table will take up 1 Byte of storage. Therefore, if you have two of this column in your table, the values will take up 2 Bytes and so on.

What I Think Is the Right Way to Do It

The best thing to do, in my humble opinion, is to use a bit type field in MS SQL Server. This type accepts integer data type like a bit value of 1 or 0, and it can have a NULL value as well.  

In this example, I’ve created a temporary table with a bit type field. I then inserted a 1 value.

If (Select name from sys.tables where name like '%#testTable%') is not null

      Begin

            drop table #testTable;

            create table #testTable (field1 bit);

     

            insert into #testTable (field1) values (1);

           

            select field1 from #testTable;     

      End

The advantage of the bit type is that it can automatically convert the string values TRUE and FALSE to bit values.  The “TRUE” becomes 1 and “FALSE” becomes 0.

If (Select name from sys.tables where name like '%#testTable%') is not null

      Begin

            drop table #testTable;

            create table #testTable (field1 bit);

     

            insert into #testTable (field1) values ('TRUE');

           

            select field1 from #testTable;     

      End

Sending Updates from Visual Foxpro

Luckily, MS SQL Server will convert the boolean value sent from Visual Foxpro by way of SQL-Pass Through or (SPT) connection.  

For this example, I have a table that I use for keeping LEAVE PAYS. It has a bit type column named isLeapYear. Let’s see what’s in it.

Notice that all other values in the isLeapYear column has zero values except for what’s in the fourth row, which has a bit value of 1.

Now, let’s try and change that into 0 (zero) by sending an UPDATE from Visual Foxpro with this command.

=SQLExec(oHandle.nHandle,'Update MyDatabase.dbo.MyTAble Set isLeapYear = .F.')

Now, we can see that all of the values in the isLeapYear column became zeros. 

Showing the Results with a Checkbox Control in a Grid

Let’s change the value of the fifth column, in the first row to 1. Then we’ll pull the records from MS SQL Server to a Visual Foxpro Grid that has a checkbox column.

=SQLExec(oHandle.nHandle,'Update MyDatabase.dbo.MyTAble Set isLeapYear = .F. where lpID = 9')

 So, this is how it should look like now. 

After we pulled the records from SQL Server, this is what a grid with a checkbox control would look like. Notice that the checkbox is automatically ticked because the underlying value in that column is .T. while the rest have .F. values. I will discuss how I created this checkbox in a grid  on a new post once I get a free time again.

Final Thoughts

Visual Foxpro is somehow lucky to have found its Logical values automatically converted by MS SQL Server to bit values. 

But another point worth considering for using a bit type field is that the SQL Server Database Engine optimizes storage of bit columns.  For example, if a table has less than 8 bit columns, all of the columns are stored as 1 byte. Having more than 8 bit columns but less than 16 will be stored as 2 bytes and so on.

As opposed to using an int type that always stores 1 byte or more per column, this is a great way to conserve server storage space if one is too concern about data normalization and storage conservation. 

Have a nice day!

Attendance Program and CinchPro Payroll System

In 2013, the management in the company that I am working with bought a couple of attendance biometric machines from overseas. It didn't have an attendance software to go with it and it would be a waste if we couldn't use it.So what I did was that I asked the company to give me a whole fortnight (14 days) to program an attendance software that can automate our existing manual time sheet calculations.

This is the software that I came up with. It gets the data from what the biometric machine yields and could do rapid calculations of the total time incurred as well as figure out late penalties. The note on the leftmost side at the bottom says it's already in its 4th revision.Since 2013, the reason why it's very easy and fast to generate time sheet reports has largely been due to this. We didn't have to calculate time from the time cards manually.

This is just one of those biometric machines, and it remarkably held in time. For five years, the company that I'm working with is still using these machines together with the attendance software that I have created for them.

This is the Payroll System that I developed from scratch. In the early years leading up to its creation, I had an intermittent opportunity to help our accounting office with payroll works for quite some time. Those good times had helped me earned a considerable amount of knowledge in payroll stuffs, which then led me to the creation of this latest software, the CinchPro Payroll System in 2017.

The CinchPro Payroll System works in tandem with my Attendance Program. With so many things going on in the payroll, one could easily make a mistake if it's done in Excel. Also, the repetitive tasks can be tedious. By using CinchPro, one can easily generate reports on the ply.

The modules in the CinchPro Payroll Systems include:

• Staff Recording
• Unique Position Monitoring
• Money Booking
• Bread or Item Booking
• Uniform Deductions
• Loans
• Other Deductions
• NASFUND PNG
• Taxes
• Entitlements such as Leave Pay, Finished Pay and Long Service
• Monitoring absences through Medical Certificates 
• Generation of Pay Slips and other reports
• Payroll for Factory workers that gets paid by pieces of work.
• Generating Excel file counterparts for sending payroll to BSP or ANZ bank for processing.

My Future Dream and a Partial Review of Eheim 2010 Canister Filter

Note to Readers: In the dusty pile of unposted blog entries in the forgotten premises of this Blog's Draft section, I stumbled upon this post that I wrote in the 7th of December 2014. So on this day, this post is more than three years already. But as what people always say, it's never too late for everything. So anyway, I'm posting this in its unaltered state to preserve consistency despite its inconsistency with this blog's chronological order.

After three years of working here in Papua New Guinea, I have been spending some time tinkering about an idea of doing something useful once I go back to Philippines for good.

I have several plans in mind but they are yet to pass through their malleable stage. I believe that for a plan to work out in the future, it has to be well carefully thought of and must be as hard as a concrete. For example, aside from planning to run a computer shop in a distant time, I am also considering other options that spark my interest. One of my options is to own a Local Aquarium Shop.

I am not fond of fish in general, but I like the idea of creating your own personal nature scene inside an aquarium, with tropical fishes swimming within graciously. They say that owning a pet alleviates stress but I think it depends upon what kind of pet. For example, I find it stressful to clean up dog droppings but I have no qualm about cleaning an aquarium tank. 

And I also find it very relaxing to look at an aquarium for hours on end. Interestingly, you may occasionally find a fish glaring back at you like you're some kind of food before gradually losing interest of you.

Having an Aquarium Shop that produces own tropical fish is what I have in my mind. But one must have to be fundamentally knowledgeable in the basics of breeding tropical fishes if one wishes to embark on such venture. My particular interest in this field is breeding live-bearers as they are the easiest to breed.  A couple of months ago, I was successful at breeding a wild specie of guppy that I bought from PNG Gardener. Now, I'm up for a bigger challenge of breeding a pair of red swordtails.

Unlike guppies, it's quite difficult to breed swordtails due to their preference on habitat. For instance, they require a breeding space with a minimum of 20 gallon. And because this is only for the sake of learning how to breed them, I purchased a 75 Litter rectangular plastic bin instead of a glass aquarium. 

Although not an eye candy, it has saved me a huge amount of money.

For a fish tank this big, it will require a bigger and powerful filter too. The Eheim 2010 or Eheim 160 was the perfect choice by the availability. I bought it for K175.00 at PNG Gardener. It is both a submersible and a canister-type filter that sucks water from the bottom and spew it up on top leaving the pollutants trapped within the pores in the sponge filter inside.

It runs on 6-Watt power so it doesn't really consume much electricity and a perfect choice for a 24/7 tank filtration. 

Another thing that I like most about Eheim 2010 is that it has a protruding tube on top from which it draws air to generate micro bubbles that goes along with the water movement. Although it appears to be not contributing anything other than being interesting, it actually helps to aerate water and oxygenate aerobic bacteria to help in the fish' byproduct nitrification process.  The pump causes water movements and the bubbles that go on top increase the surface area and improve the oxygen exchange on the water surface.

This is one of the display rack from PNG Gardener at their Gordons branch. As you can see, they have the Eheim models 2006, 2008 and 2010. All of these Eheim products are internal filters. Both 2008 and 2010 have the bubble feature which the 2006 model doesn't have.

The filter in action. You can see the bubbles rushing out from the opening on top. It is always advisable to keep the filter submerged at a quarter of an inch below the water surface to give the whole tank a good water circulation.

Here's what my plastic tank looks like from another perspective. The source of light is from a 2-Watt fluorescent lamp attached to a modified overhead reading lamp. It's a weak source of light, to be exact, but I'm guessing that the impurities in the water and the tank itself being translucent are both reflective of lights thus making the whole bin glow in the dark.

This tank is  currently holding 19 gallons of water, a couple of rocks to weigh down artificial plants and a pair of red swordtail fish.

If I'm successful at breeding this particular specie, then I'm considering it as a good sign that I should continue with my future plans.