A City of Our Own Part III: Kajang

Posted by Mujib Jazmin on January 28, 2011

“My father told me that his late uncle, not wearing any helmet, would ride his vintage Ducati bike very fast around the “roundabout” to impress his friends with his bike skills.”

Kajang town is where it all began. Mujib Jazmin is the Junior Web Designer at Stampede

We know every place tells a different story. Here I wish to share a bit of story about my beloved hometown. I was born in 1990 in a place known as the “Satay Town” of Malaysia which is Kajang. Kajang is in the eastern part of Selangor and located 21km from the capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. First settlement was established in 1709 by the natives. Well you can gain this information from the National Archive or more conveniently from Wikipedia.

What I‘m going to share with everyone is not about the present days of my hometown but more interestingly, about the old days of Kajang based on the first-hand account of my father. That‘s right, he was also born in Kajang in the late 60‘s. During his childhood, he was raised by his mother and late grandmother together with his brother, uncle and aunt in a house located in a village named Sungai Kantan.

According to my father, during his childhood, Kajang was a quiet town where not many things happened during the day other than people doing routines to support their families. Then, there was a “roundabout” road in the middle of the town, where Metro Kajang is now. My father told me that his late uncle, not wearing any helmet, would ride his vintage Ducati bike very fast around the “roundabout” to impress his friends with his bike skills. Nearby, was the famous “satay” seller in Kajang called Tasmin and the price for a stick of satay during that time was only 15 cents. The meat was skewed with veins of coconut palm frond instead of bamboo.

There were two big cinemas in Kajang town. One was built by the British before the Second World War, which was then turned into a school by the Japanese during their occupation of Malaya and made everyone sing the Japanese national anthem every morning. Thus it got named the National Cinema. Back then when movie tickets were really cheap, it was one of my father‘s favorite places to visit with his mates on Saturdays.

The other cinema was the Sun Cinema which was also located nearby the National Cinema. It was built after the independence of Malaya most probably in the mid 60‘s. Today both cinemas were no longer around. The National cinema was demolished to make way for Metro shopping complex while the Sun cinema has been converted to a Buddhist temple.

Despite the rapid development in Kajang, we can still see buildings that were built in the 1920‘s. It is because the Kajang Municipal council has decided not to demolish the old buildings to conserve the rich heritage of the town. Over time, this introduced congestions. Well you can imagine the combinations of old and modern buildings being “patched” up together in a small town, where the roads are mostly not systematic, the populations grow in rapid figures, causing massive traffic jams most of the time. Fortunately, now since they have built the Silk highway, the traffic jam has been reduced quite significantly.

In the outskirt of Kajang town back in those days, lays a few villages where the Malays, Chinese and Indians dwells. The Sungai Chua village was mostly populated by Chinese, Sungai Kantan and Sungai Ramal villages by the Malays and Kajang estate, Brummah estate by the Indians. They were all separated by the British according to their races. Now, most of the villages have been replaced by new housing estates and shopping complex. During my father‘s teenage years, he used to go fishing at old mining pools near Sungai Kantan. He said, you can choose any pools you like, and fish whatever fresh water fish that you like. Further up from the old mining pools there was a stream which the locals called “jeram” that my father and his friends used to swim together and enjoyed the tranquility of the surroundings.

That was yester years, a long time ago. Now they were gone forever. The hills and greeneries have been replaced by highways. The old mining pools have been filled with land and housing estates were built on top of it. Last time, during the day, you can feel the freshness of air around you. You can drink the fresh water from the “jeram” without even boiling it. You can easily catch all sort of fresh water fishes like the Tilapia and Lampam. Now no more. “Oh! How I missed that time so much” said my father.

As I said earlier, I was born in 1990, and there isn‘t much I can tell about modern-day Kajang than the information that is in the Internet. The Kajang which I am living now is no longer green or tranquil.  All that is left are the old buildings which are the main cause of the jams. Besides that everything has changed.

Well that‘s a bit about Kajang, now and before.  I do hope we cherish our green earth that we lived in for a better living tomorrow.

(gorgeous photography by Yummy Corner and Kajang Town, Selangor, Malaysia)

Posted in A City of Our Own 2 Comments »

Easy Way to Generate Complex Excel Spreadsheet Programmatically

Posted by Shaiful Borhan on January 25, 2011

Shaiful shares a quick workaround on how to generate complicated Excel documents from your application. Shaiful Borhan is the Web Analyst and Developer at Stampede.

In my previous project, one of the requirements was the system must be able to produce an official form document in Excel spreadsheet with precise formatting that will look consistent when printed. As reference, the client provided me a sample of the working form in an Excel spreadsheet that has been meticulously formatted using colors, font styles, borders and cell merging to produce the desired form document.

Using an Excel generator PHP library to produce the document would require too much work in terms of codes just to handle the formatting part. What we can do is use MS Excel to export the spreadsheet to HTML format. This process will generate a few HTML files based on the number of worksheets you have, a CSS file and image files (if any).

The main idea here is to let your application generate the HTML, CSS and image files exactly as the ones generated by Excel. And then use MS Excel to import the HTML files to render the spreadsheet. Since you’ll be offering a bunch of files for the user to download, it’s a good idea to bundle them up in a ZIP archive. This method should work on any programming languages.

Have a nice day!

Posted in Code Add Comment »

My Maybank2u Experience

Posted by See Guo Lin on January 18, 2011

“I then clicked the back button in my browser. It didn’t take me to the previous page. Instead it says, due to security, I was not allowed to use the back button at all and the system promptly logged me out.”

If you also use Maybank2u, you might have experienced the same thing. Guo Lin is the Web Developer at Stampede.

Malayan Banking Berhad has the most popular online banking website in Malaysia. They are also the pioneer of online banking services in Malaysia and among the first to introduce online banking facility, Maybank2u back then in year 2000. All major banks in Malaysia have since followed suit.

I have always been hoping that Malaysian websites would become better at adopting web technologies and employing smarter user experience design. I must say that despite being the most visited Malaysian website, Maybank2u does not take lead in both areas. In terms of design, it’s probably how a banking website should look, though I have seen better ones. Plus, I’m not in a good position to comment as I’m no designer.

Flashback…

Personally, I think the navigation structure is somewhat unintuitive. I remember the first time I logged into the website some four years ago and was overwhelmed by the Dashboard. There was no visual focus on banking functions useful to me. I became distracted and felt a little lost.

Does your OS come with a digital clock? If not you can use ours!

So I decided to explore one banking options after another. The first one said, quite naturally, ‘Accounts & Banking’. Clicking the link took me to a page with a secondary navigation menu on left. But hold on, what’s that about ‘Bill Payment’? I thought I saw something about bills in the homepage?

We have another link for you to pay your bill, in case the first link is, erm, down.

I then clicked the back button in my browser. It didn’t take me to the previous page. Instead it says, due to security, I was not allowed to use the back button at all and the system promptly logged me out. I felt frustrated and confused – how could the back button possible cause any security issues? (Update: It appears that the website now supports use of back button, notwithstanding their initial security concerns. I didn’t realize it until I test it again in preparation of this post.) I have tried another online banking websites before, but they let me browse the way I do, back button and all.

So I logged in again. And I saw that the homepage has a link that reads ‘Bills & Statements’ (although they meant different things). I was puzzled by the logic used by the UI designer when designing the navigation structure. When I clicked on the link, it took me to a page with a totally different main navigation structure. While the style looked the same, the main navigation structure was so out of touch that I’m certain they were built with the only integration to each other being the link.

You must click on ‘Online Banking’ first before you log out, because… you are not on an online banking site now?

I felt uncomfortable browsing a banking website patched up like this. So I decided to go back to the previous section I landed on when I first logged in, to get some bearing. Again, forgetting about the ‘security’ reason for disabling the usage of the back button in browser, I clicked on it and I was logged out again.

No, it wasn’t like this (this is when the user logs out on his own). I remembered clearly that they said I was not allowed to use the back button in my browser because it was not secure.

I couldn’t get used to how I need to change my browsing habits and got fed up by it, so I decided to discontinue exploring any further until I absolutely need to use its online banking service.

What Went Wrong?

I think what went wrong for me was:

• Confusing navigation structure
• Lack of visual cue on things ought to be focused on
• Enforcement of browsing habits change

Four Years Later…

It has been four years since I started using Maybank2u and I realized that  the only thing they have improved is the support of  the cautionary back button (duh). I don’t know when the change was made because since my first or second visit, I have made myself adapt to their no-back button policy until today (damn, I feel so stupid).

Maybank2u is not the only Malaysian banking website that causes my itch, but I will save the rest for another day.

P.S.:

I tried to access Maybank2u today by the address maybank2u.com.my and it didn’t work. My gut  feeling  told me it’s probably caused by one of the most common issues with Malaysian websites—the www and Only www Syndrome.

So I tried www.maybank2u.com.my. Voila, it works, and I’m right about the www and Only www Syndrome.

We vow not to serve any visitors trying to reach us without ‘www’ in the web address.

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