I got up to late today and my ticket list is ways to long plus I need to finish some work for a client. However - the weather is fine today and I don’t feel stressed or something like that. I bought the new Roots Manuva and really like it. I had a “club-mate” and a delicious Panini toast (yummy) and I am very looking forward to have an after work beer - in about 2 hours

At my work we usually do Java/JSP stuff but a few weeks I did a small PHP Job here and today I made the statistic in mysql. Actually nothing special but a welcome change if you imagine stupid JSP Struts tasks day in and day out and boring style-stasi requests from project managers and so on. But I am hip to the spirit and love computer work - or at least the creative-innovative part of it - the rest I try to reject and forget. Actually it is always the same - some project manager come up with a kick ass idea and then during the production it gets reduced to something really boring and forgettable unimportant whatsoever.

My coffee is empty [...] ^^

Ever tryed to “explain” a delete or an update statement? It will fail. It took me nearly an hour to figure this out. Actually I’ve never needed to explain a simple DELETE statement, but in todays case I did and was wondering why my query always failed. It is too bad that there is no such “feature”. With InnoDB you can use of course the ON DELETE/UPDATE stuff but in my case I didn’t want to alter the existing DB.

However, if you need to delete multiple rows over multiple tables, you may do something like this:

DELETE stats, links, logins
FROM promo_stats AS stats
LEFT JOIN promo_links AS links USING(promo_link_id)
LEFT JOIN promo_logins AS logins USING(promo_login_id)
WHERE stats.promo_item_id=6;

A Project manager recently emailed me about a non working link but without to mention which link he was taking about, so I replied: «What kind of link, in what situation - how can I reproduce it?» - After a short while he sent me a screen shot and said it would happen when he clicks on a flash file. (Why does he bother me? He has sent me the flash file and someone else created it.)

Nevertheless I am a very kind IT guy and explained the issue to him - So I wrote him that a link to an external resource always consist out of: 1) a protocol name, 2) an instruction for the browser that it is an external resource :// and finally 3) the domain name and last but not least the TLD and optional paths or parameters.

You may call me a fault finder but that’s something that happened not the first time. I guess this is a classic example of: stupid new media. People who are working in the new media should knew what a friggin link is - especially when they are Project Manager of a website!

I just came back from a short trip to Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein. Actually it was my Moms bday and I bought her some stuff for the kitchen and I hope she will enjoy the designer pepper mill On Sunday we went to the Arboretum (some sort of a botanical garden), which is a really nice place, although there is a small fee to pay. There’s a little lake with lotus, water lilies and koi fish. I took some pics with my phone, so if you’re interested you can get a picture

There are some things I really dislike and one of that are «anonymous calls» and because of that I’ve installed iCall Manager on my Blackberry and tada - it works. All incoming anonymous calls gets now rejected. Good bye whoeveryouare!

Passwords are sometimes hard to remember, or at least hard to read, because good passwords are cryptic. That’s a fact and I am still fine with it, because I pay attention to obvious security flaws or risks. However, there are some situations when you do not need cryptic passwords – like “first time passwords”, or “single time passwords”. For this particular case I came up with a nice idea and I’d like to call it pass phrazr (phraser).

Instead of cryptic passwords, use phrases and or simple sentences. If you just enter some phrases as possible pass phrases it doesn’t work very well, but if you use a directory it does. Plus, you can serve i18ln passwords if you add a locale.

The easiest sentence is SVO structured but “Tim like Dogs” sucks and isn’t fancy at all, so I’m going to use a more stylish composition. Factual phrases with *izm nouns instead of boring objects! RaaaaR.

Here’s a simple MySQL Table:

CREATE TABLE passphrazes (
	passphraze_word 	varchar(30) 					NOT NULL,
	passphraze_type 	enum('subject','verb','noun') 	NOT NULL,
	PRIMARY KEY (passphraze_word)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin;

If you still wonder about it - the magic goes here:

SELECT concat(
	(SELECT passphraze_word
		FROM passphrazes
		WHERE passphraze_type = 'subject'
		ORDER BY RAND()
		LIMIT 1),
	'-',
	(SELECT passphraze_word
		FROM passphrazes
		WHERE passphraze_type = 'verb'
		ORDER BY RAND()
		LIMIT 1),
	'-',
	(SELECT passphraze_word
		FROM passphrazes
		WHERE passphraze_type = 'noun'
		ORDER BY RAND()
		LIMIT 1)
);

No clue jet? Well, by selecting random rows you can generate funny phrases like:

He allocated nahualism.
She reinforced mithridatism.
They served social-evolutionism.

Then style it and additionally pimp it more secure (replace spaces with dashes, plus signs, or even camelize it) in your favourite coding language:

He-allocated-nahualism.
SheReinforcedMithridatism.
They+Served+social-evolutionism.

The use case is hopefully obvious. If someone sign up at your site and you generate the first time password for the user, why not something meaningful? There are tons of possibilities to combine words unique.

*updated*

It was time to get a new mobile phone so I’ve choosen the BlackBerry Bold 9000 for 89,- EUR and hope it will be delivered until tomorrow. I guess I will not use all the fancy features it claims to provide but it’s good to know I could if I would like to. - Nah, I will use some of them for sure, like the GPS + Maps, email, 2MP Cam, IM stuff, Organizer, Browser and of course I’ll use it primary as phone

Also I’ve canceled the 16mbit / VOIP Alice Contract and ordered a VDSL 25 MBIT/ISDN line from t-kom and hope we’ll get it until next month.

Also I’ve installed chrome, googles new browser but more importantly it seems to me that googles war against MS reaches another level. I wonder what MS will be in two years. MS loses constant market share in the browser business and I’ll be surprised about the Moz Foundation and google corporation in the future. Firefox has meanwhile a good share with ~20% and as someone mentioned some weeks ago, every laptop above 1000 USD is a Mac. Yarr, and there is no IE since 5.5 for the Mac and every development ist discontinued. Thus I assume that the IE will no more be the browser to develop for (primary) in future, because it will be just one amongst of many. And! If the antitrust law finaly forbid the bundling of Browser/OS - then a long fought war is eventually won!

However!

Updates may also appear in the real world and yesterday I’ve (managed to) updated my competent revenue authorities with the “est”, “gse” and “n” Papers, without any assistance … *sigh* :p