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!

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

I had to update WP, because someone managed to exploit a security hole in my blog. I guess it was the draft exploit – but I am not sure. Also I’ve decided to use the open_base_dir restrictions, because the guys who tryed to hack my/our server, tryed to install a ftp server and if I’m right, then the kids call them self “Caffeine’s Heaven”. I did that ways back in the days too – and luckily I’ve discovered it in time. Also I’ve moved to a subdomain and added some rewriting rules for my blog (301).

Anyhow!

I’ve to hurry, because it is already 9:30am and I’m still sit here in shorts

My Flatmate bought a couple of weeks a video ipod because his 3rd gen ipod’s battery has died. He told me it will be expensive to get it fix, so I’ve googled for a cheaper solution and found somewhere a nice howto. Tuesday I’ve ordered via ebay a new 1100ma/h Battery and yesterday it arrived. It took me 10 minutes to change it. And now I’m going to use my new Ipod for the first time – which means – I have music on my ears again. yay!

Edit: The Ipod works fine. Cool!

Today I’ve tried to setup PHP with MySQL but for somehow the Apache crashed, when trying to query something. Funnily the SHOW command worked fine, ie: SHOW DATABASES;. The module was loaded correctly and appeared in the phpinfo(). So I’ve double checked all config and log files but nothing happened or gave me a clue. Browsing the php.install newsgroup also didn’t gave me any idea what could it be – but – then I’ve remembered that I’ve downloaded the 5.1.22-rc-community release, instead of the 5.0.x release. Downgrading to 5.0.45-community-nt luckily solved the mysqli connector problem and everythings seems to work fine now.

Hope this might save someone’s time.

Just installed SpamAssassin and modified the mx server, to hopefully stop some spam. I’ve found this tutorial and it has helped me a bit to configure everything. 100+ Spam mails/Day are definetely too much, so if everything works fine, it will reduce all the spam down to 20%. I mean: I’ve set up a little ruleset in theBat to store all flagged mails in a junk folder and mark them as read.

It’s monday

*note: the mx stuff seems to work and currently I get only 20 spam mails, which means a reduction of ~80% and spamassassin does the rest. Only 1-3 Spam Mails/day, which is quite cool *

In 93 my philosophy teacher asked us, if we can imagine buying or selling things over the internet and how it would affect the society and individual beings. I thought it would be a great thing and people could be more connected. Do you remember how the telephone has changed the world? And so did the internet.

The first Computer we had was an IBM in 86 or 87. The second was a 486 with modem and belonged to my Mothers boyfriend. That must have been around the late 80’s or early 90’s. That was also the first time, when I used a computer as a design tool. A Friend of mine had a funny program with that you were able to make simple animations. I spend tons of hours by pushing one and another pixel back and forth on x and y and that was so awesome! 

For somehow I’ve stopped the computer thing for a while and I nearly failed the computer coding class but in 95 a friend of mine introduced me to a guy who was a real geek and so Iâ�?��?ve started hanging out at his place and did music with Cubase and Emagic logic. I don’t want to repeat myself, but that was awesome again and so I bought my first own machine.
I made my first email account and met Julian in a AOL BBS like thing (I am addicted to names like Julia(n|ne)) and that was my first friend I’ve met over the net. Hehe, and it was really complicated to explain my Mom what the internet is and why do I need it so much and why it costs so much;) Then coding HTML in notepad, experimenting with JavaScript to crash browser, reading lots of interesting stuff in newsgroups and of course conspiracy theories, faking ISP accounts and became an IRC victim

All these are nice and funny stories from �back in the days� but if I’m think about what my teacher has asked us â�?��?? the internet has truly affected our life in an unpredictable way.

You do not call your friends via landlines or meet them like back then, you SMS, ping them via IM and or send virtual greeting cards. You buy and sell items via ebay/amazon/etc and instead of discussing your feelings and interests with real persons, you write in communities and chat rooms. You do not even talk for real with your pals at work, you chat.

Every invention has its positive and negative effects and one big negative effect is that we separate us from real human or natural behaviours. When we LOL, we do not roll on the floor and laugh, it’s just a smile. We loose control or better said we forget to show real facial expressions, because there is no need to. But that’s not all. We’re just sitting in front of a screen and just use some fingers. Due to that lots of people get fat, besides all the unhealthy fast food. We’re seeking for more extremes and I honestly do not think that sex with animals would have been so famous without the net. In real life we do not loose inhibitions; we do not even smile when we walk through crowded places but when we use the computer, we start to unfold our deepest feelings and depths.

Nevertheless: I like the internet and the internet itself is not bad but I believe we should use it more responsible. I am strictly against any censorship or regimentation but for a responsible use. You do not let your child drive your Porsche; you may buy a bobby car or three wheeler. If you allow your children to access with administrator rights to access the internet, you are responsible for it. It is not the internet s or nations fault that your kid has found sites it shouldn’t. You are. If someone breaks into your Computer, it is not the fault of the internet; it is your own fault, that you had no knowledge of computers.

In Germany we have an idiom like expression: �Unwissenheit sch�tzt vor Strafe nicht�, which is similarly to the English: â�?�ž Ignorance is no excuseâ�?��?. You can not plead ignorance to get away from consequences.

… writing bad and unforgivable code.

There are lot of good looking sites out there and a lot of good looking (w)CMS front and backends but most of the so called *cool* CMS sucks. WP ist cool – I like it – it’s a good piece of code but I think the templating is kinda hard on the nerves sometimes. Well that’s ok, because you can do quite a lot with it – but take Joomla and or OSC for instance and be prepared for a damn rampage.

I don’t know … maybe I should grow botanic things and stop coding instead of them. Why do people code nowadays procedural, when it’s clear they have to recode (or copy and paste) it more than two times. OOP rules – at least most of the time. Sometimes I stumble upon classes which contains 80% echo/print commands. Why not using a good templating system like Flexy or maybe Smarty if necessary?

Why is it so hard to use a validator or RTFM?

Do not misunderstand me – I am not a coding guru – I am just a person who likes good and usable things but the sad thing is – most of the things I am discover are bull****.

Why does so many things sucks anyway?
Like the IE, the media, the fast food throwaway society, the bad smelling people in the streets, Hollywood movies, Sternburger-Beer, ban of smoking in bars, criminalization of graffiti artists, criminalization of soft drugs, less than 25 days of holiday per year, global warming and so on and so forth and etc and pp and yes – you know what I am saying – don’t you?

It’s Sunday.
It is just a livelong dream.
I am sleeping right now and when I wake up – I’ll be surprised how wonderful you all are and everything is