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

It took us quite a while until we were all satisfied but now it’s done and you can view it over here:

» http://areal-records.com/

The site relies on prototype, some web 2.0 gimmickry, scriptaculous and the pear framework, a wonderful combine script for CSS and JS. Firefox 3 still needs some »pimping« but for all the other browsers it should work fine, as far as I can tell.

It’s midnight.

What da f..k? And the damn office has still closed on Sat and is located out in the sticks. It’s raining outside an my company canceled »beer and sausage« Man – that truely sucks!

Note: I had to pay 20 Euro tariff for 5 T-Shirts.

My neighbours just had sex – uhh, ahhh, uuhhhh – well for about 4 minutes – not much longer – then they were done. So I’d call it a quickly. I was quite tempted to have a look but I thought that would be indecent and naughty, even though it sounded like a doggy-style However, I’m no voyeur and it’s a hot night and every cool cat wanna have a kitten – or so…

The only reason I’ve noticed them is, our balcony doors are next to each other and both are wide open. But for my excuse, I’m still fixing a database – or better said, I do a modification. for writershops.com I use the world DB from MySQL plus an extra column for the CIA facts book country code. However, I’m still thinking about to extend it with postal codes and make it public to everyone. Maybe. Time-management is not one of my primary attributes so far.

Tomorrow we have “beer and sausage” at our company, which is quite cool – I mean the fact that we do such things on company time and money. Each first Friday on every new month one department is organizing this little event. Last time we had Becks, this time we’ll have Berliner and sausages.

However (I love this word), I’m currently working on a new JavaScript lib, with a carousel, an interactive navigation and some tab switcher, a lightbox, some fx wrapper and other stuff, based on prototype and scriptaculous. That it nothing phenomenal, but I try to keep it slick as possible and of course flexible. ATM you still can apply any function to the callback functions »beforeStart« and »afterFinish«, via one method call. I’ll post the code when I’ve got something like a milestone release, which seems to be end of July.

Yay-Ha!

I’ve ordered 5 new shirts at threadless.com again and I’m looking forward to wear em.

The Beginning

Tools Of The Trade

Fake Pandas Have More Fun

No More Bento

Terrible Wonderful Strange

It took us 3 weeks more than expected(stupid things like a missing index = up to 140 server-load) but since last week medizin-online.de it’s online. YAY! However! Tomorrow we’ll go to Sylt and to be more precise to »List«, relaxing for 3-4 Days at the beach and maybe doing a day trip to Rømø. I really love the northern part of Germany – because that’s where I’m from and »List« is “the northernmost municipality in Germany, located on the North Sea island of Sylt close to Denmark in the district of Nordfriesland in the state of Schleswig-Holstein (wiki)“.

On the way back we’ll visit my family, especially my Grandma, Mom and Cousin, because I haven’t seen them for quite a while. I guess 2 Years for now and plus that: my Dear haven’t seen Hamburg yet! Haha, that’s a lot of things to do in just 5 Days. 3 Cities and approximately 1.000 km by car – but the beach will excuse everything