To Whom It May Concern...

Leo had survived schema madness. He’d outwitted deployment dragons. But now, he faced his final boss: passwords. Every system had one. Every environment had a different one. Some expired every 30 days. Others required uppercase, lowercase, symbols, emojis, and the blood of a unicorn. Leo’s password manager looked like a cryptic novel written by a paranoid wizard. One morning, Leo tried to deploy a hotfix. The CI pipeline failed. The database login expired. The VPN needed re-authentication. The cloud dashboard prompted for MFA. And the coffee machine? It asked for a password too. Leo snapped. He stormed into the server room, eyes blazing. “I am DONE remembering secrets for machines that don’t even say thank you!” He grabbed a stack of sticky notes labeled “Prod_DB_P@ssw0rd!” and flung them like confetti. He yanked out a cable labeled “Auth Proxy” and shouted, “You authenticate this!” A junior dev peeked in and whispered, “Is this failover testing?” Leo turned, wild-eyed, holding a keybo...

Leo’s rebellion didn’t start with a raised fist—it began with a whisper to his IDE. Instead of creating yet another schema for a new module, he wrote a comment at the top of his SQL file: sql  -- This schema is imaginary. It exists only to satisfy expectations.  -- I reject your reality and substitute my own. He declared a new philosophy: Flat is beautiful.  All tables lived in a single schema called `Freedom`. Columns were wild and free—some had names in lowercase, some screamed in ALL CAPS. Foreign keys? Optional. Stored procedures? Banished.  Then came the real statement: a README.md titled _“The Schema Rebellion Manifesto”_. It read like a blend of data modeling principles and punk rock lyrics. Leo posted it to the company wiki, shared it in the #db-architecture channel, and added ASCII art of a flaming ER diagram. Naturally, chaos followed. Test environments imploded. CI pipelines wept. One DevOps engineer sent a slack message: “Is this performance art?”  B...

See honey... this explains it all! ...

I like how this guy did his test of Ubuntu 8.04. Personally, I use Ubuntu for a small server at home. But would not think of changing over any user PCs yet. http://contentconsumer.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/is-ubuntu-useable-enough-for-my-girlfriend/ I'd love Linux/Ubuntu developers to see this and take some of the points to heart.

These are beyond the old 'I stuck in the first 5 disks, and it still says 'Insert Disk'...' stories. These are IT things. From goofs to just wrong practices. Some reminders for IT people though. http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/04/13/77021_16FEusergoofs_1.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/05/07/19FEuserintro_1.html

I was thinking about some of the marketing campaigns Microsoft has been using lately and what they might mean. Let's examine them. MS says: Where do you want to go today? Means:   More than likely you will not be able to accomplish anything in (the) Office today. Why not go for a drive? MS says: Do more with less. Means:   We can't provide those features you want. Try to do more without them. MS says: It's better live. Means:   This online communication thing isn't working out. Why not meet people face to face? Those are just my thoughts.

I should know better. We had a section of code where a new 'document' was created in our web app. A document in this app consists of data in various tables. So, what happens is, we start adding rows to the tables in the dataset, but before we add any rows, we turn off EnforceConstraints for the dataset. Later, right before we Save the dataset, we run a method, IsValid, which turns EnforceConstraints back on, and checks the dataset's HasErrors. So, our flow works like this: CreateButton.Click   EnforceConstraints = False   ... add a bunch of rows, which may at times have Nulls where their shouldn't be.   ... Nulls get filled in.   IsValid     EnforceConstraints = True     ... If HasErrors, throw exception.   Save End Method Now, what would happen if you put IsValid in the Watch window? That's right, EnforceConstraints would be set to True very frequently. I'll go bandage the hole in my foot now.

I just received a free book, 'Small Business Specialist Primer', by SMB Nation Press. It's quite a large book, I wondered 'Why get such a big book for free?' Here's a few things I note: No page numbers. You got the 12-2, 10-9, 8-2 thing going on. In the section, About the Authors, one author, a lady, has this line in her bio: Since she moved to Florida, she hasn't been to the beach. I love the beach. I don't want to do anything that would prevent me from enjoying the beach from time-to-time. Does that mean that if I read this book, I won't get to the beach? Perhaps my view will change as I read it.

Time is money. Time is of the essence. No time to kill. Every second wasted is bad. That's the long and short of it. So, let me fill you in on how even a big(ger) development company can lost this valuable resource. Hyper IT guys who think they know it all If you can rush, and never miss a step, then rush. If you're gonna rush and miss key things, don't rush. Our IT department has a procedure in place for rolling out new laptops. Backup the old one, and (within a day or two) give you the new one with all the software the developer has been using and will need. No settings are copied, but the software is supposed to be up and running. Here's how my laptop upgrade went: Backup my laptop - IT guy asks me when I'm working till. I tell him 5PM. I'll be by at 4:30 to backup your laptop. My thoughts are, he's gonna back it up and give it to me by 5? That's pretty good. So, 4:20 he comes and takes my laptop. At 4:50 PM I ask him how long it'll be. "I ho...

This is a simple little tool, but it shows me what I want to know. http://www.softperfect.com/products/networkscanner/

I live in an area where a zip code could be 30-45 minutes across. And I work in a different zip code than where I live. So let me lay out my problem. Let's say I live in the western side of 'Town A'. Further west, we have 'Town B' where I work in the Eastern half. If I do a search on my insurance company's site for doctors in the zip code of Town A, they may send me to a doctor in the eastern side of the town (remember, in this example, I live in the western side of the town.) So, I drive 30-45 minutes WEST in the morning, to go to work. Then I have a doctors appointment, and have to drive maybe 1.5 hours (passing my house) to go to the doctor. That's just silly. So, let's say I punch in the zip code for 'Town B', where I work, and they send me to the Western side of town. Here I'm working in the eastern side, so again it's all the way accross town. A 1.5 hour round trip. Could I put in 2 addresses, and let our slaves of a computer figure...

Ads!!! They're everywhere. Some of them aren't even that nice. Here's a way to get rid of ads... it's not everything, but it helps. http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/ Basically, it gives you a list of ad servers. You copy and paste the list into your hosts file, and whenever a page tells you to look at an ad from one of those servers, your browser looks for it on your own hard drive. But since it's not there, nothing comes up where the ad would be. It's a little tricky, but if you have a geek handy, ask 'em to do it. (Note: I've found a few ads that still come up. I look at the source, and add their server to the list, and viola, it's gone.)

The RC5-72 challenge was discontinued in May. Therefore, there will be no reward for processing keys... I'll leave the link to my stats up there for now. In the mean time, I will look into other distributed computing systems. In fact, right now I'm trying Boinc.

Boy, I need a new PC for my job, what do you think? Actually, these are pictures from a site where a guy photographs old work-sites: http://www.hebig.org/photos/

Some of you may have visited my other sites: http://www.greatwhitedata.com/ (My business site) http://mark.phillk.net/ (My personal site) http://mark.phillk.net/funnyKeys.php (My joke collection) Well, I'm always looking to improve the site. I also will host for other people. Of course, that doesn't always come free. But I'm willing to work it out with you good people... Any one of these items would be a nice donation: HITACHI Deskstar 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive Western Digital Caviar 750GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive Acer AL1917WAbd Black 19" 5ms DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor 700:1 Built in Speakers Of course, if you want to buy these for yourselves... I guess I won't mind too much, they are good deals!

I may have mentioned this blog before, but I'll state it again. http://www.codinghorror.com/ I just read this post . It reminds us to allow ourselves to take a fresh look at things, putting asside our biases. I also liked the article he wrote, Will My Software Project Fail? This site has helped me to round out my viewpoint and perspective on coding, and reminds me to look up from time to time, and remember what we're coding for.

This morning my laptop took it's sweet time booting up. On the screen it said, 'Applying Your Personal Settings' So, what?! Are you saying it's my fault this OS is so slow?!

I feel that every good developer should have a basic understanding of how a computer works on the inside, and if possible, a little time playing with Assembly. (Much like a Jedi must build his own light-saber!) Here's an article to help you start with your sweet Developer Rig. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000918.html

I wiped and re-installed my system drive this past week. It's nice to have a fresh install. I've already had issues. Actually, it was a minor thing. LogMeIn. When I installed this software, and rebooted, I could see the Windows logo as it started, then my monitor stopped getting a feed. I could hear my startup music, so I knew it was just a driver issue. Reinstalling the drivers (after rebooting into VGA mode, YUCK!) seemed to fix it. But now I'm back up and running. And Patched! As you can see from this post from Coding Horror , (one of my new favorite blogs!) it's very easy to kill an unpatched system. What is my goal!?! Ubiquitous media! I want music, videos (recorded via DVR/PVR), and pictures that I can access from anywhere. That means, I want my PDA to plug into my system at home, and pull a random selection of music from my music server to take with me when I go. I don't want to have to think about selecting this one, or that one, but not that one, cause I...

I've been trying this today: www.logmein.com I can remotely connect to the PC I have set up as a client, and do whatever I need. Currently I'm connecting to my big Windows XP system at home. But on that system, I have a VNC connection to my linux box. So I'm able to configure things on my site, or just do some work on my server. Even going 3 PCs deep (Local to client, client VNC'd to linux) was adequate to work with. Don't expect to watch video played on the client, but that's a given. The only problem I've seen so far, and I'm not sure if it's a problem or user error, is remotely rebooting my PC. I told my client to reboot for some windows updates that had run, and now I can't get in. But other than that, it was quick and worked well.