Databases & Life

Most (all?)

If you want to send email then it’s best to do it over the email server that is the authoritative one for the sender email address.

At one company I worked at, we had “customer care agents” who would answer requests from users, e.g. emails and telephone calls.

One of the main project my company works on is analyzing mobile phone bills for companies – a company gives out mobile phones to all its employees, then they get a huge bill every month, often delivered by post and printed on (perhaps literally) many reams

A file recently turned up from an external partner.

Today I wanted to use some software I have on CD on a new computers.

I have just, out of necessity for a customer project, written code which takes user-entered plain text, and creates out of that HTML with URLs marked up as clickable links.

/* So that /newest section exists, so that list template will be used for /newest URL */

How would you diagnose the following bug?

I was inspired by Paul Graham’s essay How to Lose Time and Money.

I was told recently there is a certain inflection point a company reaches when it gets to about two employees.

This is a report of business activities in 2013.

From a certain version of the “jetty” package in Debian Linux, if the web application didn’t start up (servlet init() throws an Exception), this error wasn’t logged anywhere.

In Java, I like to wrap ID values in objects, rather than just passing them around the code as their native "int" or "long" or "String" values.

I am writing this blog post in October 2012; this will get published automatically in one year, like government secrets published 50 years after the event.

The following two viewpoints are not consistent: “Come and work at our company.

At Uboot, there was the suggestion that we should change database technology.

My colleague suggested that systems should compare passwords in a case-sensitive manner.

There are (at least) the following options that a project manager must make when organizing bug fixes to software: Should the original author of the code in question fix the bug?

I was always in two minds about using constants for table and column names when writing SELECT queries.

That depends on if the enum values provide methods which differ from one another.

While one session is doing a “delete then insert”, and another session doing an “update”, the update waits until the “delete then insert” is finished.

A friend said this to me today: it’s really odd, why do fans of dynamic languages often have this cult-like approach?

If you want to represent characters, you want to represent any possible sequence of characters.

Talking to someone who doesn’t work in IT, and who isn’t a native English speaker; She was talking about various people in software development, and referred to them doing “programmizing” (as opposed to “programming”).

Associative arrays.

Naming a class AbstractThing violates the Liskov Substitution Principle, and causes client code to read wrong.

I like things happening in parallel but which don't require mental effort thinking about synchronization and race conditions etc; i.e. where one can write code that basically looks like sequential code but is actually parallel.

The following [question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4649423/should-switch-statements-always-contain-a-default-clause/4649518#4649518" target="_blank">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4649423/should-switch-statements-always-contain-a-default-clau…

My mate has given me a laptop (which in itself is a strange occurrence, but that’s not the subject of this blog entry).

One of my customers (mobilreport) is used by accountancy departments in large companies in Austria and Germany to analyze their employees’ mobile phone usage.

Can one have two tables with constraints of the same name?

The following question was asked on Stack Overflow: I have heard some strong developers say that “inline SQL in and of itself is not evil”.

We developed a cool algorithm to add informational trailer texts to SMS at Uboot.

I've heard the phrase "Let's rewrite this in Java!"

One often needs to send users email notifications.

If you store your users' ages in the database, in one year's time their ages will be wrong.

This year has been an amazing year professionally.

At Offer-Ready, we allow companies to find their optimal mobile phone tariff.

After about 6 months of work we took the new design for mobilreport online a week or two ago.

This was a cool project I implemented Summer 2011, I can now talk about it, now that my customer has taken it online.

A website I'm working on allows the user to choose passwords, and also can suggest passwords for the user.

In Java, there is the great SVNKit which I have used for many a customer project successfully.

Here’s a interview I gave about the work I do: https://www.whatchado.com/en/stories/adrian-smith

A friend recently asserted that he doesn't bother with security updates on his computer and for his software.

A friend of mine posed the following question recently: Do you have an opinion over using myisam or innodb for a read heavy MySQL DB?

Bought a new computer, decided to try out Ubuntu Linux.

I was slightly surprised today to check XML containing the following for validity, <!

One feature I miss from my Perl days, which I’ve never seen in another language.