Everybody knows about web forms, right? Make a <form>, a few <input type=”text”> elements, maybe an <input type=”password”>, finish it off with an <input type=”submit”> button, and you’re done.
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Tags: web
“If you board the wrong train, its no use running along the corridor in the other direction,” said famed World War II German resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We in IT boarded the wrong train a long time ago. Its the “standard model” of information technology organizations — the familiar litany that says CIOs should run IT as a business [1], meeting the requirements of its internal customers. This refrain has been endorsed by our holy trinity, too: analyst firms, most consultancies, and ITIL.
via Run IT as a business — why thats a train wreck waiting to happen.
But let’s stop talking about “backups.” Doing a backup is too low a bar. Any experienced system administrator will tell you that they have a great backup plan, the trouble comes when you have to restore.
via Let’s stop talking about “backups” – Joel on Software:
Twice in October on the home machine – dead internal drive.
The 2 major websites moved off of our servers, but before they moved I did a test restore every 4-5 months.
Having returned from an archeological dig into the dark history of Mac OS X, I’ve unearthed a feature that could change the way you interact with your applications, enabling you to focus on one or two more easily than in the past.
via TidBITS Macs & Mac OS X: Revealing Mac OS X’s Hidden Single-Application Mode.
In a story just dripping with irony, e-mail security vendor, McAfee, has accidentally sent the contact details of more than 1400 conference attendees in a spreadsheet attached to a thank you message.
Tags: security
SSD performance and endurance are related. Generally, the poorer the performance of a drive, the shorter the lifespan. That’s because the management overhead of an SSD is related to how many writes and erases to the drive take place. The more write/erase cycles there are, the shorter the drive’s lifespan. Consumer-grade multi-level cell (MLC) memory can sustain from 2,000 to 10,000 write cycles. Enterprise-class single-level cell (SLC) memory can last through 10 times the number of write cycles of an MLC-based drive.
via Analysis: SSD performance — is a slowdown inevitable?.
Interesting discussion about SSD. Maybe we should burn-in the drive with at least one full write cycle?
Tags: hardware, performance
Suppose for instance you want to prevent attackers injecting shell command execution through your scripts. You could use this query in order to block anything containing /bin/:
CodeSOD: Well, at least it compiles…:
Working on a team that is uplifting a legacy application into a newer technology, Neil K. is responsible for ensuring that the new application is working the same as the one being replaced.
While looking into the new functionality, he found the following tucked away in a stored procedure (of which this is only an exerpt). For his sake, I hope for two things. First, I hope he’s only responsible for testing it and doesn’t have to maintain this hornet’s nest of code. Second, in the name of all that is good in this world, I hope that the whomever is responsible for this mess contained their version of insanity to only one stored procedure.
Enjoying a successful career as an IT professional has always presented a challenge, in that youre expected to be a jack of all trades, master of none. Or maybe thats a master of all trades, jack of none. In any case, and however you approach it, you need a bewildering and ever-expanding array of cross-functional competencies to get and stay on top of your game. One thing in particular should strike you about the following list: Most of the competencies lie beyond the traditional IT skill set and could be equally well applied to other functional disciplines. Theres less difference between us and “them” than is usually thought.
Tags: IT
In the “Time and Time Again: Scenario 1″ installment, and continuing through Transaction 2, 3, and 4, we developed Scenario 1. This is the “plain vanilla” scenario for asserted versioning. It consists of an original insert, two original updates and an original delete. In our experience, 75 percent or more of the transactions against asserted version tables are covered by Scenario 1. This is because the Scenario 1 transactions accept default values for all three bi-temporal dates that may be specified on original transactions. These dates are, in the positional sequence in which they appear on those transactions – the effective begin date, effective end date and the assertion begin date. The default value for the begin dates is the date the transaction is applied. The default value for the effective end date is 12/31/9999.
Tags: temporal