Just a ‘heads up’ about a commenter named ‘Jamie Holts’ who has been leaving a lot of innocuous comments on political blogs over the last 24 hours - ‘Jamie’ is a spammer. His ‘blog’ is bestnewspolitics.com, which appears to consist solely of content stolen from ezinearticles.com; his ‘blogroll’ consists of links to bulk emailing software, keylogger software, splog generation software, gambling sites and get-rich-quick sites.
‘Jamie’ is building up his site’s Google juice by leaving innocuous, link-free comments that will easily get past most comment spam traps; if you use a spam-fighting service like Askimet and get a comment from someone linking back to bestnewspolitics.com, please flag the comment as spam before you delete it.
Jamie Holts is a spammer; bestnewspolitics.com is a splog. Pass it on… :-)
Posted by protected static as asshattery, blogging, spam at 5:19 PM PDT
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So there I am, driving down the road, munching on a total impulse purchase of Japanese rice crackers, minding my own business, when all of a sudden an ill-chosen handful of crackers teaches me a most valuable lesson: when those wacky Japanese a.) make rice crackers that look like grilled squid and b.) put a big old cartoony fish on the package, guess what? They aren’t being cute - the crackers really are made with fish.
Puts a whole new spin on goldfish crackers, doesn’t it?
(If I’d been paying closer attention, I would have noticed that the package not only bore the mark of the Grinning-Madly-Because-I-Make-Gaijin-Vomit fish, but a shrimp and a squid as well. The shrimp looked about as realistic as anything printed on Japanese snack food packaging can look; the squid, on the other hand, had Hello Kitty eyes and was waving a fan. I’m pretty sure that the Sanrio squid would have been all the Hell No! warning I needed had I noticed it in time. Oh well. Live and learn.)
Posted by protected static as random at 11:19 PM PDT
2 Comments »
Upon waking The Boy this morning, I was greeted by an unnaturally spiky cockscomb of Boy hair. This was no mere bed-head; no, this spoke of deeper horrors…
I had no idea when this child last bathed.
Posted by protected static as random at 9:06 AM PDT
6 Comments »
In the old spam filter this morning, an email with the following subject:
We are a dodgy drugstore
Hmmm… I bet you are:
Web definitions for dodgy
chancy: of uncertain outcome; especially fraught with risk
Posted by protected static as spam at 8:10 AM PDT
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Here’s a hot tip, boys and girls: never try to normalize your data using text fields as your primary identifier. The computer won’t know that “Some Company, Inc” is supposed to be the same as “Some Company, Inc.” or “Some Company Inc”; likewise, “Department” is not the same as “Dept.” is not the same as “Dept” even if they represent the same entity - and the programmer will hate you when they also have to investigate manually find out that “SomeOtherCompany 2000, Inc” is different from “SomeOtherCompany2000, Inc”.
No, really. They will. Upper-case-H-A-T-E, hate you.
Posted by protected static as programming at 8:48 PM PDT
9 Comments »
mathres.net, also know as Math Resources, is a crappy little splog. You see, they scraped my content about The Boy’s math homework because, clearly, I’m providing some deep insight into math or homework or math homework. Isn’t it obvious that my account of eye-rolling is a highly-sought math resource? But wait! you say. What if they’re a (math) legitimate aggregator? You know, it’s (math) automated so maybe it’s (mathematics) overly inclusive?
Alas, this would be (math) wrong. See, they attributed my piece to ‘unknown’ - but the (math) spider/scraper/whatever-they’re-using stored my pseudonym to tack on to someone else’s stolen content.
So no, they just like to scrape the internet for keywords like math. Math. Math. Would I piss in their Google Juice by retyping keywords or phrases like math or mathematics or math test or math homework? Would I want them to steal this (math homework) content? I certainly (math) might.
As for the ‘curiously ineffective’ label? Their ad fraud has already been caught by Google. Pathetic little splog fraudsters… but I repeat myself.
Posted by protected static as asshattery, blogging, spam at 8:57 AM PDT
2 Comments »
So The Boy’s math classes are covering multiplication these days - it looks like right now they’re doing up to multiples of 12 (Algorithmic math! Finally!). We’ve been trying to convey the importance of memorizing basic math facts, and I’m glad he’s starting to get that, both conceptually and from the instruction.
At any rate, tonight’s homework involved flashcards covering the multiples of 2, 3 & 4 from 1 to 12. We started with the 2s, and he started ripping through them: 2, 4, 6, 8…
[sound of needle across record]
Wait a minute. No, no, no, no… This won’t do; it’s way too fast. He’s memorized the sequence.
So I shuffled the cards…
I got an eye-roll.
Me: “So… Am I wrong? You’ve got these memorized, right?”
The Boy: (sigh) “Yes.”
Me: “Then you won’t have any problem if I move around the order, right?”
The Boy: (sigh-eye-roll-double-Immelman combination - even the Romanian judge is impressed.) “No.”
Me: “Good - that’s what I thought. What’s 2 x 9?”
The Boy: (sigh) “18″
Me: “Good.”
And so it went… It took a lot longer this way, but I smelled a growth opportunity!
And much growth was enjoyed by all.
Posted by protected static as random at 10:50 PM PDT
2 Comments »
So y’all might have read something ’bout the Dalai Lama being in Seattle… I’ve got some thoughts about him and Tibet, but haven’t really had time to collect them into anything coherent, so you’ll just have to wait.
I did decide however. that tempting it might be, “Sweet Jesus Tap-dancing Christ, do I hate the Dalai Lama” was right out as a title…
Posted by protected static as random at 11:04 PM PDT
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Lest you think I’ve drunk deeply of the Open Source Kool-Aid, let me please politely but forcefully disabuse you of that notion… Let’s talk about MySQL.
So… MySql? This darling of the Open Source scene, recently purchased by Sun because they were losing out on that whole Web 2.0 thang and needed to acquire some piece of that hot, sweet, sweaty LAMP stack action by hook or crook? Yeah, that MySQL.
It sucks. And I don’t mean a little, I mean lots. And by lots I mean more suck than James Dyson will need in hundreds of lifetimes. I mean suck on the order of Harley-starting, golf-balls-through-garden-hoses, black-hole-consuming-galaxies suck.
Did I mention MySQL sucks?
As part of the project referenced in my last post, I need to match data in a MySQL database to data in an Excel spreadsheet to data in a Microsoft SQL Server database, then ported back to a MySQL database. The client wants the code that will do all this to be SQL, not a compiled language, which means that most of this will have to be written in MS SQL Server since that’s the only platform that can really read all three data formats. So what’s the problem with MySQL?
Where to begin…
Never mind MySQL’s atypical SQL dialect - that’s pretty much par for the course when it comes to SQL databases, and there are regular expression libraries and code bases out there that will convert 90% of your Microsoft-specific SQL code to MySQL-specific code. Forget MySQL’s use of the back-tick as a way of identifying table and field names - sure, quotes or square brackets would be far more standard, but maybe (maybe) the back-tick is in a reasonable position on a Swedish keyboard instead of being in the carpal-tunnel-inducing location it is on standard English keyboards. Because, you know, you wouldn’t want something to identify something as esoteric as table and field names to be in an inconvenient location, right? And we definitely won’t talk about how MySQL barely deserves to be classified as an RDBMS (Relational DataBase Management System) since it, well, doesn’t entirely support the R part of that acronym. Hey, referential integrity is overrated, right?
No, these idiosyncrasies pale beside the horror of actually trying to use MySQL’s tools. Oh, the command line tools work well enough, as does MySQL QueryBrowser and MySQL Administrator (as long as you don’t expect to work with anything other than MySQL data sources). No, let’s talk about their offerings intended to make MySQL a viable alternative for commercial solutions.
So, my struggles with Visio and MS SQL Server? Laughably minor when compared to how crappily MySQL’s Workbench works. Want to reverse-engineer a MySQL database with their visual designer? You can’t - at least, not with the ‘community’ version, only the commercial version. One problem with this - they haven’t released the commercial version yet, and the community version’s been available for a while now.
Want to migrate a MS SQL Server database to MySQL using MySQL’s Migration Toolkit? Good luck connecting to your MS SQL database. From what I can tell on MySQL’s forums, I am far from alone in facing this problem, and… there’s no clear fix for it. There are no checklists detailing what the configuration needs to be for either the source or destination server - you’re on your own, there. Oh, and don’t bother with the video ‘tutorial’ for migrating MS SQL to MySQL - besides being utterly simplistic, it shows the user doing something you can’t apparently do: save a connection to a MS SQL database for MySQL to reuse. Sure, you can edit the XML file that stores saved user connections - good luck finding documentation on what the values need to be for the connection elements to actually work properly.
So maybe you can port MS SQL structures and data by running MS SQL queries against a linked MySQL database. After all, as far as I can tell, every other database driver that lets you link MS SQL to other databases will let you do this - and you can do it in reverse, copying MySQL to MS SQL. Ha. Nope. Apparently, I don’t have privileges to do anything other than view data from the linked server - even though I’m connecting to it using the MySQL root login. “CREATE TABLE foo (bar INT NOT NULL, baz varchar(255) NULL);”? Forget it. Not gonna happen. Not using any of the tools provided by MySQL anyway.
Computers. Programmers. Software. Hmph.
Posted by protected static as asshattery, programming at 12:28 PM PDT
5 Comments »
Obviously, it’s been ages since I’ve had to do any formal database design work. My benchmark? I was totally unaware that you could no longer reverse-engineer or modify databases using Visio. Hasn’t been possible since, oh, something like Visio 2003.
(Aside: you can still use older versions of Visio to modify SQL Server 2005 databases, just expect a ton of (apparently harmless) error messages if you use the built-in SQL Server drivers. I’m led to believe that the ODBC driver will do it just fine, too. Thank whomever for legacy support for 16-bit technology, eh? Good luck finding a legal obsolete version of Visio, though.)
So I installed a 90-day trial of Visual Studio 2008 Team System. ‘Coz, you know, it includes the latest MS SQL development tools.
This entails…
…a 4GB download.
So I can export a database diagram I’ve already created to a format that, oh, I CAN SHARE WITH A CLIENT!
And, as it turns out, you still can’t actually export the database diagram in any form than a SQL script. Fortunately, we had an ancient version of Visio lying around the office. But damn…
(And don’t get me started on Apple, Sun, or the vast preponderance of Open Source stuff, either. Right now, I hate ‘em all. Computers. Software. Programmers. Hmph.)
Posted by protected static as asshattery, programming at 7:14 PM PDT
3 Comments »