Users Web Password Practices Pitiful

Go change that password now!!!

I know I wont.

Just read this off CNN’s news. A county in New York has passed a law which requires all public wireless networks in the county to have atleast a basic level of security. To quote the news item:

“The law requires each business to install a firewall or change the default SSID, the name that identifies a wireless network, if the personal information stored has not already been encrypted. Penalties would range from a warning on first offense to a $500 fine on third offense.”

Even though the step is in the right direction, a lot more needs to be done in this regard. Just ensuring different SSIDs and encryption would not be enough. It wont keep the real hackers away, but it just might scare away the novices. In any case, it wont provide any real identity theft protection. More technical and stringent laws need to be framed for wireless technologies to become reliable and safe. And even before that, the technologies themselves need to support better security features. They are still in the nascent stages and thats when they are most vulnerable.

I just hope Indians (who are known to have very shrewd minds) can come up with something better and technically feasible before towns like Pune go completely wireless without even thinking twice about safety measures. May God help the wireless surfer!!!

DB2 has been IBM’s baby for a long time. Infact, it was one of the very first DBMSs around. But till today it does not support a very fundamental feature provided by both Oracle and MS SQL Server. That is the ability to use the %TYPE and %ROWTYPE suffixes to define the types of variables being used in cursors, triggers, procedures, functions and other database objects. Know more about %TYPE and %ROWTYPE.

If you really understand the power of these suffixes, I am sure you will also realize what a loser DB2 works out to be in this respect. Especially since most database driven applications today are written in such a generic manner that even changing the data types of base columns does not affect them.

The only saving grace for DB2 is that is supports UDTs or User Defined Types. By declaring both the base columns and the variables to be of the same user defined type, you can achieve the same functionality. But thats just lesser bang for a bigger buck. I am migrating some stored procedures from Oracle to DB2 nowadays. And everytime I encounter a %TYPE suffix, I just go to the base table and check the type of the base column, and hard code that type. This may sound reasonable given the pressures we work under, but that does not mean it is correct.

Oh! One thing I forgot to mention. DB2 of course supports procedures written in languages external to the DBMSs itself. For example, you could code an entire stored procedure or a function in C or Java, and call it as a DB2 stored procedure or function from any application that uses the database. Cool…isnt it?? In fact, DB2 even accepts functions and procedures written in languages as ancient as COBOL. That is why DB2 is still quite widely used on Mainframes. I still have to get to higher levels of geekiness to tell you more about that.

Been trying to migrate this blog to a more rememberable address which of course is blog.dhruv19280.com. As it seems I encountered some problems while doing this. But now things are back to normal.

As some of you might have noticed(or did anyone??) links to previous posts on this blog were not working properly for almost 2-3 days. Just got that corrected. Things should be working great now. If you still have problems reading previous posts, please email me at dhruv19280@yahoo.com. Thanks.

I live in Bangalore right? Right. And what is Bangalore famous for? The IT Industry right? Of Course? And what is the IT Industry famous for? Coding right? Wrong!!!

The Indian IT Industry is famous not for its coding abilities. Instead it is infamous for it. So many coders writing millions and millions of lines of code. Who checks its quality and readability. The most distressing feature of coding is that its not just you who has to read it. Today your entire organisation wants to read it and tomorrow the whole world will.

Sure you can learn a language in 3 days. You can even become a master of any language in less than a month. But there is something about coding which no course or book or website teaches you. It must be readable just not by you but by anyone and everyone.

Coding is not just about theories and languages and concepts. It is an art in itself. And very few people are able to master it early on in their careers. Take my advice and follow these simple steps when you are coding. Be it C++ or Java or PHP or any language under the sun. These coding tips will help you understand what you are doing better and faster.

Click here to read this article on InformIT.

I know these things are “superficial” and “real coders never comment their code” and blah blah blah. But hey, its your code and you might need to read it just a year later. And instead of banging your head tomorrow over the logic, you just might spend an additional 10 minutes today to comment and format it. It makes everyone’s lives so much simpler.

If you have been using Yahoo Mail since I have, at some point of time or the other you must have wondered what the “f308″ or “f342″ etc stood for in the URL of the Mail server. Well Yahoo itself chose to disclose this information here.

Read this Tale of Two Countries on Value Research Online.
It is about the two global economic giants(??) of the world, namely the US and Japan, and their contrasting paths adopted to achieve economic success, as we know it today.

Everyone knows US is the biggest debtor in the world today, and Japan is the biggest creditor. But this article tells us how this happened ever since the start of the century. And it also tells us about the biggest mistake committed by the Japanese economy by committing to maintain their central reserves in US$ rather than gold.

Today’s situation is such that every country’s central bank holds reserves in US$s rather than in gold, which is even today, the most internationally recognised form of currency. So effectively, if the US$ suddenly drops and the US economy collapses, it will take down every economy with it!!! The same problem is faced by the Japanese economy on a much larger magnitude, even though they should have been the greatest holder of gold reserves, had they chosen to maintain their reserves in gold.

Thus, even though the US is on the brink of collapse, (it is almost bankrupt), every other country will strive to make sure that it does not go down, lest its own economy completely collapses as well. To quote the author “By any metric, the US should have been bankrupt, if not insolvent.” However, it is the very fact that the world’s central banks maintain their reserves in US$ which makes them support the US economy. Both Japan and China have done this recently. Or atleast that is my understanding of the subject.

At the same time the author also draws an interesting conclusion about Japan’s economy. He reminds us that it is work itself which gives us pleasure, not money which is considered the reward for work. So maybe the Japanese have risen above economics and have realised that it is not money or monetary reserves which make people happy, rather it is the hardwork that earns that money which makes one happy. To have this understanding at the national level is an achievement in itself.

What really bothers me here is that India is trying to grow as an economy by adopting the methodology of the US, which does not sound very promising or fair. I guess some amount of balance has to be achieved at the macro economic level and such balance has to be enforced by the finance ministry and the central bank together. One advice to all my loved and dear ones, dont over use credit cards. Make sure you can always pay back whatever you spend on them within the credit period.