Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: database

  • Unsticky Likes

    Of late, I have been featured in some posts that generate many comments on Facebook. Naturally, I like these comments. So when a new one comes in and old ones I thought I previously liked no longer show them being liked, it was noticeable. Over the past few months, I have seen the behavior over and…

  • Overuse of SSNs

    The overuse of the Social Security Number bothers me. Healthcare providers use the SSN. They all want it, so they all have it in their files and databases. Given the push to move records to electronic form, they all have it recorded in databases. This makes them tempting targets for fraudsters. They have to use…

  • DOJ, Dreamhost, and DisruptJ20

    The government has no interest in records relating to the 1.3 million IP addresses that are mentioned in DreamHost’s numerous press releases and opposition brief. Basically, the Department of Justice served Dreamhost this warrant asking for the code backing the web site, the HTTP request and error logs, logs about backend connections to upload files to the…

  • Universities and SIS “Innovation”

    Several years ago, while I worked at a medium-sized university, there was a very similar incident like what happened in Student Is Sanctioned for Creating Class-Registration Web Site. A student wanted into a full class. So he built an application to routinely check for whether a seat was available in the Student Information System. The database…

  • Want to Work With Me?

    There are a bunch of new positions which were just posted. We need analysts, database administrators, and an operating system / hardware specialist. The list: Database Administrator SQL Server for us Desire2Learn, an eLearning system. We have other projects needing Oracle DBAs too. System Support Specialist Linux, Windows, VMWare. Includes Desires2Learn but also other projects. Business Systems…

  • To Blog or to Share?

    This blog has suffered from my sharing on social media. Where I used to post every day, even just one liners to go check out a web site or a story, that activity is now all on Facebook, Twitter, Google+. HackEducation does a weekly post of news. I am thinking about doing something similar for…

  • Why Ten

    The question of why we run ten clusters came up recently. Off the top of my head, the answer was okay. Here is my more thoughtful response. Whenever I have been in a conversation with a BEA (more recently Oracle) person on Weblogic, the number of nodes we run has invariably surprised them. Major banks…

  • Report Just Usernames

    Occasionally I’ll want to see the usernames who use something like a user-agent property or were doing something during a range of time. Rather than report all the log lines and pick them out of the data, I use this which Blackboard (or maybe BEA added). Note  we’ve added user-agents to the webserver.log. The double…

  • I Write Like Me

    Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers. Not trusting a single sample, I tested fifteen writing samples including stories and blog posts (excluding those with block quotes). The Cory Doctorow result was the…