Hello Planet MySQL!

My blog been added several days ago to the Planet MySQL feed, and am now one step closer to world domination.

I'll assume that most people who see this entry at their feed readers would be unfamiliar with this blog, so I should be including an introduction here. Instead, I invite you to take a look at the home page and look at some olds posts of mine that might interest you. Not everything is about MySQL, and the Planet MySQL feed takes only the ones that I've labeled as such.

The following posts are the top search engine keywords that this blog gets, so you might want to start there:

• MySQL T-SQL CASE Statement: Bad Language Design
• MySQL Development Tools - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
• Why not to learn MySQL?

I wonder how many comments of this sort I'll get?

Recommendation: ImgBurn

I'd like to recommend a fine piece of software which I found to be the best program to use for casual CD/DVD burning. I use it exclusively for more than a year. It's fast, simple and functional. Moreover, it's completely free.

• ImgBurn

So now that you know, please stop using that cracked version of Nero. It's not as good as ImgBurn anyway.

Assumption is The Mother of All Fuckups - Firefox Password Manager

Consider the following:

1. Are you using Firefox?
2. Do you use the "Save Password" feature for web forms?

If you answered yes to these questions, you are at risk. Not the kind of "cool buffer overflow" risk, that I personally ignore most of the time, but the kind of "anyone knowing this sitting near my computer knows all my passwords in 2 seconds" risk.
You are probably assuming, that some geek security freak at the Mozilla Foundation made sure your passwords are safe, encrypted one-way into a unbreakable AES/MD5/SomeHashBuzzTLA.
Well, they are not.

Follow these steps:

Open the preferences screen in Firefox (this is the OS X version, but the Windows version is just the same)

Click on "Show Passwords"
We're not there yet. Click "Show Passwords" one more time (it can't be that easy), and get the following:


I blurred the images for obvious reasons, but you can guess how it looks - the entire site/username/password list is there in clear text.

I know this "feature" is well documented if you bother to look it up, and it can be somewhat mitigated if you place a master-password over the configuration. Still, I find it unacceptable for a browser to behave this way by default.

My recommendation - assume passwords saved in Firefox are compromised to begin with, and only save passwords for sites where you don't care if someone knows the password.

Opaqueness and the Illusion of Greatness

When you don't know how things work, you image them as how you would want them to be, or according to an impression based on a random fact or advertising.

There is this old joke that goes like this:

When I was a child, I slept well since I knew someone was guarding me.
When I was in the army, I didn't sleep since I was the one guarding.
When I left the army, I didn't sleep since I knew who was guarding me.

If you served in the Army, I presume that you already know the joke and/or can relate to how sad it really is.

"What has this got to do with anything?" you wonder? When using open-source vs. closed source software, this is sometimes the case.

I got it when I was reading Jay Pipe's book "Pro MySQL". He mentions there that although the manual describes different parts of MySQL as different and encapsulated components, working beautifully together - in reality, it's all just a big pile of code, tightly coupled together and not always as modular as you'd like to imagine. He also tells of parts of the engine that were apparently written by different teams with different standards, where the code just looks and feels very different from the rest of the system. I didn't dig into the source code myself to this depth, but I believe him.
If you have worked before on the source code of an open source project, this is probably not a surprise for you - but for me it was a sort of a moment of re-enlightenment. The ones writing the database are people just like you and me, and they even write bad code sometimes. Only in MySQL, it's bad code anyone curious enough can see.

I wasn't used to this type of thinking for years, having grown up in the Microsoft closed-source ecosystem. I had no one from SQL Server come to me and tell me that they did some stupid mistakes here and there, and that the code is a mess. Yeah, there were Service Packs change logs with lists of fixed bugs, but I doubt someone in Microsoft would release a statement in the change log that tells how the sort sometimes didn't work (famous bug in InnoDB a while back).
The solid UI, the great documentation and the overall behavior of the database does its best to hide the implementation details from you. Since it was solid on the outside, I assumed it was solid on the inside. It was sort of anti-FUD. I wanted to believe it's as elegant inside as it seems outside.

I said "re-enlightenment" before, since this kind of realization actually did happen to me before, but I didn't let it sink in completely.
I've been working a lot with SQL Server in the past, and if you are familiar with it as well, you know that you can access the source code of all the internal system stored procedures. There are a lot of them, and usually you don't need to dig into their code, unless you're using some cool undocumented trick or trying to find out if something is a bug. I can tell you one thing - much of the code in those stored procedures is extremely ugly. No proper casing/indentation, hard-coded magic numbers everywhere... Maybe later I'll dig up one of these gems to show to the world. I mean yeah, it works, but still... Yuck.

Thing is, this anti-FUD was so strong, I didn't want to believe that it's that ugly on the inside - so I left my "beliefs" then as they were.

Conclusions:

1. Don't stay in the army.
2. Bad programmers can write both open and closed source programs.

iTunes on the Mac and Hebrew

Hebrew, It works, bitches. Apparently all the rumors were just another case of FUD.

I'm of recent the owner of a brand new Mac mini 2.0 Ghz, but more on that later. The thing is, I've decided to give a chance to the iLife and iTunes other iBuzzword products.
The moment I imported my library to iTunes, I've noticed it cannot read my Hebrew song names from the ID3 tags. I assumed that according to what I've heard before, the Hebrew support on the Mac is not so good, so I left it as it was. Later on, when browsing through the library, I saw some of the names in Hebrew. Hmm. *Ding*.

Apparently, iTunes works great with Unicode, but not with the Windows Hebrew Codepage, also known as CP1255. It even provides a built-in feature to convert from ASCII in the ISO-Latin1 codepage (and only it), to Unicode. After wandering around the Interweb, I found a nice little utility (aptly named "Unicode Rewriter") that does just that - almost automagically. Choose a source codepage, and you're done. In 15 minutes, I converted all of the songs to Unicode with the click of many buttons and a bit of dragging & dropping. It might even work in Windows, I didn't try it.

Now all I'm left with is the endless task of importing and organizing all of my music.

The hidden England, or 11 things I didn't know about England

I've returned from England after a short week-long vacation there this Monday. I really don't intend going into details on the banal things, but rather the small or big things which caught me by surprise.

1. Finding an Englishman in New York is probably easier than finding one in London. The city just looks like one big tourist attraction, or an airport. I was eagerly expecting to hear a bit of that English accent since I got off the plane, and the first time I did was in the reception of the Ritz Hotel near Green Park on the third day. Uncanny. 
2. Everything is in one language. This probably holds for any other English speaking nation, but it is interesting to notice there are no two-language signs as in other countries. Even the French have signs in English. The English on the other hand, do not have signs in French.
   Cultural superiority?
3. There are a TON of warning signs everywhere, about everything, and mostly about the Closed Circuit Television - or CCTV as they call it for short. The signs say you're caught on camera at least 300 times a day. 
   Safeguard your wallet. Don't go out the bar with a drink. Don't steal or you'll be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. You're being watched by a closed circuit camera. Don't put feet on the seat next to you. Report the police if you anyone vandalizing anything. Don't wear a helmet here. Be good to others. Mind the damn gap. We're watching! 
   The amazing thing is that the signs are very hypocrite, and try to twist the logic as if they are doing everything "for your safety". For your safety, please  don't steal. For your safety and comfort, we created a queue to help you wait. For your safety, we're recording everything you do. You should thank us. 
   The signs are phrased a bit differently, but this is what the meaning is. I didn't take pictures of the best signs we saw though, and only collected some at the last day there.
   And all this "security by fear" is not really working, as some English friends of ours said - "Well, yeah - it's very effective - you can now watch yourself getting mugged, or your car getting stolen and say - Hey,that's me on the TV!"
4. The loudest places are quiet. I was walking in the Underground during rush hour when it was completely packed with people. All I could hear was feet walking. No one was speaking at all. Maybe it's because there is no cell-phone reception underground?
   When we took a coach from London to Manchester, the bus was nearly silent. No one was speaking with anyone, except the occasional phone call here and there, and me and my friends chatting about rural England.
   The streets are not quiet at all - but I'm so used to public transport to be loud, that it was a pleasant surprise.
5. The "known" fact that there is no such thing as an English cuisine is a lie. There is great English food, it's just not that complex. I bet the French spread that rumor. I ate some amazing simple yet delicious food there. Lamb with Mashed potatoes and steam vegetables may be simple, but it's tasty nonetheless.
   And how about the other English dishes like black pudding? Yeah, it's simple - cooked congealed pig blood. So what? It's yummy. Kidney and Steak Pudding, Game (pigeon and other birds) Terrine... Great stuff. 
6. The grass is always greener on the other side. I've heard more than once that England is terrible, has bad public transportation, devoid of culture (??) and that the government is screwing the people. Hating where you are is something universal I guess.
7. Opel Astra + England = Vauxhall Astra. Weird. Although Vauxhall sounds so much cooler than Opel.
8. Britain is obsessive about fire safety. Apparently the big fire of London left this society scarred for life. In every building there are fire doors every some meters, and we experienced a fully fledged fire drill when we were at the hostel.
9. Getting money from privately operated ATMs is very expensive. The cost is a whopping 1.99 pounds! This is about $4. Just makes no sense. In Israel it's 4 NIS, which translates to roughly $1.
10. Everything has a license. The scaffolding on the streets is licensed. It's crazy.
11. Tabloids. They are wonderful. Disguised as real newspapers they very much consist of naked women, sports, and silly exaggerated stories. Fun to read, and professionally written - I still don't understand if it's for real, or it is just some huge inside joke.

Now, if I could only stop making lists of everything... Not very much of a story teller am I?

Hi-Tech Insulation From the Elements

Technology keeps surprising me.

I spend nearly 4 hours a day in trains/buses or riding my motorcycle to work and back. It goes like this:

1. Motorcycle or bus if raining, to the train station in Haifa.
2. Train or bus to Herzelia.
3. Walk to work for about 1.8km from the train station.

Read backwards for the return route.

Thinking like a DBA, I'm always looking for ways to optimize everything, commuting included. This time I decided I need a piece of clothing that fits my so called "lifestyle", with the following seemingly impossible combination of requirements:

• Good wind protection (while riding the motorcycle for 10 km a day to the train and back)
• Very Warm (not to freeze when riding the bike, or when walking to work and back)
• Very Light (the weather in Israel can change it's mood between morning and evening, so it can't be too heavy to carry in my laptop backpack)
• Water repellant (for those long walks by the Herzelian highways while it's raining)
• Stowable (so that it will fit in the backpack) - and that's a real word by the way.

So, after bit of searching (about 10 minutes), I've bought myself this piece of modern technology - The North Face "Red Point Jacket".
It's extremely light and extremely insulating at the same time. It's also extremely expensive. No wonder it's marketed as "ideal for extreme mountain sports". How rad am I?!

Those North Face dudes really know their stuff.

P.S.
I really hate spending that much time on the road - but on the other hand if I didn't, I wouldn't have the time to watch House and to write stupid blog posts about apparel.