I’ve been reading a story on The Register about the predicaments that Facebook is experiencing due to the whole “draw the prophet” competition. A single sentence got my attention, its subtle meaning not being related to the main storyline:

“BBC Urdu reports — according to a Google Translation — that Pakistan's Deputy Attorney General has launched a criminal investigation against Zuckerberg and others in response to Facebook hosting a "Draw Muhammad" contest on its site late last month”

Free brownie point to anyone who notices something horribly wrong here (and I am not talking about religion).

I am of course referring to the whole “according to Google Translation” business or as one of my fellow forum dweller noticed: “Since when is Google Translate a reliable news source?!?” More...

I just read today that DisplayPort graduated version 1.2 in December 2009. It really looks promising, we can now drive up to four full HD screens or even have our very own 3840x2160 screen should the panel manufacturers ever decide to make them. So, barring the now obsolete VGA d-sub, SDTV composite and such, we have the following real life high definition transmission standards:

• composite YPbPr
• DVI (plus derivatives)
• HDMI
• DisplayPort (plus derivatives)
• horde of nameless pretenders nobody cares about

I should be happy, but I am not, and it has nothing to do with confusion over which one is better or shinier.More...

It’s been a while since I last wrote something in the blog. The culprit? My MBA dissertation research study. A small advice from the newly found wisdom: If someone ever suggests you should do a nationwide survey of any kind, respectfully decline unless you live in Vatican or Monaco, or unless someone pays you to do it :). Doing it for the sake of an MBA research, even for the dissertation, is a huge pain; just choose a theoretical subject and bury yourself in books, it beats dealing with telephone interviews with paranoid members of the population, then having to trust their half-witted answers for a serious subject such as electronic retailing. Well, I did not procrastinate (my old favorite word) and I persevered (my new favorite word) and completed my research with great results, leaving me with more time to play. So, the question now is how best to celebrate the return to blogosphere? Maybe a nice one-liner LINQ to validate LUHN check? More...

A recent problem I encountered on two different, yet unrelated, locations (a client and a forum) caused me some grief. As an introduction to the problem, observe the life cycle of a particular database common to a lot of production installations. As customary to a lot of ad-hoc built systems a database gets created by a team-leader or some other non-dba person in a dev server environment with little concern for the concept of transaction logs. Over time some funky voodoo magic happens to this log which eventually gets transferred as detached mdf/ldf combination and gets reattached in a production environment, after all who wants to create database by script and then have to import all those pesky preloaded lookup tables and other stuff, its much easier to just dump the whole thing on a prod server and turn transaction log into SOP (e.g. somebody else's problem). How rude...
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I didn't believe a server could be so slow and yet be able to retain a connection without breaking it. This is a new record, the whole 135bytes/s:

At this rate I will download the updates I need in about 4.5 days, which perfectly matches with my deadline which, by the way, expires in 4 hours. I hate these situations, having to go to one's client and like a complete loser explain that you could not complete an arranged task because "some people somewhere" fail to grasp at the importance of proper digital distribution channels. Sounds as lame as the "dog ate my homework" excuse. If you are cash constrained for decent servers and bandwidth and are a victim of your own popularity then start making other arrangements, maybe a bittorrent based distribution mechanism, hint, hint? And before you start arguing that it's a "free" software I didn't have to pay for and that I should be happy with what I get, let me point you back to the whole holy grail of open source dogma, how it's freedom and superiority will kill all other proprietary software. Guess what just opened in 12 seconds and allowed me to work immediately? If you said "Visual Studio" you were right, it has so far exhibited a nice habit of saving me from embarrassing myself in front of my clients, that makes it worth every penny I paid.

UPDATE: Eclipse, I hate you right now. I managed to install the stuff (too late for the deadline and following an "I see" from a client, $#!#^!). Do you know how I did it? I placed "127.0.0.1 download.eclipse.org" in my hosts file and replaced Eclipse's update URL's with a mirrored one (I manually chose a mirror in France). Eclipse, assuming a catastrophic failure in the download.eclipse.org, decided it should after all DO WHAT ITS TOLD and download stuff from the mirror. Hurray, the world is saved. I cannot express how low I think of Equinox P2 right now. That bunch of smart guys has spent years devising a perfect mirroring system which essentially depends on availability of ONE SINGLE HOST e.g. download.eclipse.org. They made provisions for situations when the site is DOWN, but made no provisions whatsoever for when the download speed is crawling while at the same time server refuses to drop the connection. How briliant, I wish I had virtual blog hands so I can klap my hands in joy, I I knew if you guys write software for airplanes too, let us know so we can avoid them. I just dont know why I hold myself to a higher standard in design when people obviously care nothing about doing the same even if their product is used by god know how many people. Sickening.

If you ever did anything in SQL worth embedding into transaction(s), you were bound to encounter an age old problem of auditing failures in audit table(s) while at the same time rolling back the failed transaction. Problem ofcourse being that transaction rollbacks are efficient and blind in their duty and will leave no stone unturned while wiping out all evidence that your statements were ever executed on that server, this unfortunately including the inserts in the audit table. Kind of a catch 22 situation. Or was that the "chicken and the egg" dillema?

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There was an interesting topic in the [ES] forum that I moderate (serbian); to put it bluntly the guy wanted to use new SQL Server 2008 auditing functionality to check who of his users is "peeking" inside audit logs themselves ;), you know, the usual "who oversees the overseer" fallout. Just for a second we'll pretend that the would-be overseer wont copy the audit logs to his own instance of the SQL server ;) and that somehow he or she is forced to use SQL server to do it. Since one has to use fn_get_audit_file to parse the binary representation of the audit log into a meaningful table-to-query, we naturally assumed we could hook EXECUTE on master.sys.fn_get_audit_file function and this will solve the problem, you read the files => you get noted.

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I just saw this nitty little story about the Amazon's "gentle" handling of the 1984 affair (you can read more about it here and here). I won't go into much detail about who is right and who is wrong and whether 1984 is or is not public domain (and where) and who is a bearded pirate and who is not, you be the judges for yourselves. What irked me is the fact that a vendor (Amazon) who fully charged a person for their device (Kindle) still retains ownership over that device and gets to delete stuff on it as it sees fit. And we are talking about an expensive gadget here, not as expensive as the fruit stuff, but still in the $300 zone. 

Maybe I am old fashioned, but if I got the 1984 on my Kindle and I read through the few chapters and then had it deleted by the Amazon, I would be extremely mad so I completely understand the outcry, it really is not about the money (hell, give the cash paid to the rights holder, what do we care). I know, I know, Amazon just promised never to do it again; I say big deal, the management decisions and promises of big companies have a very bad habit of being as stable as snowflakes in desert, and on a sunny day for that matter. If anything, the corporate world is quite predictable and at least one publisher will now be just as mad about their new decision to be kind to customers as the CNET editor from the link above. This, naturally, results in threats of legal action against Amazon for facilitating piracy, placing the management between a rock and a hard place. Guess what happens next? maybe a new user agreement for Kindle that will give Amazon the right to do what it did and poke and prod your gadget? It sure can force you to sign a new agreement by not allowing you to buy additional books until you do, so dream on about rebelling against the change.

On the light note, I am actually glad this happened the way it did, I was hoping for Kindle to arrive in Europe and was planning on getting one and this sure dissuaded me, big time. $300 more bucks left in my pocket... I wonder what DRM free stuff I can get for that money....

Well, after 6 (six) months of failed negotiations, crocked hosters, time wasted on setting up hosted platforms we finally said "enough is enough". I will write about it in more details in one of the future blogs, but suffice to say if you are anything more than an average Joe bringing up a site to host pictures of kids for granma and granpa to see then the hosting industry is something to be avoided, at all costs. The blog that you are reading now is hosted on OUR Dell 1850 server which we procured and placed inside a rented 2U rack in Vancouver (Canada) colo center. Now you can read this blog again and I can demo and deliver my applications and solutions without having to deal with abusive hosters' firewalls and without having to explain that port 80 is not the only port in existence. More importantly I can send confidential emails to my clients without having to trust the very same hosters and their underpaid employees not to tamper or steal information via "smarthosts".

Either way, the nightmare seems to be over and the blog is up, I am still setting up the server environment (in addition to working, raising the kid and doing my MBA dissertation), so bare with me a bit while I start writing this baby up.