Posts by Mark Flingstone

Executive director

Another instance of a Scarlett O'Hara approach to taxpayers' money ... gone with the wind ...

I did it

Received the email, and, although I registered with fake* name, surname, birth date, no photos and nothing else, I promptly denied any access to all useful (grin) info I published.

FWIW, in Italian, FACEBOOK may also be prononunced FESSBOOK (slang on FESSO - dummy).

(*) why did I register? needed to know how many freetards among my colleagues/friends registered

@Jacqui Smith: bikes are fine, now can we get rid of some bikers?

I feel you'd like to know that I'm not against bikes, I'm against *some* bikers, esp. when they use a mobile phone, jumping red lights and raising middle fingers when you horn.

I acknowledge I may be biased. Maybe I am just plain jealous. So feel free to say I'm a moron or whatever while you cycle away.

Really

there must be a way to compel this guy to prove his magic in court.

If he backs out, case closed; If he agrees, case closed as well.

However I might be wrong. So Alex, please invite Harry or Hermione or other schoolmates of yours, and turn NYT+IHT journos into frogs, although I warn you - some in the audience won't be able to see the difference.

ITA

ITAs (1) are the expert system engineers, that coexist in so many ICT companies with an insanely high number of losers that "design" systems on paper.

As a side note, ITAs (1) usually refer to the losers calling them "ignorant technical a**holes" or ITAs (2), and this leads to confusion.

The damage is compounded by the fact that an ITA (1) can easily spot an ITA (2) in five minutes, but bosses tend to mix them up.

Bosses and non techies may use the following theorem: ITAs (1) are the ones summoned up when the ITAs (2) run away (nothing works, customer gets suspicious, phone rings).

sandbox

HP engineers finally let world+dog know where they kept their heads while sandboxie got up to release 3.30.

Yeah, you got it. In the sandbox.

On the other hand, since it's already been available for a while, there are ample margins for early birds to be granted a patent for it by USPTO.

@ Stuart Van Onselen

"Rather give me the Italian politicians. They're lively, colourful and interesting, and they don't have any ability to invade anybody!"

If you find them lively, colourful and interesting sure you don't live here. One week is enough to be bored to death seeing them on TV at late nite shows making a*holes of themselves.

Well for sure they aren't able to invade anybody since (a) they're too smart and too few to build an army of their own and (b) Italians are way too clever for being sent abroad for fighting Dubya wars...

... uhm, maybe I am missing something... we went to Iraq after all...

sanitize, tr.v., -tized, -tiz·ing, -tiz·es.

may stem from the original sin of windows odbc_ calls, that don't allow for parametrized queries. Nowadays, even if PDO does (also on odbc-based datasources) everyone keeps their 1980's way of thinking, also odbc_ calls are so lower-level that have to be much more efficient (...)

For the rest, I agree: if it is numeric/integer, get (int) in front of it, wrong dates can be checked or allowed to pass thru as parameters (and trapped as sql errors), etc.

Output: htmlentities all the way.

Stop

making assholes of yourselves discussing which choice would have been the best for the country.

Neither side has a clue of what is needed in the long run to get out of trouble - education and a recipe of the 1980's: perestroika.

We got lots of money thrown at the 3 "I"; english, computer science, private sector into schools. Net results: english: none-stop dubbing foreign movies and you'll see; computer science: ok, now kids know how to start windows, a right skill when they turn 20; private sector: MIA.

Re: perestroika, just guess what will happen if every contract were awarded to the best competitor instead of the worst, but bribe-paying one.

Just another bunch of italians venting their anger in the wrong place...

Manual backup

One shouldn't underestimate the power of copy-and-paste.

Of course, there's always a penalty you have to pay when you use the clickety-click variety of pen and paper.

For those who don't want to, an 2GB USB sticker goes for less than 20 euros, privacy and copy-rights included.

Nice to have

Here in Italy, an attempt to have some regulatory board for the IT profession botched years ago.

As a result, wannabees and others still plague the IT world.

In addition those guys/gals usually prove to be cheaper than a real professional, and here you go, they are in, you are out.

By the way, I am happy for those that enjoy the new wave of IT spending across Europe. If you have some spare, please send'em here - address available on request.