There is no Right Join

From very early on in my career, I’ve coded SQL by hand. This is nothing particularly special, but it always astounds me how many people still get confused over the various types of joins.

Over at Code Project, I just stumbled across an article that does a pretty decent job of explaining the various join options, but it did remind me of something very interesting.. See, in my 11 years in the industry, I have never had a need for a right join. Why?? Simply put, Right Joins are just backwards left joins.. If you get your table ordering correct, then right joins don’t exist.

So, I hereby call for an end too useless right joins…

I used too just melt them..

Customised My Little Ponies..

A new phone, and an interesting system

Well, over the weekend I finally took the plunge. I said goodbye to my trusty old JasJam and got myself a HTC Touch Pro.

Along with this new phone, I also changed my telco. I had been with my previous telco for over 11 years, and in general hadn’t had any major issues. That was until I started looking at the Touch Pro. See, the Touch Pro was released exclusively to a single provider here in Oz for 3 months. That 3 month period started back in October last year. Fast forward 4 months, and the phone is still only available at one telco.

I contacted my previous telco, through several different methods, via phone, email and in person at their stores. Unfortunately, this is where things started too turn for me. I couldn’t get an answer about this phone. I got everything from “Would you like to just get another phone” to “What’s a Touch Pro”. This really struck me as strange. Nobody seemed to know anything, not their sales people, not their customer support, nobody. Any company that can’t answer a simple question about product availability has some serious problems.

Anyway, back too the new telco. So far I’m reasonable happy, but one thing did strike me as odd. See, as usual, the telco had to do a “credit check”. But the format of the credit check was by far the most interesting I’ve seen. It involved a few quick questions:

• Are you employed
• How long have you been employed
• What type of employment

From this, they managed to approve me for 3 services. So, I could pick up 3 phones on plans. Wow, that’s great.. The problem is, the system in no way took into account my income, the plans I was going to get, the monthly repayments or even my other commitments. I even confirmed this with the customer representative, I could get 3 brand new phones, all on $200 plans..

CodeCampOz 2009

That’s right folk, Code camp is back for another year, and anybody who’s been before knows it’s worth making the trip.

Mitch has announced the details and registration is now open.

Unfortunately, this year I won’t be there. See, it happens to be on my birthday..

Interesting Problem

I came into work this morning, to find my inbox full of errors from one of our production applications. This application has been running full time for a long time.  The exception that our app was throwing was:

The security timestamp is invalid because its creation time ('xx/xx/xxxx xx:xx:xx PM') is in the future. Current time is 'xx/xx/xxxx xx:xx:xx PM' and allowed clock skew is '00:05:00'

After a little searching (ok, it took 30 seconds), I stumbled across a great post about this.

A little further digging and my assumption was correct, this is actually tied to Kerberos.

Anyway, in this case, I didn’t follow the easy solution of changing the binding behaviour, instead I got out systems guys to ensure that all the machines in question have their clocks correctly syncronised.. It seemed like a better long term solution.