The Ji Village News

Category: Technology

  • Identify a proxy when automatic configuration script is used

    Many, if not all, corporations control and monitor employees web surfing and email activities. Sometimes a company may choose to use automatic configuration script to enable employees’ web connection. This can be verified by: Internet Explorer: Tools -> Internet Options-> LAN Settings -> “Use automatic configuration script”; Firefox 3: Tools -> Options -> Advanced ->…

  • Interesting things about TIMESTAMP data type in MySQL

    TIMESTAMP is interesting in that it can give you an easy way of keeping track of when was the last time a row was modified, with a few caveats, listed below. The tests were run on 5.1.30-community MySQL Community Server (GPL). By default, TIMESTAMP is NOT NULL. Inserting a NULL value causes it to store…

  • Consolidating Twitter feeds with Yahoo Pipes

    I have been suffering from web addiction for a long time. So when Twitter first came out, I figured that would be the last thing I need. Plus, to really take advantage of Twitter, you’ve got to have a relatively fancy phone with a data plan. A decent phone costs anywhere between 150 and 400…

  • Thoughts on Data Masking

    Often times, production data needs to be moved to different environments for testing/developing purposes. However, some of that data can be people’s name, birthday, address, account number, etc., that we don’t want testers and/or developers to see, due to privacy and regulatory concerns. Hence the need to mask those data. I can certainly see this…

  • Random oddity

    Recently I wrote a program to reshuffle data in a csv file. And I ran into a problem with Random in C#. Let’s look at the following program. One would think that it should print 5 integers, randomly picked between 0 and 8. But no, in almost all cases, the program prints the same integer…