Year: 2014

Contributing Advent 21: Timezone database

Contributing Advent 21: Timezone database

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Timezones have always been a pain, and Daylight Saving(s) time does not make it a lot easier. Then of course you have governments that decide to change the rules. Often that is done nicely in advance, but once in a while the rule changes are announced at the absolutely last moment, or, sometimes even after the new rules have come into effect. To track the craziness, have a look at Time Zone News, and this image to see how many different rules there are!

Cat’s name as a password? Obsolete!

Remember the good old joke about choosing a secure password and not using your cat’s name as one, even though it is MySup3rKittyCat13*?  Well, that is now obsolete – a better way is to name your kids with SQL injection names.  Xkcd has an example:

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And if you think that this is all just a joke, I assure you it’s not.  Here is a serious question at Stack Overflow that starts with:

We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup application when his last name is used as the search term (which happens to be quite often now).

True story, apparently.