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April 29, 2004

Faxinated - with extreme prejudice

A week or so ago, the following email arrived in my InBox which caused me quite a bit of consternation. After the initial confusion and then the proverbial dropping of the penny, I could only sum up my thoughts with the following phrase: what kind of an idiot do these people take me for!!!

>Dear Mr & Mrs Marks
>> 
>> Thank you for your recent faxination. 
>> 
>> Unfortunately, in the interest of security, we are unable to process your
>> transfer request, as you do not have a banking codeword set up on your
>> account.
>> 
>> Please forward a further request by mail, once this has been received we
>> will arrange the transfer for you.
>> 
>> I do apologise for any inconvenience this may cause to you, but hope you
>> will understand our obligation to comply with the guidelines that are
>> presently in force.
>> 
>> Should you have any queries regarding the above request, please do not
>> hesitate to contact me. 
>> 
>> Hazel Lister
>> Verification
>> Customer Contact
>> Tel: +44 (0) 845 054 4000
>> Fax: +44 (0) 845 051 0123
>> email: customerservices@anoffshore.com
>> 
>> 
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> -----
>> In order to ensure that the extremely high levels of customer security is
>> maintained, Abbey National Offshore strongly discourage all customers from
>> disclosing sensitive information pertaining to their accounts via this
>> medium. In particular account numbers and code words.
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> -----
>> 
>> 





**********************************************************************

Important:



Internet communications are not necessarily secure and may

be intercepted or changed after they are sent. The Abbey

National Offshore Group does not accept liability for any

such changes. If you wish to confirm the origin or content

of this communication, please contact the sender using an

alternative means of communication.



This communication does not create or modify any contract.



The content and attachments of Internet communications 

and emails sent and received by the Offshore Group may be

monitored.



If you are not the intended recipient of this communication

you should destroy it without copying, disclosing or 

otherwise using it's contents. Please notify the sender

immediately of the error.



The Abbey National Offshore Group comprises Abbey National

Offshore Holdings Limited, Abbey National Treasury

International Limited.



Abbey National Offshore Holdings Limited, Registered Office:

Cater Allen House, Commercial Street, St Helier, Jersey, JE4  8WU

******************************************************************************

There are only two possibilities that I can think of here:

Let's play Sherlock Holmes for a second and use deduction to determine which of these premises my Moriarty is hiding behind:

If this is a legitimate email from the financial establishment in question, then I would urge them to address the following subtle but important problems:

In short, this is not the sort of company I would like to have looking after my meagre pile of savings.

So, let's see what's behind door number two...

Assuming this letter is a cunning plan of Baldrickian proportions to defraud me of my sheckels, let's test the underlying psychology here under the best possible conditions.

  1. Oh, it's an email from my bank (the conspirators have lucked out and actually targeted a customer of AN Offshore)
  2. Oh, and they're saying hello to my dear wife (again, the hypothetical me about to be duped into poverty has tied the knot at some previous stage)
  3. Hmmm, I don't remember "faxinating" them recently, but I probably just forgot?
  4. Curses, whatever I faxinated them about didn't have enough security credentials for them to complete the faxinated request!
  5. OK, well I guess I should comply with their request and mail them as requested...

Now, that's a lot of faith to be placing on (hopefully) gullible people to connect that tenuous pattern of dots and engage in such further communication as to reveal confidential banking details.

Bottom line - if I'm going to be swindled out of my money, I want it to be the stooge of such a fiendishly complex schema that it makes the combined plots of The Usual Suspects and The Spanish Prisoner seem childlike in comparison. Moreover, I don't want to be considered the same as the next schmuck on an email list. Morons.

Interestingly, the contact details in the email seem legit AFAIK, although I haven't bothered enquiring further.

Posted by Andy Marks at 05:21 PM | Comments (1)

April 12, 2004

XP Trophy Books

Here's an open question to my enlightened but limited readership:

What five books should every ambitious Agile/XP developer read?

I ask this because I've recently been asked questions along this line and I honestly couldn't come up with a definitive list I was happy with. At this point, I should clarify my requirements a little further:

Note: Although I've been using the general term "Agile" here - I really mean "XP" as this is the only Agile method I've been exposed to so far.

Given these assumptions, what books should this person be looking at to give them the best foundation of knowledge before they begin working within an Agile team? So far, I've come up with the following somewhat meagre list:

  1. Extreme Programming Explained (aka The White Book) by Kent Beck. I haven't come across a better introductory text for XP - pure and simple.
  2. Test Driven Development, also by Kent Beck. TDD was a confusing blur prior to reading this book.
  3. ???
  4. ???
  5. ???

Noteable Omissions

I should admit that although I'm a huge fan of Refactoring by Martin Fowler (as required by my employee agreement with ThoughtWorks :-)), it's not in this list because I believe refactoring and the patterns covered in this book is a concept inherently understood by most developers, although they may not have realized their murky concept of "cleaning up code" actually has a proper name.

Ditto for the rest of the books in the Extreme Programming series, which although informative, IMHO don't build upon the White Book enough to join the original text in my list.

So this leaves at least another three spaces in my list for new entries submitted by whomever so desires. What other texts do people think should be in there? Argue your case, be it for The Pragmatic Programmer, any of the books from Ward Cunningham or Ron Jeffries or even Sun Tzu and the Art of War if you want to completely underwhelm me with your Renaissance readings.

So hurry up with your suggestions. Competition closes soon. One vote per reader. No warranty either expressed or implied. Judges decision is worthless and correspondence happily entered into.


Note: I was introduced to the term "trophy book" by Gregor Hohpe, author of the recently published Enterprise Integration Patterns. Although I haven't nominated his book (or even read it for that matter), I thought I might curry some favour by citing him for the title/inspiration of this article instead.

Posted by Andy Marks at 05:44 PM | Comments (2)

April 06, 2004

DTSTTCPW

This'll be a short one I promise!

I just wanted to take a second to give a big thumbs up to the good people behind MySQL, a database I've been using in spurts for quite a while, but have only started to look into in any detail recently.

Anyways. the reason behind my rhapsody is that today I had an urgent need to get a copy of a MySQL database sitting on server A onto server B (my laptop). Specifically, I was demonstrating a piece of software that plugged into MySQL and server A held a suitably large chunk of data on it that would make good demo fodder and it made me all green with envy and "it will be mine" of thinking.

As soon as I'd considered this option, I was immediately drenched in a cold sweat as database migration is not something I'd ever really excelled at, much like Olympic-level gymnastics, chess or Lisp. I did have a lot of experience carting Oracle tables around, but remembering the pain I endured prior to first possessing that particular kitbag of skills did nothing to ease my state of mind.

So I did what any self-respecting geek would do in a similar situation: I Googled for export mysql data. The Google gods immediately rewarded me with 136,000 results and the first page contained links to several tools proclaiming MySQL export capabilities. It's downloadin' time!, thinks I.

At this point in the story I should mention that my client's internet connection is only marginally more efficient than having someone dictate the content you want over the phone and transcribing it into a file at your end. A quick check of download speeds confirmed my belief that no warping of the space-time continuum would result in me getting my chosen tool before my deadline. Time to rethink...

Folornly scanning down page 1 of my search results, I came across a link to a mailing list archive from the good people at the Nashville Linux Users Group where someone had posted a question containing requirements very similar to mine. Amidst the responses was this little speck of gold:

If all your tables are in the myisam format, you can just tar.gz the entire
data directory and copy it to the other server...

And it's that simple: to migrate a MySQL database from one installation to another, simply scoop up the directory containing the database into your hot little hands, walk from source to destination and dump the directory into the same location... WOOT!

Obviously this has completely blatted whatever data I previously had in any equivalently named databases on my laptop, but I didn't care.

Crude? Yes
Inefficient? Probably
Overkill? Almost definitely

But it worked quickly and simply and fitted my needs perfectly. The solution was generic in a way I rarely come across in software these days: no proprietary tools, protocols or commands - just file system manipulation. Kisses and hugs to all those good Christian MySQL developers!

Posted by Andy Marks at 07:27 PM | Comments (0)