• SQL

    Use SQL Views to Grant Access and Constrain Output

    You can grant access to certain columns to view in SQL without providing access to specific users to see the whole database. This is pretty useful when delegating reporting to users, without giving them access to all of the data in your database. For example, a user might be able to see a column with an address, but not a column with a credit card number, increasing database security while allowing you to delegate certain tasks when appropriate. In this article, we’ll use the same “Customers” table from our first articles, signupdate: ID Site Contact Address City Zip Country SignupDate 1 Krypted Charles Edge my house Minneapolis 55418 US 2005-01-01 2…

  • iPhone

    Activation Lock Status At Apple

    Thanks to Josh for pointing this out. Apple has a page that lets you look up whether your device has Activation Lock enabled. This way, even if you don’t have it, you can confirm that it’s locked after you, for example, remotely wipe it. The page is available at https://www.icloud.com/activationlock/.

  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Manage Recent Places In OS X

    There are two defaults keys that can be used to manage the recent places options in the OS X Finder. Both are in the .GlobalPreferences. The first is NSNavRecentPlaces and the second is NSNavRecentPlacesLimit. The NSNavRecentPlacesLimit key limits the number of items that are stored in the list. To increase the default to, let’s say, 20, use the defaults command to set the NSNavRecentPlacesLimit key to an integer of 20: defaults write .GlobalPreferences NSNavRecentPlacesLimit -int 20 Then use defaults to read the setting: defaults read NSNavRecentPlacesLimit You’ll need to “killall Finder” in order to see this in a Finder Save dialog. You can also inject items into the RecentPlaces array, called NSNavRecentPlaces, or delete…

  • Business

    Huffington Post Article On Soft Skills Training

    My next Huffington Post piece is up. This one is on Soft Skills. The original was about twice as long, so eventually I’ll post the rest here. But for now, hope you enjoy. I often hear entrepreneurs say that they hire based on soft skills, because they can’t be taught. I’ve been hiring and guiding people for 20 years, and I vehemently disagree. In some cases, people don’t want the social graces. In others, people (especially really smart people) rarely have the patience. But, provided you are willing, you can train yourself how to work well with others. Just ask Zig Ziglar, one of the best sales people and a famous…

  • SQL

    Index Those SQL Tables

    If you have growing sets of data, one of the best ways to speed up database performance is to make sure each column in larger tables is indexed. You can easily index a column following this syntax (using the name of your table in the place of tablename and the name of your column in the place of columnname): ALTER TABLE tablename ADD INDEX (columnname); So if you have a table called Customers and the following columns (as in the case of my Customers database from the previous exercises): ID Site Contact Address City Zip Country You would index them all as follows: ALTER TABLE Customers ADD INDEX (ID); ALTER…

  • SQL

    SQL and Date Functions

    SQL has some really great features for managing dates. Given that dates are a very common thing to store in databases, that’s a pretty logical thing to get to a good, mature point. But the most challenging aspect of working with date and time in SQL is formatting. There are lots of different ways to format dates around the world, and even different structures (e.g. epoch) that are often complicated by adding time to records. But, you need to do things in a consistent fashion with how SQL expects them, if you’ll be using built in functions to manage dates. Dates can be stored in a variety of formats, which…

  • SQL

    Manage SQL Schemas with Flyway

    Flyway is a tool that allows you to perform version-controlled management of SQL schemas. You can download flyway at http://flywaydb.org. It doesn’t require a build, so once downloaded, drop it where you want it to live and you can just summon the binary in scripts. Once installed, the following is the basic structure of commands for Flyway: flyway [options] command By default, the configuration will be read from conf/flyway.conf. Options passed from the command-line override the configuration. Commands ======== migrate : Migrates the database clean : Drops all objects in the configured schemas info : Prints the information about applied, current and pending migrations validate : Validates the applied migrations…