René Rebe

So the Lenovo X100e is announced, compact, kind of ThinkPad design inheritance. And best of all: with a more powerful AMD silicon inside (AMD Neo and related ATi graphics) and matte 11″ HD screen! Too bad it misses an digital video out (HDMI or so instead of the so last millennium analog VGA). Looking forward to the dual-core AMD Neo (X2?) option mentioned by an Lenovo spokesperson in some hands-on video, …

Update: Of course the absence of digital video out (HDMI et al.) is a show-stopper. It also looks a little cheapish in real-life, battery life is also said to be disappointingly low (3-4h on a charge). I’d definitely wait at least for an AMD X2 variant to appear. Of course fixing the other imperfections would be welcome, too.

Daily one encounters strange stuff on the web, or email. People try to get quick money by scamming you with pharmacy or other replicas (think Rolex) – from what I heard they often would not even deliver anything at all.

The other day I encountered a (Germany) site that wanted to verify the identify and age via an external service available at sofortident.de. I was cautious. A second look made me wonder even more: The first step requires to fill a form with name, address, age and the bank institute. I wondered what the heck they need the bank institute for. But the second form quickly enlightened me: Depending on the institute they then ask for your bank online account information, to (AS FAR AS I COULD FIND OUT) LOG INTO YOUR ONLINE BANK ACCOUNT and certainly parse out your birth date (or more) for verification.

To me this sounds like the worst thing to do on the internet: Telling some third party site your bank account information. Certainly they do not get the TAN (or other means of per-transaction authentication information). However, giving third parties any of my account data and let them mess with the system does not sound like the most sane idea to me either. And in the worst case some sloppy web coder accidentally left the input data in some log, or temporary file (or in some database intentionally). You’ll never know until it’s to late, the next scandal in your evening news broadcast.

Take care!

Fortunately I only get in touch with SQL (yeah, this not so Structured Query Language) every other week. Unfortunately until then the pesky syntax details always bite and force me to look them up on the internet, or a nearby old-fashined bookshelf. So here goes the most basic 1×1:

CREATE TABLE table_name (”column1″ “data_type1″, “column2″ “data_type2″, …);

INSERT INTO table_name (”column1″, “column2″, …) VALUES (”value1″, “value2″, …);

UPDATE table_name SET column1=value, column2=value2, … WHERE some_column=some_value …;

SELECT column_name(s or e.g. *) FROM table_name WHERE some_column=some_value …;

DELETE FROM table_name WHERE some_column=some_value;

Update:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table_name WHERE some_column = some_value;

Update 2:

ALTER TABLE table_name ADD COLUMN some_column …;