Today I came across what I predict will be the next big paradigm shift in the world of database design. This brilliant work I stumbled upon has been created by 4 students at the Koninklijk Atheneum of Sint-Niklaas, an innovative institute devoted to developing bleeding edge technologies. It is a completely new way of structuring MySQL database tables, the next epoch in design if you will.

Before we have a look at the code, let’s first consider the strong points of this new way of structuring database tables.

Benefits:

• It does away with all the confusing field type’s – just use INT’s for ID’s, and text for all the rest.
• Create only one table, which then holds all your data. This can be done by creating fields such as peopleWith1pc, peopleWith2pcs, peopleWith3pcs, ect. Brilliant no?
• To make it even more easy, it also does away with any sort of naming convention, after all, it’s only confusing!

Let’s have a look at a simple example where the new pattern is applied to a database in which survey results are stored. The table stores ‘answers’ of people who took the survey. The field names are in Dutch, but this should not prevent you from deducing the overall awesomeness.

Code:

References:

• Official paper on TCP
• A deeper look at the benefits
• Step-by-step tutorial

Two weekends back, me and two friends went to the cinema in Sint Niklaas, a city in East Flanders, Belgium. Some lol’ed stuff happened though:

As usual, we bought our tickets at one of the ticket machines at the entrance. To be more precise, our favourite machine, which, as all others there, runs on Windows XP (win!), but is a little more bugged, since it allows you to get rid of the reservation application in several ways. For some reason we got blank tickets, with nothing printed on them We tried to go to the room where the film we wanted to see (The Book of Eli) was played, but did not get access, since they first had to check the misbehaving machine. In the meanwhile, two other people had bought a ticket at that machine, but didn’t get anything out of it at all. After 5 mins of waiting they came to fix up the machine by resetting some stuff, and we could finally go and see the movie we came for. It’s so typical this happens to use, and we have to wait there for 5 mins!

You have absolutely no reason to think I somehow managed to get free tickets from the machine, and then mess it up, so we could go watch the film for free. Therefore the title of this blog post is obviously highly misleading.

Yay – I almost thought I could finally access my bank account for the first time in what must now almost be a year – of course I couldn’t.

I’ll start at the beginning, going through all the ways their system failed.

All my problems started off with me just trying to sign in to my on-line banking account. Back then they where switching between a system with just logins, and one with a card-reader you need to put your bank card into. Like I always had done, I tried to sign in to my account, but entered a wrong password 3 times according to the site (very strange since I have 100′s of logins, and practically never enter a wrong password – and my portable password manager certainly doesn’t). So I had to wait a little over a week until they send me a new code. When entering it, it failed again (and so the cycle repeated itself a few times).

At some point the people at the banking office got so annoyed (since this was all my fault), they gave me a card-reader so I could use the new system. I have logged in to that once just to checked how it worked. A week later, when I needed to do some transaction, I did exactly the same, but got some obscure error when I put my card into the reader. After sending an email to my bank and waiting a few days, I got the reply the chip was damaged, and I should go get a new card. I went passed the office again, and requested a new card, which I immediately got. I had to wait for a code to be sent though. Due to some delays at the main office, this took approximately 3 weeks (omg?).

Well, when I finally got that code, I of course tried it out right away. Apparently I had to ‘activate’ my card first at an ATM though. I don’t know how, but I somehow failed to sense in the force I had to do this, and only found out after my card got blocked and someone informed me about it. Great, now I had to wait for another code to be sent!

This one only took a week or so, and I managed to activate it at the ATM. (Why is that required – lame analogue nonsense!) So today I tried to login again. I went to the correct section of the Argenta site, entered my details, put in a challenge and my pin into the card reader, and typed the response in the form on the web-page. I didn’t get any errors saying my code was wrong or that the chip of my card was damaged, so I thought ‘woooot, finally!’.

Half a second later, I got this popup:

This is Dutch, translated into English it says: There is a problem with your card. You can contact the support ….

What?! There is A PROBLEM?!!!! with my card????

I send another mail requesting the reason for this. If they fail to give decent support, I’m going to transfer all the money I got there to one of my other accounts at another bank. I’m not going to quit to try get access to my account. It’s just funny how they keep fucking their system up. If this wasn’t Dutch – I’d submit it to failblog. I’m also staring to think it’s just easier to go hack their servers then to access my account in a regular fashion, it would s not surprise me if the security fails as much as their login system.

Yesterday, when I was cycling home, from Sint-Niklaas to Hulst, as usual, my left eye got hit by a small piece of flying debry. At first I thought there was a sharp piece of stone in my eye that I couldn’t get out. But after going to the optician (and having a lot of pain – lame analogue shit ) , it was clear there was nothing in my eye, but a part of the upper layer was damaged. I now have to take painkillers and some antibiotics for 2 days, after which (lucky!) my eye should be completely healed without any permanent effects.

This is really lame though, couse I’m not able to efficiently work on my GSoC project with one eye, and reading articles is also quite tiring. Could have been worse though – lol.

Yesterday I was working on my GSoC project and moving a whole bunch of data around (I’ll post more on this later on). I somehow succeeded in deleting my blog’s database.

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Indeed, that’s just a huge fail -_-”

Anywayz, I got it back up now, and restored about half of the posts by copieng their html source from the google cache. I’m not going to recover the less imprortant ones, and the comments will also be lost The post dates are also wrong now, which I’m going to fix in a moment. After I’m done I’m so going to take a bakup

EDIT: I got tired of poking around in my blog database, so not all post have the correct date. They are all in the correct order though.

I finally received my first Google Summer of Code payment.

This payment was in the form of a prepaid card send to me via mail, together with 2 GSoC stickers and a Google notebook – YAY! Getting the money from the card proved to be quite an ordeal though.

The first step required to getting the money from the card was registering on the citiprepaid website. To do this all GSoC students needed to fill in a form with your name, email and other info. You also had to enter your phone number. This is where it got funny. The form contains 3 fields to enter different parts of your phone number into, but only 2 of these are visible -> WTF??!! Since the phone number is required and must be valid, no one can submit the form without a workaround provided by another GSoC student: using the FireFox plugin Web Developer to display detailed form information, which would then also reveal the hidden field. Another issue here, although considerably smaller, is that only US numbers will be accepted, which forces all non-us residents participating in GSoC to enter a wrong number.

By making it impossible for non-geeks to successfully submit the registration form, citiprepaid now joins Argenta on my list of banks that try to fuck up their websites.

Anyway, I got my €350 from the card (although it took me at least 3 hours to get all the damned stuff fixed), so I’m happy