When I arrived in the San Francisco airport last week, I saw a large banner for GoToMeeting over the terminal entrance. Citrix is a partner/competitor (yes, both) to Lou’s company, so I pointed the banner out with amusement. As we walked towards the AirTrain, Oracle and McAfee logos greeted us as well.

It was a swift, albeit strange, reminder than SF is a hub for technology. Oracle’s appearance is what put us in ’strange’ territory: I often think the bay area is more for young startups preferring free MySQL and Postgres. In my mind, New York is the Oracle market, skewing towards mature, established companies with the need and money for enterprise-level infrastructure, administrators, and licenses. I realize that is probably why O is advertising in SF and not in New York — SF needs the convincing — but I was still surprised to see that red logo so quickly. I would have expected the Blinkx.com video search billboard on Rt 80 in its place.

My observations there aside, there was a particular SFO banner stating the following:

“10 of the Top Ten Hotels use Oracle.”

I’m sure this is true, but I wonder why Oracle didn’t say ‘exclusively’ or ‘for critical systems’. It was probably a marketing decision, based on length, space, and psychology, but statements of this type are definitely a little grey. What if the 10th hotel uses Sybase*, with only a single application that they bought externally lying atop an Oracle engine?

I was once in a position to choose my department’s survey software. Our current vendor was small, Linux-based, and clunky, with questionable amounts of revenue, but a solid client list and the ability to script. We could upgrade to get what we needed, or we could go elsewhere to a better, shinier application. I spoke to Vovici, an industry leader, who had an asp.net-based web interface and millions of dollars of contracts. Their software was slick, easy, and fulfilled our requirements, but would not let us do any customization. It was also cheaper.

At one point, in one of our calls, my Vovici representative asked what we currently used. When I told him, he said he had never heard of it and went to their site to check them out, then noted his surprise at seeing large company X on their client list. Company X already did millions of dollars of work with Vovici. He noted that X was so big that perhaps some random department gave them a survey once or twice.

It seems likely. I don’t think our vendor was lying. I don’t think Vovici was lying. It’s possible that our vendor had no idea X did business with other survey companies all the time. If they asked, that department in X might not know or be willing to say anyway.

But it is misleading. Any time some company lists only a client list, or a number of clients, with no qualifications like exclusivity, contract size, relationship length, etc., it’s like a list of Facebook friends. People just collect them to have them. You have no idea if they were bar acquaintances or Top Ten.

This is obvious, of course. You always take such things with a grain of salt. My real point is that I don’t see malice or even a mistake in this case. What could our scrappy Linux vendor do? A qualified list that was arbitrarily shorter than their competitors?

We ended up sticking with them. I was pleased because I felt guilty for supporting an MS-based, non-customizable, corporate software over a Linux-based, small-biz one. Vovici was a better product, but there were other factors (administration, maintenance, and infrastructure) outweighing it. As for the client list, it was only important in that we were already on it.

*It is telling I had to look up “enterprise database” to get Sybase. Oracle is the only one I could immediately think of.

I set up a friend’s account on my server last night. It was the first step towards providing my acquaintances with free, unrestricted web hosting. Slashdot tells me this is a bad idea.

It turned out that, despite having dabbled in MUD development and his own server, he didn’t know Unix commands (just err, “DOS”). I’ll refrain from comment because said friend knows I write here, but I was surprised to find myself explaining the basics. Luckily, we were just installing wordpress, so his interaction with the command line was minimal and will probably be nill in the future.

I went through ls, ls -l, rm, rmdir (no rm -rf — too complicated to explain), permissions (but not directory permissions) mkdir, cd, pico, and relative paths. He got putty and WinSCP. (I like ttssh better but I thought the installation of the ssh piece was one extra step to an already overfull process.) I also showed him the wonder of wget and the despairs of case sensitivity.

Despite all that, mySQL actually provided the most troublesome step. I set him up with a strong mySQL password but still wanted him to change it himself. To my amazement, there is no way to do this in phpmyadmin. Apparently, you can do it in cpanel, but we don’t use that due to its poor updating system. The web would lead me to believe my only alternatives are the following:

• Change it as root (then I still know the pw, and I don’t want to.)
• Use sql to update the user table (only the user knows pw but he has access to user table and everyone else’s.)
• Use the mysql command to do it, but that requires the command line and isn’t appropriate for my friend described above.
• Delete the user and remake him with new pw. (I still know the password. As an aside, wth? That isn’t a valid suggestion. I’m looking at you)

It seems like a simple enough addition to phpmyadmin. Write a script that accepts the user’s current password, validate against the user table, then ask for the new pw, and run the sql to update it. I can, and probably will, add it myself, but why hasn’t it been added already? It makes me wonder if I am missing something, like the link clearly shown in this picture.

Granted, people don’t change their database passwords very often, if ever, but the option to give the user a gibberish pw generated by phpmyadmin seems to agree with the concept of ‘user changes it to something meaninful afterwards.’

I have a vague memory from cpanel that there was some manager like mysqllite that handled this sort of thing? but I can’t find it.