Currently I'm working on updating the main blog at safnet.com with a refreshed look and feel (the design was last changed "way back" in 2008), then I'll move on to this technical blog. In the meantime, this garish built-in template will serve to remind me that work needs to be done.

New tech-blog entries have been rare primarily because I have been spending much of my technical-writing time on internal documentation at work: trying to build-up a thorough set of documentation in a SharePoint Wiki. Most of that content is proprietary, and would not be useful outside the company anyway. But I do hope to start posting comments here again soon, starting with a few entries after recently reading the classic The Mythical Man-Month.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow is what happens when a classic geek extrapolates the cyberpunk future of a reputation-based economy combined with the extrusion of an open source ethos into the management of everyday affairs, tosses in immortality and lean project management, and sets it all in the context of the semi-religious experience of Disney World.

The organic-bandwagon (and "green" in general) can often seem like a holier-than-thou verbal assault to the average consumer who does not take production processes into account when making purchasing decisions. Moralizing and preaching from the crunchy-granola crowd is not appreciated. And yet there is a point to it all, and we granola eaters need to be armed not merely with facts but also empathy and moderation. That said, often times we are armed merely with anecdote and conjecture, not even fact. Two recent pieces of research present compelling additional facts behind American society's — and by extension, increasingly the world's — over-reliance on technology without consideration of the long term effects:

This afternoon I heard an interview with Thich Nhat Hanh, from the public radio Humankind program, that is helping me frame a response I've been thinking about over the last few days. On Facebook, I posted: "Over-preparation only guarantees that you don't have time to live in the moment. That you don't have time to make a better world today, or to appreciate God's handiwork just beyond your nose and all around. From a comment to a friend after I asked for advice on pursuing an MBA. Thoughts?"

There are now many worthy biographies of Bahá'u'lláh available to both the casual and serious student. Choosing from among them can be difficult; thankfully, there is enough diversity of perspective, and a rich enough body of source material, that one is enriched by reading several of them. Dr. David Ruhe's Robe of Light: The Persian Years of Supreme Prophet, Baha'u'lllah hones in on Mírzá Husayn Alí's life before He became the "Supreme Manifestation" — as a youth, and particularly as one of the foremost Bábís. That he does so in a relatively objective and scientific manner gives his work an additional refreshing lens through which to gaze on the life and teachings of Bahá'u'lláh.

Letter to Congresswoman McCollum, and Senators Franken and Klobuchar:

The recent harrowing arrest of faculty and administrators of the Baha'i Institute for Higher Education in Iran has once again highlighted the subtle and extreme actions in which the current Iranian government is willing to engage in order to suppress the free expression of worship by the Baha'is of Iran.

This world is sadly riven with manifest injustice, often in the form of a government's abuse of its own people. Our most potent weapon against injustice is truth, in speech and deed. In a free land, who can deny that the treatment of the Iranian Baha'is -- unable to administer their affairs, to attend the official schools, to gather in communal worship of that same God to whom most of the world's peoples turn in prayer -- is unjust and unworthy of any nation?

When I became a Bahá'í in the 90s, perhaps the second deliberate change I made (prayer being the first) was to act with greater respect and appreciation towards my parents. I have long remembered that there was a particular passage that prompted this change; the "Bahá'í Faith" quote service on Facebook has brought that long-sought quotation back to me today:

Last Sunday I attend my first interfaith passover seder, at Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul. There were around 150 people present, from many different religions (though almost entirely white), commemorating together the Jewish liberation from Egyptian slavery. In addition to a traditional Haggadah "liturgy", representatives from six other faith communities were given an opportunity to speak about liberation or an exodus from their religious perspectives, and at the tables we had an opportunity to speak from our own perspectives, particularly with the "questions" aspect of the seder.

A particular comment in Louis Gregory's biography struck me as illustrating the combination of personal responsibility and material detachment in Reinhold Niebuhr famous prayer, "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference."

Microsoft's Books Online article on SQL Injection does a great job of reviewing the possible attacks against dynamic SQL statements (using EXEC or sp_executesql). I won't re-hash their discussion and suggestions. What I offer below is a sample remediation effort for this set of statements (the @Fields and @Values variables are actually stored procedure parameters):

DECLARE @Fields VARCHAR(1000), @VALUES VARCHAR(1000), @SQL NVARCHAR(2500);
SELECT @SQL = 'INSERT INTO MyTable (' + @Fields + ') VALUES (' + @Values + ')';
EXEC(@SQL);