What modern school systems need to tackle

Thanks to my filled leisure time calendar I'm still reading about the cooperative game. Cockburn's words remind me of things, that are no longer adequate for todays jobs. He is writing about teamwork in class and that pupils are drilled to work alone thanks to tests and exams. This is okay for basic knowledge like writing, reading and do simple math. As soon as kids grow older and by the age of at least 12 they should work in teams to accomplish tasks. And I'm not speaking about homework projects. I'm thinking about group tests in teacher defined groups with specific tasks the team needs to accomplish. This only works for classes, where creative thinking and teamwork makes sense like physics, math and so on. It will not work with history I guess, but history is one of the classes I'd like to restructure as well. In the always on society, nobody needs to know details about locations, birth and death years. You can look all that stuff up in seconds. Just an overview of all this should be enough for the average pupil. If you need it, you will know it in later years. Students should be forced to solve problems by finding a solution the whole team is happy with and no specific right answer exists. Would it be cool to have a test at the end of the year to test math, physics, a bit of history and handicrafts by assigning the task to build a catapult that shoots exactly 5m and create the plans for a catapult that shoots 8m. By watching and guiding the team, teachers should be able to assign individual grades.

Using QR Codes with your Android

I bet there are MILLIONS of posts out there describing how to use Quick Response (QR) codes on your Android. QR codes are those black and white squares that encode some information.
To read these codes, you need an app like the ixMAT. To create the code, use this handy bookmark to open a new window with the QR code ready to be read on your phone.

Went to a Wedding

Since I'm waiting to start my new job in August, I'm trying to get as far away from work as possible at the moment. That's why I don't have anything interesting for you this week. The last week was filled with preparations for a wedding on Saturday since my girlfriend is the best woman of the bride. It was a really nice wedding, actually the best I've seen in the last 15 years (I guess, I don't know that many people who marry ^^). The only drawback was the high temperature (over 33 °C) coupled with suites and dresses.

Insert, Update, Delete ... when not to use $_GET or $_REQUEST

Two days ago I had a quick chat with a friend from coreoil.net. We both received a mail telling us not to go to a website. He said, that just visiting a page, cannot be harmful.
Well, I had to agree to a certain extent because the odds of a successful attack are very low. But there are some pages, that are open for attacks. Lets say, you are logged in at a custom page created by a price dumping kid who just knows to create SQL injectable code. Since it's your page, you sure have admin privileges and are always logged in.
So far, no problem.
Now you receive this email, telling you to go to a website. Still, no harm. On this page is an image, pointing to <img src="http://www.your-page.com/delete.php?id=12" />. By just going to that page, you would be deleting something from your website through a GET request. Without the use of JS there is no SOP that will protect you. This image request is using the GET method because you just want to get something. Deleting is a manipulating request, so you should use POST variables only. If there is no POST variable (which can be created by submitting a form) manipulating calls should ignore the request. By replacing your $_REQUEST and $_GET variables with $_POST you successfully improved security to your system.

Out of money reply

What a turbulent week! I got an offer from another company and my old one didn't even try to hold me. I cannot say much about the new company because I just met the CEO and the head of development. They are pretty cool guys and seem to know what they do.

Compared to my old company, where people just said things like "we've always done it that way" and "that's what I did 30 years ago - that's nothing new!", people in the new company are really engineering software.

The act of quitting was pretty cool: "I will quit today because I received a better offer" - "ok".
Three hours later there was a meeting, reorganizing projects. No counteroffer nor what so ever. I think they knew I will quit, as I complained a lot about internal processes the past few month. The working climate became very bad since they started a project in down under. Also the lack of support for ideas and productivity improvements made that decision easy. The interesting thing is, that all people with a degree leave the company.

I'm really sorry for the projects I was working on, especially BHL. It will become a really cool app and the people working within the project where super nice.

I am not allowed to tell the project partners that I quit (I still can put it online, can't I). I am also not allowed to tell people anything about how we actually work (I had that in the post, but removed it) ... just think about that