Business & pleasure

Just read two books. "Making It Happen" is the legendary Sir John Harvey Jones [wiki] talking about his experience running ICI. While he talks about high level jobs like executive directors and chairman of the board, his advice is relevant to all levels of any company, and not just manufacturing ones. The idea of giving subtle input to guide people and tasks is one that can be applied all over the place. Recommended to anyone in the Business business!



On a much lighter note, Guy Browning's "Never Push When It Says Pull" gives you advice on the more mundane tasks we face, such as ironing, hiring a car, and using a lift (if you don't know what a lift is, see here):

Calling a lift is easy. Simply press the button and wait.
And then press the button again. Many lifts work on
the pressure you exert on the call button, so hitting it a
hundred times will make it arrive a lot faster. Before you
get into the lift, it’s as well to check whether it’s going up
or down. There’s nothing more embarrassing than
saying confidently to a packed lift ‘Ground floor please’
and then feeling the lift rocketing upwards.

Forgot your OpenACS password?

If you work on multiple OpenACS systems and suffer from password overload, don't fret. This handy piece of SQL will reset your password to the same as it is on another system. In this example, I'm connected to the ACSTEST schema which I've forgotton the password for. I know my password for ACSDEV, so I'm copying it from there. My e-mail addresses are the same on both systems, so I just run the select then run the result. If your e-mail addresses are different you can always change the subquery.

select 'update users set password = '''||u.password||''', salt = '''||u.salt||''' where user_id = (select party_id from parties where party_id ='||p.party_id||');'
from
acsdev.users u,
acsdev.parties p
where u.user_id = p.party_id
and p.email = 'michael.hinds@quest.ie';


You can run the select on ACSDEV and paste into an ACSTEST SQL*Plus session, or in my case ACSTEST has access to ACSDEV anyway, hence the "acsdev." in front of the table names.