Starting point for the auto-incremental in a SQL table

There are those times when you will want to edit the auto-incremental starting point in a SQL table. For specific requests, for instance, its better to start with a large number than a small one. 2-4 digit numbers in a web request where the end user can see the request number is akin to a starter check. It works, but seems so… amateurish! so here’s a quick way to do this:

ALTER TABLE my_table_name AUTO_INCREMENT =2342124

previously entered data will not be affected and you will be able to have higher numbers from that point on.

Remix of oshell dot calm

aEon has owned the domain name oshell.com since 1994, while employed at The Learning Company. Around 1997 while working there I was befriended by the lead engineer on the software project for a CD ROM based product that was sold over the shelves at Egg Head and Comp USA (may the latter rest in peace). I was content to do rapid interface design mockups to bridge the gap between my department (then the graphics division) and her department, which was programming and engineering. The résumé building project was a real fork in the road of my life, although I didn’t realize it at the time. She taught me several things about HTML. I absorbed all the information she taught me and discovered a new interest. I decided to become a developer.

I had written some rudimentary applications in Lingo in Macromedia Director, and I continued to develop that skill, but the web opened up my eyes to a new set of possibilities. These the words my mentor bestowed on me: “No one wants to to anything unless it’s connected to a database” turned out to be very important indeed in shaping my choices.

oshell dot calm has had many incarnations over the years, from plain html, to images cut into slices (ahh, fireworks), to CSS pushed content, and finally a fully flexed version of the site. Pure FLEX, with the creation of a few elements in illustrator, the creation of animated parts as separate swf files, and of course a fully fledged data connectivity that uses the standard web 2.0 http request model for gathering data from a mySQL database that is pushing content - which is today’s release.

The Rules

of security and e-commerce applications are constantly evolving. There are four basic rules we keep in mind when dealing with e-commerce. privacy, integrity, authentication and non-repudiation. In basic terms, it works like this:

1. Keep information from unauthorized parties. If you promise to keep data safe, don’t do stupid things like not log people out – especially if you told them they could ‘check out without an account’. Log them out to prevent identity theft. Even if you are not taking credit cards, you are taking responsibility for their name, address, phone number, and an account history. Be respectful of that.

2. Don’t alter purchase records

3. Provide encryption and decryption so data is secured in transit

4. Store and keep good records of proof the purchase went through.

How shall we safeguard against the issue of shared fingerprints, and the news that “The venerable MD5, for example, has been broken, making it easy to introduce a forgery.”

It’s an interesting question. Some people think that MD5 has officially ‘bit the dust’. I share that opinion, which is why I am rewriting the password algorithms in elastic cart and we will probably be using SHA1. Maybe. I am exploring the potential flaws in it as well.

First Module for Elastic Cart

Elastic Cart has an open architecture that allows for modules to be written as ad-ons. Tonight we finished one such module. We will eventually make this part of the framework, and allow a full web based or possibly air based solution for data entry – but for now this is a Filemaker ESS solution and ‘contribution’ based code addendum. Using actual technologies open ODBC driver for data piping, we breathed life into the ‘fast event calendar‘ for Elastic. This can also be easily adapted to both Zen Cart and OS Commerce, cube cart, or any of the other popular open source frameworks.

Interacting with a simple filemaker interface, your data entry personnel update the web immediately by simple interaction with the record in Filemaker. On commit, if the status of the record is on, viewers of the website will see immediate updating and adding of entry or event records. Add images to depict your events, plus a link for each event.

@todo – plans include ticket sales and full integration to the shopping cart portion of elastic, as well as to add social bookmarking to each event in the calendar.