Coding

MySQL Authentication with old password no longer supported

MySQL Authentication

I’ve just hit the following error:

MySQL Authentication – Authentication with old password no longer supported, use 4.1 style passwords.

MySQL Authentication with old password no longer supported, use 4.1 style passwords
MySQL Authentication Error

This is due to the way passwords are stored in the database for later versions of MySQL. All I needed to do was to reset the password for the user concerned. Just setting the new password as the old password was enough for MySQL to update the password hash, and I could then log in.

Of course, this is only an option if you can log in as a user with sufficient privilege to change the password. Fortunately, I could. Not sure what i’d have done otherwise…

http://www.mysql.com/

Miscellaneous

Cake – A Political Nightmare.

Cake

At my place of work, pretty much like other places of work I imagine, it is customary to take cakes into work for everyone on your birthday. I do not, however. And i’d like to take a little time to explain why.

Many moons ago, while I was working for the same company (but a different department), I used to adhere to the cake tradition. And all was well. One year however, I did not. Now I can’t remember the reason why, whether I was skint, or I forgot, or I just didn’t pass the cake shop on the way into work that day. It doesn’t matter – the upshot was that there was no cake from me on that particular day in September. And nothing was said. Well, not much anyway. There might have been a couple of questions about the missing cakes but certainly not enough for me to remember. So the day passed without incident.

A few weeks later, there was another birthday. This time too, the birthday boy did not supply cakes. This time however, I did hear the complaints. Boy, did I hear the complaints. My fellow co-workers whinged and whined about the lack of cakes for a full day, but never to his face. A full fucking day. Like they had been denied the cure for cancer. Or that he had broken the (hitherto unknown) 11th commandment. Or that he had murdered a small puppy. With a cake.  Or that they had some god given right to eat cake on someone else’s birthday.

Cake

It got me thinking: Did this happen when I didn’t take the cakes into work? I imagine so. I’m not so conceited to think that I would be immune to the bitching and backbiting when I dared to defy the almighty law that states ‘You must take cakes into work on your birthday’. So I imagine that I got a lot of stick (behind my back) and got slagged off rotten (behind my back). It got me thinking, what would happen if I forgot to take cakes in again? Or what if I was ill on that day, or skint? Or what if I just exercised my own free will and chose not to take cakes in on that particular birthday? Would I lose friends? Be ostracised? Would I wake up to find a horses head on the pillow? I am joking for effect of course, but I still consider this to be an important issue. I’m sure that there are evolutionary reasons for the reaction I got (or didn’t get, as it wasn’t within my hearshot) to do with the human desire to be part of a group, or ritualistic reasons, but it still fucking annoys me.

So I took myself out of the birthday cake game. And for this reason I also do not eat cakes that other people have supplied on their birthday, out of principle. It was such a mountain out of a molehill that I resolved to no longer be part of it. I know a few people think that I don’t partake because i’m tight (and now that I have a family to bring up, that’s a little more accurate than it was), but it’s not. And I know people still whinge about my lack of cake supply, but I don’t care. Honestly – you should see ‘cake day’. It’s like some people have never seen a fucking cake before.

If I ever decide to buy a cake again, it would be this one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_cake

Coding

Powershell Script for emailing PPCoin price on Vircurex

I have recently found myself checking the price of PPCoin on a daily basis. Obviously this sort of thing can be automated with a script, so here it is. Powershell was brought into service for this one: I haven’t got much experience with Powershell so had to google my way around, and learnt something in the process.

The Powershell Script

$url = "https://vircurex.com/api/get_info_for_currency.xml"
$xml = [xml](new-object system.net.webclient).downloadstring($url)
$from = "***@***.com"
$to = "***@***.com"
$subject = "PPC"
$server = "servername"
$smtp=new-object Net.Mail.SmtpClient($server)
$smtp.Send($from, $to, $subject,$xml.hash.PPC.BTC."highest-bid".get_InnerXml())

Obviously you’ll need to set the from and to addresses, and the servername correctly for your environment. Also, as I am using this on a domain joined PC, it uses the default credentials so I didn’t need to set any on the SmtpClient. I’m sure the above script could be improved so that you pass the to address in via an argument, but this is a quick and dirty hack so it doesn’t really matter. However, it definitely would benefit from some exception handling…

Scheduling the Script

I then saved this script and scheduled in Windows using the Task Scheduler. I had to use the full path of the 32-bit Powershell executable (C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe on my Windows 7 box), and used -Command “D:\PPC.ps1”  for the arguments (where D:\PPC.ps1 is the full path of the script):

Powershell Scheduled Task

And there you go! Powershell to the rescue.

As a sidenote, I have had issues sending emails when using the SmtpClient in .NET and a domain-joined PC & user. If you’re getting a ‘Client does not have permissions to send as this sender‘ exception, then you need to ensure that the user ‘NT AUTHORITY\SELF’ has ‘Send-as’ permissions on the user in question. The following link helped me out with this issue:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/exchange/en-US/e763de97-88a1-494d-9841-4f3a466b5604/exchange-550-571-client-does-not-have-permissions-to-send-as-this-sender

 

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