{"id":61,"date":"2004-09-02T10:17:06","date_gmt":"2004-09-02T09:17:06","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=61"},"modified":"2025-02-01T03:04:17","modified_gmt":"2025-02-01T03:04:17","slug":"serial-number-systems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.malcolmhardie.com\/weblogs\/angus\/2004\/09\/02\/serial-number-systems\/","title":{"rendered":"Serial Number Systems"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve recently been trying to write a serial number system for SQLEditor. I&#8217;m also looking for a new name for it. It was pointed out that the current name is generic and difficulty to pronounce, plus there is already at least one other &#8220;SQLEditor&#8221; out there already. Suggestions are welcome!<\/p>\n<p>But back to the serial number thing. If I could remember more of the maths that I learnt at university I would be happier, but as I tend to do I had forgotten most of the stuff that I don&#8217;t use, retaining only the bits I do use (Vectors primarily, plus some other stuff).<\/p>\n<p>Obviously serial number values end up in base 36 (0-9, A-Z), but other than that the problem occurred on how exactly to represent them. I need to have a link between the username and the serial number because that&#8217;s one of the methods implemented to discourage copying. If you see someone else&#8217;s name on the thing.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m currently looking at a graphic convertor like delay (it will wait 20 or 30 seconds at startup after the trial period is ended) rather than a complete lockout. Because I think (a) it&#8217;s nicer to do it that way and (b) it offers people a chance to experience the feature set even after 30 days have expired.<\/p>\n<p>One thing I have noticed is that there are very few descriptions of how serial number systems actually work, probably to prevent people reverse engineering them and creating generators. <\/p>\n<p>Of course the most secure system is one that receives a license key directly from a server, but I think that could be too intrusive. I guess we&#8217;ll see how well the first version works out.<\/p>\n<p>New features for Beta 7 include &#8220;crows-feet&#8221; style referential cardinality indication and a new way of exporting foreign keys; following a suggestion they will be placed after the tables as soon as I write the code anyway, the parser is already capable, but the exporter is not.<\/p>\n<p>Finally Beta 7 will also offer selectable colors on the fields, more transparency and prettier connector drawing. Possibly also table type for mysql as well as a new export system for creating databases via scripts on remote servers. More later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve recently been trying to write a serial number system for SQLEditor. I&#8217;m also looking for a new name for it. It was pointed out that the current name is generic and difficulty to pronounce, plus there is already at least one other &#8220;SQLEditor&#8221; out there already. Suggestions are welcome! But back to the serial [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sqleditor","category-writing-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmhardie.com\/weblogs\/angus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmhardie.com\/weblogs\/angus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmhardie.com\/weblogs\/angus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmhardie.com\/weblogs\/angus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmhardie.com\/weblogs\/angus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmhardie.com\/weblogs\/angus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1618,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmhardie.com\/weblogs\/angus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions\/1618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmhardie.com\/weblogs\/angus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmhardie.com\/weblogs\/angus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmhardie.com\/weblogs\/angus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}