Michael Ludwig schrieb am 21.03.2011 um 21:56 (+0100):

> I agree. Here's a little GUID abuse story. At my previous
> employer, a place where they manufacture a software called
> d.vinci, things were set up so that the nice two character
> ISO 639-1 language identifiers - de, fr, en, etc - had, for
> what reasons I do not know, probably just ignorance - fallen
> in disgrace and been replaced by whompy 128 bit GUIDs, as if
> someone was fearing a giga-babylonian linguistic explosion,
> which the app had to be prepared for. So the devs at that
> place had actually memorized what the various GUIDs stood
> for - I have to add that the most important language GUIDs
> (due to a quirk in the version of MS SQL Server they had
> seen the light of the world in) differed in only two of the
> 32 characters making up that unreadable hex string. The fun
> thing is those GUIDs leaked everywhere, into all tables,
> each and every copy of the code base (their way of scaling
> to multiple customers), right down into data export, web
> services, and the HTML, as can be observed on public pages
> like this ("Sprache Karriereportal"):
>
> https://nordex-jobs.dvinci.de/cgi-bin/appl/selfservice.pl?action=newuserform

Hehe. Now that I remember. :-) They're using GUIDs also for
countries, of course. :-) You may not have known, but ISO
country codes are for sissies - real men use GUIDs. :-)

Deutschland 8D0E313D-0B9F-4E00-BEA1-839BD0F37445
Frankreich C554B0F3-5035-4102-9315-D989600C534A

Makes sense. Certainly. A lot of sense. :-)

Look at that HTML source code if you've got the guts to face
a world of pain, which only real men can stand.

And talking of men (and women), what do you think they
identified human sex by? I think the following sums it up
quite nicely:

female 48A9894D-6B32-4BC5-B155-80A6D8EE5DCB
male 62472D00-8920-4A34-9FD9-E0733501D456

I think there's actually a table called GENDER or something.
Yeah, GENDER, because the identifier is "gender_nr". (The
database column names leak into the HTML, of course.) Now,
exactly how many rows are in that particular table is
anyone's best guess.

Michael :-)