The Dark Side of the Force loses another one

A local developer who prefers to remain nameless was pleasantly surprised to discover that PostgreSQL’s stored procedures support is if anything considerably better than MS-SQL-Server’s. He is now converting his MS-SQL-Servee-backed application full-tilt to PostgreSQL.

He had a look at MySQL and was very impressed with a number of its features but regretfully concluded that it did not have the right stored-procedure features to support his application (which is basically written as a big flock of stored procedures which a very thin GUI application layer invokes when it needs to do real work).

It’s not as exciting as an umpty-thousand-desktop mass migration, but it’s much more up close and personal for me, and having this one developer change will swing at least hundreds of users across to an Open Source system, and soon see MS-Windows depart one of “my” server rooms entirely.

Comments

Anonymous said…

your site is pretty average penguin boy

08 March, 2006 14:12

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b

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