Geek Page!

So, what does a respectable *nix user do when one of the primary databases he must support and query goes from Oracle to MS SQLserver? Use a VM? Well, for some things, yes, unfortunately.

For day-to-day querying, however, I wasn't about to put myself through that nonsense. Unfortunately for me, my trusty Tora does not deal with ODBC robustly. Despite getting to to talk to the mssql server over ODBC, the results weren't usable. Never mind that it doesn't give me schema browsing, all the string columns were showing up as "null" values -- not real useful, you might say.

I managed to set up FreeTDS on my kubuntu system, along with the awesomely-named sqsh. Using these tools, I am able to log in to my mssql servers and run queries. Sqsh is quite powerful and flexible, but I wanted more than what it offered alone. So, I turned to emacs. read more ...

Note to self: next time I develop a financial application using postgresql, AVOID THE MONEY DATA TYPE LIKE THE PLAGUE.

Lesson learned. That is all. ...

I've been an apple guy for as long as I can remember. It all started in early childhood with the red delicious variety, a staple of my preschool snacks and later sack lunches. As years when by, I explored golden delicious, granny smith, Jonathan, and Rome apples; finally, a few years ago, I settled on the gala variety as my old standby apple. I saw no need to switch varieties again, but recently the Fuji apple, with its snappier texture and more complex flavors, has caught my attention.

Before making the switch, though, I thought this might be a good time to check out an alternative fruit, the orange. Now, oranges aren't nearly as popular as apples, so you may not have heard of them; but these strange wonders of the fruit kingdom (hailing originally from Asia, but now grown in the tropics worldwide) have been around for quite some time and attained a small but loyal fanbase.

So, to appease my curiosity, and the imploring of a few of my orange-eating friends, I decided to take the plunge and replace my weekly supply of apples with a bag of oranges. I'd spend a week with oranges, and write about my experiences here.

Day One: A rough start...

read more (8 comments)...

Well I haven't done the posting I promised, because I've been working on a small project in my spare time: my first python plasmoid for KDE 4. It's a nice little dictionary plugin similar to the kdict panel plugin in KDE 3.

read more ...

Well, years after being recommended it, I'm finally checking out CodeIgniter. With the downturn of the economy, it looks as though fewer departments will be buying vendor-provided solutions, so some in-house PHP coding is in order.

As much as I code PHP, I've always been oh-so-keenly-aware that everything I code is spaghetti when I use PHP. Compared to Python where the quest for elegance is so easily fulfilled, my PHP coding always feels like a massive hack, no matter how much object-oriented code I throw at it.

So after debugging one last fatal error due to my forgetting whether my database query function was called queryDb() or dbQuery(), I decided to start looking for a solid but not overwhelming framework. CodeIgniter seems to fit the bill.

If nothing else, learning it may give me something to blog about! ...