March 12, 2001

New laptop (sorta) and playing with Postgres

Got a "new" laptop -- basically, a stripped down older one which had the parts my current one needs. So I took the extra memory, hard drive and CD ROM out of my old one and put it in the new one. Result: rock and roll at a blazing 166 MMX megahertz. Still, the price was decent (ebay purchase) and my laptop was just gathering dust since the LCD was incredibly spotty and the pc card slots were super flaky.

I hope to be able to use it at a presentation for yapc -- maybe more than one if I can get the tuits to do both OpenInteract and SPOPS.

Coincidentally, there was some discussion of a message queue system on the mod_perl mailing list over the weekend. Serendipity favors the bold: POE experimentation awaits.

Someone pointed out that 'oid' was a reserved keyword in Postgres (doh!), so I made another fix for SPOPS to make that work and will hopefully finish testing it later on tonight. I've been reading up on Postgres and am thinking that everything I currently do in mysql I should do in Postgres. There was a brutal email regarding MySQL on the DBI list today. It wasn't anything I hadn't heard before, but it just got me thinking that there isn't much of an excuse to use it anymore. (OTOH the email author seems to be of the "if it's not Oracle it's not much" mindset, which ticks me off. For most applications, Oracle is vast overkill (IMO). Yes, there are plenty of apps where only Oracle will do, but most companies don't run those apps.)

OpenInteract on Sybase ASE/ASA seems to work fine now. Once we get PostgreSQL onboard I can chill out on that front until someone backs a dump truck of money to my house to make everything work with Oracle.

(Originally posted elsewhere)

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