A frustrating day, lots of jobsworth annoying people. They Know Who They Are.
A bit of database hacking today, too, which actually worked out OK but took more effort than I would have hoped to get there. There’s a recently-created table in the database with about 12 columns, two of which are integers but which should, it turns out, actually be a 4- and 7-character string with leading zeroes instead. Given that you can’t change the data type on the fly without trashing the data, and I didn’t want to dump and restore the data in its entirety, I created a new column of the correct type, copied the data across whilst at the same time adding in leading zeroes. This was nice until I tried:
ALTER TABLE mytable DROP COLUMN oldcolumn
… which doesn’t work on PostgreSQL 7.2 – it was only introduced in a later version. Bugger. This meant I needed to do a data dump and restore anyway …
Oh, and does anyone know a decent X server for Windows (98 Second Edition) which works reliably? I’ve tried Cygwin X server and Xming (which are based on the same code, I think) and they just seem to be unreliable – hanging up, occasionally just not starting at all. I have a shiny fast Opteron server on which I am trying to serve up Stata to people: a console version is available (‘stata’), but people want the pretty GUI version (‘xstata’) and this requires the X server. Anyone got any thoughts on this?
Maybe you should use this as an opportunity to Sargify more desktops 😉
PermalinkX-Win32 Rocks. http://www.starnet.com/
They also had X-Win-16, which they open sourced and have just developed X-Win64….
-ttfn, D
PermalinkHave you tried Microimages MI/X 4.2? I haven’t used it for a while, remember it looking a bit crusty, but also that it ran fine on Win98. http://www.microimages.com/mix/
PermalinkXvision was one of the best around, but seems to have disappeared in the Sco/tarrentalla mess. Use X-Win32 @ work, works OK…
PermalinkThanks for all the suggestions, people … I kind-of want to avoid commercial X servers, and so I will try to figure out why I’m getting problems with Cygwin/X
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