A frustrating day, lots of jobsworth annoying people. They Know Who They Are.<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n
ALTER TABLE mytable DROP COLUMN oldcolumn<\/pre>\n… 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<\/i> …<\/p>\n
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<\/a> 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?<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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… (read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}