June 2008 – cottee.org

>Postgres – Converting Encodings

18 June 2008 ian Comments 0 Comment

>I’ve run into a number of problems recently with dealing with old databases of ours which are encoded with LATIN1. Now, with postgres 8.3 (maybe before) you’ll get a message if you try to create LATIN1 saying something like createdb: database creation failed: ERROR: encoding LATIN1 does not match server’s locale en_US.UTF-8DETAIL: The server’s LC_CTYPE setting requires encoding UTF8. I got bored trying to work out why – it seems to be that postgres now prevents what it shouldn’t have…

>Fuel strike: 100 petrol stations reported to have run dry

15 June 2008 ian Comments 0 Comment

>The Guardian reports “Fuel strike: 100 petrol stations reported to have run dry”. I’m not sure if that is supposed to make us worried. Doesn’t sound very high to me. According to Wikipedia we have 9,271 petrol stations in the UK. So that’s … er … just over 1%. Come on – we need HEADLINES!

>Rhino on OS X Leopard

15 June 2008 ian Comments 0 Comment

>When I was using Ubuntu as my main development environment I used rhino to try and learn Javascript in a bit more detail. Coming back to OS X means that I wanted rhino but had no idea how to install. This is how I did it. If you come across this page and it’s wrong please let me know. I just wanted to get something running. 1. Get the source file and extract it. I used ftp://ftp.mozilla.org:21/pub/mozilla.org/js/rhino1_7R1.zip. Use unzip rhino_7R1.zip…

>8 Things We Hate About IT

5 June 2008 ian Comments 2 Comments

>I just read this and noticed one of the comments at the end of it. Did you write the first draft of this article in crayon? The only point made here that even approaches a fundamental understanding with the current reality of actual IT experience is the fact that 75% of the guys are approaching 40 years of age and haven’t the slightest bit of motivation to learn new things. I find the idea that as you approach 40 you…