I got my uberBox at work upgraded to RedHat 8.0 today. It’s nice. The dithered fonts in XWindows look really good, and the admin tools actually work (as opposed to things like the X Services Tool in 7.2). There were some glaring omissions like ksh and the telnet server made in either the pursuit of ease-of-use or danger avoidance, but if you’re behind a firewall, telnet’s just fine to have installed.

So, the lesson today kids is to choose the “Custom” option and install what you want. Don’t expect “Workstation” to actually have everything you use in it.

And in non-geeky news, Jen and Max are coming home tonight instead of tomorrow. They were going to go to the beach, but because it’s been raining for three days, and is supposed to keep dripping right on through the weekend, they’re coming back. Last night was kind of tough. It was really boring without anyone to talk to, and no Max to play with. I didn’t know when to go to bed, partly because I didn’t want to go up there by myself. I’m glad they’re coming back tonight…

I’m learning a new language. Yes, I’m doing it. I forgot how much fun it is to jump into something brand new and see it work. We’re moving to Java/JSP/Tomcat at work, and that means that I get to switch from my beloved AOLserver to the strange world of virtual application urls, beans, servlets and JSP tags.

To make this fun, I found the fabulous Apache2/Tomcat bundle from the kind folks at Server Logistics. The setup was virtually painless past doing some configuration (that’s unfortunately not in their readme). So, I’ve replaced the Apache that comes with OS X with Apache 2 and a JSP engine. I’ve now written my first jsp. It’s ugly, but it works. I can now include files, do neat-o for loops, switches and if statements. I do like that you can switch from code snippet to regular HTML mid-process (like int he middle of an if statement). You can’t do that with AOLserver, which means you sometimes have problems with escaping quotes.

I’m looking forward to this move. This afternoon was a lot of fun.

In sad news, Jen and Max are in Pennsylvania with my mom for the next couple days. I’m aaaa-aaaall alone, which explains why I’m still at work.

In the spirit of learning something new every day (and the fact that the way I was doing it took 20 minutes each time I ran the query), I learned how to select aliased tables with Postgres today. For those of you who aren’t geeky, you may want to skip this post altogether.

I’ve been using SQL when I had to for almost five years now and never run into a spot where I’d do something like this, but it worked really really well and runs a whole lot faster than the old way (mostly because I was doing a JOIN of a table with almost a million records to one with 250k records).

I know the suspense is killing you… how do you do it? This example is completely unrelated to what I’m actually using it for, because it’s work related. Let’s say you have a table full of used car ads and you want to get each distinct manufacturer and how many ads there are for each of those manufacturers. Now, if you have a separate table of car makers, this is fairly easy. But, let’s (for sake of my precious example) say manufacturer is a free text field where the user can enter whatever they want. To get out the list of manufacturers and the number of cars ordered by most often listed, you could do the following:

select distinct lower(manufacturer) as carmaker,(select count(*) from car_ads where manufacturer = carmaker) as car_count from (select lower(manufacturer) from $table where timestamp between $begin and $end) as all_ads order by car_count desc,carmaker

How cool is that? You can create a virtual table with a select statement from either the same table or a separate one. You could even join your virtual table with another virtual table for even MORE fun!

Who are you related to? I’m just thrilled I’m related to Jodi.