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Domain: uwinnipeg.ca

Stories and comments across the archive that link to uwinnipeg.ca.

Comments · 54

  1. Re:My Programming Fundamentals Teacher by citizenc · · Score: 1 · on H-1B Visas Increased In 96-To-1 Vote

    Yup, they do.. the actual title is 'Business Computing'..


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  2. Re:It's sponsOr, not sponsEr by drinkypoo · · Score: 1 · on Open MPEG-4 Codec Contest
    You, of course, are looking for Lingua::Ispell.

    Nope. I'm looking for Ispell implemented in perl, not interfaced to in perl. It would be better if it were all done in perl so that slashcode would not need external libraries or programs to run. Not that I have any idea if it needs them now.

    Also, to those who are worried about the dictionary, if it were Ispell-ish then you could have any number of dictionaries. I leave which dictionaries should be implemented as an exercise to the reader, and the /. staff. It would, of course, also need some way to store dictionary additions for users. I suspect this last point is the reason it hasn't been implemented.

  3. Hypersonic SQL by chocolateboy · · Score: 2 · on Is there An Enterprise-Level Open Source RDBMS?

    I gave up dB work a year or two ago. Maybe it was starting with MS Access and enjoying its compact, RAD, toy quality. Unscaleable and inapproriate for Enterprise stuff of course (and making no pretence to such garlands), but fast, small (well, the .mds were small if you compacted them) and fun.

    The problem was the inevitable upgrade lead me to MS SQL Server 6.5 (I was stuck on NT at the time). SQL Server had a lot of stuff I was missing in Access - triggers, stored procedures, scaleability - but it also brought a lot of frustrations. The domain aggregate functions were poorer than those offered by Access, which was a pain as I was trying to roll my own OLAP before it all got proprietarized into a Babel of different buyouts and skill-subsets. Its big-iron feel didn't stop it having a ludicrous 255 byte limit on varchar fields. For bigger you had to futz about wastefully amalgamating BLOBs of text with READTEXT/WRITETEXT. Plus it was grotesquely high-maintenance. I didn't want to become a DBA. I just wanted to hack SQL. And wasteful. The 'devices' ('Honey, I bloated the database') were huge and couldn't be shrunk, no matter how svelte the actual data.

    By the time I escaped the NT shop I was naively looking to Oracle to save me from these frustrations. Unfortunately, I'll never know the joys or horrors of that particular 'platform', because at 600 Mb for the Linux installation I just bailed out and cried 'Enough of this grotesquely bloated crap!' and pursued XML or BerkeleyDB solutions to anything remoteley persistence-flavoured thereafter. I knew that fast and small were synonyms, but the vendors were growing fat on the antonym line and there was nothing I could do about it. Even MySQL and PostgreSQL were part of the problem. They're all emacs. None of them are vi.

    Recently I ran my periodic, wishful, wistful Google-grep for 'fast', 'small' and 'rdbms' and found myself, after rejecting Brian Jepson's TinySQL as ridiculously small and cute but strictly pedagogical, finally discovering The One.

    Hypersonic SQL, a tiny Open Source Java database weighing in at less than 100K, supports correlated subqueries, transactions, referential integrity, indexes, stored procedures and JDBC - everything basically, but GROUP BY, cursors and triggers. I never used cursors myself. I'd rather iterate in Perl. The other two, admittedly are fondly missed, but not life-threatening. It doesn't support failover. But with such a small, developer-friendly codebase anything's possible.

    Did I say 'Perl'? 'But it's a Java database', I hear you cry. How can this beast talk Perl? Well, it can't, which is why I'm working on a Perl DBI interface to it talking to a native driver over TCP/IP. If anyone wants to contribute (I wouldn't need to hack it if some brave soul wants to polish up the languishing JNI module in JPL to support embedding Java in Perl on Linux (currently it only works for Win32)), please get in touch. I'm almost certainly way out of my depth and entering a world of pain.

    Oh, did I mention? It's 7 times faster than SQL Server.

  4. Relative freedom? by phrawzty · · Score: 1 · on What's Banned On Your Campus?

    Here at the University of Winnipeg - ConEd Campus, the students in computer-related courses have quite a bit of freedom over what they can and can't do. We're free to play with Napster, sit on the various instant messangers, etc.. As long as it isn't illegal, and it isn't consuming too much bandwidth, the admins here are ok with it.

    As a sidenote, i would also like to point out that while all the workstations are WinNT, all of the servers here run FreeBSD. Woohoo!

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