BTW, you can get to that page by searching for the "launchpad" project on launchpad, clicking on the "Code" tab, and then clicking on the "lp:launchpad" branch.
I just loved Beyond Numeracy by John Allen Paulos. I found Innumeracy to be a little too slow, but it all depends on where you are in your math studies.
I think there will still be a large demand for mined diamonds until lab diamonds become cheap enough that every high schooler is wearing one and two carat stones. Financially successful will do everything to avoid looking like a kid and having to explain that they are wearing an "expensive" diamond.
I think you will benefit from reading Beyond Numeracy by John Allen Paulos. His earlier book, Innumeracy, is more of a social commentary, but Beyond Numeracy explains a lot of the reasoning behind the different areas of math, such as algebra, geometry, and chaos theory.
I think a lot of textbooks teach math like a cookbook. Just mix all the ingredients and put it in the oven. Don't ask what the baking powder does. In Beyond Numeracy, Paulos doesn't just say that the area of a circle is pi times the radius squared. He explains how that formula was found without calculus.
Beyond Numeracy does a good job at communicating mathematical concepts, but I don't know how easy it will be for you to apply what you learn to your math classes. I have noticed that people who claim to be bad at math get frustrated when they work on a problem for five minutes, but a person who thinks they are good at math feels challenged by a problem that they can't solve in ten minutes. Then they become almost obsessed with finding the solution themselves. They really don't want anyone to tell them the answer or explain it to them.
I was really amazed at the Linspire live cd for one thing in particular. It automatically recognized my Wifi card, and it was easy to configure it. Even on ubuntu, I have to google for the right windows driver to use with ndiswrapper, which is really annoying.
Slashdot has lots of readers who are programmers. I may find more
useful
information from another source, but it really doesn't take much time
to
ask slashdot, so there is no real downside. If I evaluate five products
and one fits the bill, I'll probably use it. However, if I spend two or
more weeks on each product, I'm definitely not going to test 20+
products, so it is very important that I test highly recommended
software first.
* To be able to understand the path of a process without perusing in and out of a lot of functions. Huh?
Whatever do you mean? Its a process. A process is not necessarily
instantiated in software. Or to put it another way, if your a real
business guy, you do what it takes, not what you prefer to peruse.
You are correct. A process is not necessarily instantiated in software. However,
when a process exists in a large codebase, it may be difficult to summarize
the steps. The code could be refactored in many ways to make it simpler
to manage, and using workflow or BPM software is just one possible way of
refactoring the system.
Why do you think I am a "business guy"? I am actually a programmer, and
I often receive questions about the details of how and when our
systems pass information between departments, since the coded processes
have been slowly altered over five years by numerous people.
* To be able to report on how long each step in each
process takes. This is trivially simple, whats the issue? Do you really
need a consultant to hold your watch and tell you the time?
If we run through the same process 5,000 times in one month, it is nice
to know that the average time is 10 hours, but 7% of the runs through the
process took over 72 hours. Then, it would be nice to look at how long
each step took so we can identify that billing took 60 hours, and we can ask billing what difficulties they faced. If we
don't decide to use workflow software, we would just log the times in various
parts of the
code. If we do use workflow software, it would be nice if it did this automatically, so we won't
have to add logging code to every single step in each process in order
to track this information.
* To be able to see exactly where in the process
software errors occur and be able to skip over failed steps so that we
can come back and fix them later.
Why do you expect software errors, before you have even
selected a package? If a business process has a genuine fault, and is
broken, continuing the process and hoping to fix it somehow later
sounds like a dumb business move to me. "yeah Boss we sent out the
wrong orders, to the wrong addresses, I figured we'd fix the software
issue later... ok?"
I'm not expecting the workflow software to be exceedingly buggy, but I
am expecting certain steps to break. For example, if a process adds a
customer's address to the billing system and breaks because of an
invalid value, we would just open up a request in billing's queue
manually, and then tell the workflow software to go ahead and finish the remaining steps.
* To be able to integrate with our issue tracking
system, billing system, and CRM software. We definitely will have to
write some webservices here.
Aha! Isn't this what you really want to do? Come on, admit
it... Your itching to find a reason to develop cool web-services and
some fancy infrastructure. Ok, who cares!, but it is a side issue to
the described problem. Webservices, are just protocols, methods, used
to access a real service, that someone may "write". They are not
important, nor do they inherently solve anything.
Actually, we already have a lot of webservices, so it really isn't an
exciting task to write more of them. Some BPM software claims to
automatically integrate with certain CRM softwa
Re:The Big Secret of User Mode Linux
on
User Mode Linux
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You might try just using a chroot'ed installation of your software. If you have a linux installation in/home/foo/testsystem, you will need to mount the proc system in/home/foo/testsystem/proc/. There is no problem with mounting the proc filesystem in multiple directories.
I'm tempted to buy one of these for all my family members that still hunt and peck. That would make me like the Soup Nazi, "No keyboard letters for you!!!" I guess there is a reason it's called Das Keyboard.
But seriously, I think it would be better if all the F-keys and other command keys had labels, so only the letters, numbers, and symbols were blank. I really don't want to hope I'm hitting the Home key instead of the Delete key.
What about the incompatibilities between Netscape's Javascript, Microsoft's JScript, and ECMAScript? Microsoft didn't have to say Jscript is Javascript compatible in order for people to use it, they just included it in their browser. If Microsoft includes a forked Java VM called Lemonade in their OS, only a small percentage of people will download an official Java-compatible VM to run Java applets and applications.
It will be ok to be a web technology idiot once HTML & Javascript can be used like Assembly. There are many programmers that are Assembly idiots, but it doesn't matter since the compilers create perfect assembly code for you. Even though HTML & Javascript are human readable, they are a pain to use directly since you either have to find or build your own higher level widgets and functions. HTML is especially difficult to separate into components when you are writing it by hand, since it is just a big string of text. Because of this, it is incredibly difficult to combine two different groups of widgets since you can't define the parameters or return values of blocks of HTML so that you can validate that two chunks work together.
AJAX libraries have only become possible because development of IE has been stagnant, and development of Firefox/Mozilla has been very backwards compatible. Future versions of IE have the potential of killing AJAX libraries unless the popularity of cross-browser supporting websites prevents new incompatible versions of IE from gaining market share.
You can always solve a problem multiple ways. Depending on the project, the costs involved solving it the hard way may be greater than the costs of paying for licensing if the added features save you enough time.
I've migrated postgres from 6.something to 7.1, then to 7.2, then to 7.4, and now we are looking to move to 8.1 to solve some performance problems. With 8.1 we are getting closer and closer to having everything we need, but I have to admit that I am sick of upgrading my database over and over again to get new features.
We migrated to 7.1 to get referential integrity. We migrated to 7.2 to get the new light-weight VACUUM which doesn't lock the entire table. We even did an emergency upgrade from 7.2.3 to 7.2.4 to fix a problem where postgres would crash several times a day when the load was at its peak. We migrated to 7.4 which improved performance dramatically, primarily because postgres' optimizer finally would re-order outer joins. Now, we are migrating to 8.1, since it finally fixes the problem with referential integrity blocking crud statements if another crud statement is referencing the same row. This can be a big performance problem if you have a foreign key to a table with three rows, so you can have at most three statements updating a table referencing the table with three rows.
How often do you have to upgrade oracle, and how often do you have to dump all of your data and restore it?
I am really sick of upgrading, and I think there are still a few features that we could benefit from down the road. I'm still uneasy about replication in postgres, and postgres still doesn't have binary backups, so I think a full dump and restore takes much longer than necessary.
People think it is a waste of time to learn how to administer Oracle. What about all the time spent updating and testing our application for each new version of postgres? If our application didn't need to run 24/7, maybe all these upgrades wouldn't be so stressful and wouldn't require such extensive testing.
It's really a question of whether you care more about protecting your investment or being in control of the direction of your company. Steve Jobs definitely has cared about the quality of the product he produces more than the quarterly reports, which explains why he was fired from Apple. He cared so much about his dreams that he wasn't willing to give the board of directors what they wanted.
Bill Gates has always cared more about making money. He is perfectly comfortable rolling out a lot of cheap subpar products to control the market place. For example, Windows was bundled with MS-DOS which killed DR-DOS. Explorer was bundled with Windows, which killed Netscape. MS-DOS and Explorer weren't the best product at the time, but it didn't matter.
Steve Jobs tried to replace the floppy at NeXT before it was economically feasible. The NeXT computers' optical drive was extremely expensive. But then, when Steve was rehired at Apple, he introduced the iMac, which had a cd-rom drive and no floppy drive. If you care about your products more than your business, you may stifle your company or save it.
I definitely think a buyout plan in your contract is a good idea. If you are allowed to sell your stock to third parties, you may be fine if your company is on the road to being publicly traded. However, if your company decides that an IPO is indefinitely delayed, you will have a hard time selling your shares, unless the company is required to buy you out.
I am really unclear on your 50/50 split in control. If you have investors, the control will end up 40/40/20 or some such split. What really matters is who controls the majority of the seats on the board of directors, so a 40/40/20 split of ownership may still give you a majority of control.
One thing I have noticed during the refactoring of php apps or python apps with more than 50,000 lines of code is that it is very hard to find all the places a function or variable is referenced in a scripting language. Even if you have unit tests for every function in your code, your tests probably don't cover every branch of every unit test. Using grep works fine if the function or variable has a unique name, but if I am looking for a contact's role, I may be looking for contact.role or c.role or cont.role. Bleh!
In a compiled language, I find out every place that is affected by the change in my objects' interfaces. Of course, strict type checking doesn't protect me from breaking things do to logic changes, but it does make refactoring large projects much less unwieldy. I definitely am more productive creating new code in a scripting language, but I think scripting language developers should be aware of difficulties that they will face once it is too late to switch to a different language.
I really wish that scripting languages had some sort of interface checking. Instead of checking the type and requiring you to extend the right combination of classes and interfaces, it would be nice if the scripting language warned you up front that a function is going access the "first_name" attribute of an object, so passing in an integer is not going to work.
Maybe Firefox can now have a built-in calendar and be able to read all the vcalendar attachments I receive. I really prefer thunderbird over evolution. Maybe, it's because I still haven't gotten ldap to work in evolution, and evolution says it can't subscribe/unsubscribe from folders on my Cyrus IMAP server.
One of the best explanations of how employee motivation occurs is the Harvard Business Journal's "One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?" Unfortunately, it doesn't specifically say how to motivate IT workers, but it gives you a plan on how to determine what changes will create long term motivation instead of making them look for the next bonus or perk.
I would also recommend "Rapid Development" by Steve McConnell. It covers a lot of topics, but it recommends a lot of books and articles, which is how I found out about the HBR article above.
This seems like a perfect extension of the disk recovery business. All you need is about 20 old computers with a bunch of old software. You can copy all the old files onto a CD-R in pdf format. Be sure to put your logo on the CD-R, so you can get their repeat business in 20 years.
I think you are confusing the "tab character" and the "tab key". Your text editor may add several spaces to a file when you press tab, or it may add a single tab character. I.e. your tab key could create spaces or tab characters.
When python reads the file, it will treat the indentation level of a tab character the same as 8 characters. If your text editor adds spaces to the file when you press the tab key, you won't have any tab characters in your file. However, your text editor could add a tab character to the file but only display the tab as having the width of four spaces. This will cause problems, since python will treat it as having a width of 8 characters.
Editing Unreal Tournament would attract many boys to the class, but I think it would bore most girls and guys who aren't gamers. Just because you enjoy to play on a computer, it doesn't mean you will enjoy to build something. I think the students who sign up for an Unreal Tournament Programming Class would primarily be interested in the "user testing" portion, and they would get frustrated with how much programming is not gaming.
I don't think anybody who is new to programming will think a programming
language is cool based on the capabilities of the language or the libraries it
has. The coolness factor is based on seeing some application built in it, and
they want to be able to do the same thing. I doubt that there is any consensus
among your students as to what a cool language is. The students may have some
aversion to VB from things they have read, but all languages have critics as
well as hype.
I think you will be able to attract students to your course by focusing on what
you can do in the course and not on what language you get to use. A course on
"Building a Blog", "Programming a Robot", or "Building an Online Store" is much
more enticing than PHP or Ruby on Rails. When you watch a home remodeling show,
they don't advertise it as the show with the coolest miter saws and wrenches.
The show isn't about the tools, it is about the end product, a new deck, or new
cabinets in your kitchen.
Since you are teaching new programmers, I will suggest languages and frameworks
based on how easy they are to start using as opposed to how good they are in
the long run.
PHP has excellent documentation. Although its function names can be
inconsistent or duplicated (e.g. sizeof, strlen, count), it is fairly easy to
follow the code. This would probably be the easiest well development platform
to get started on without evaluating different components, since you really
don't need to bother with libraries to do MVC for a beginners course. You
definitely will want to set up PHP with "xdebug" so that PHP will provide you
with a stack trace for your errors. Otherwise, you will only see the line
number where the error occured, which is not very useful if the line number is
inside a function that gets called in a hundred different places.
Ruby on Rails is a very large frameworks, and you are just throwing names
around to suggest this for an intro course. Ruby, the language, and a basic
html templating system might be easy to teach, but Rails involves the MVC
pattern, object-relational mapping for database access, and an architecture for
unit/functional testing. This is NOT good for beginners. The Rails tutorials
will also give you a false impression of how easy it is by having you build a
bunch of database driven web pages with very little code. After you finish the
tutorial, you will still have a lot to learn.
Although I think Ruby is a more powerful language for an experienced developer
than PHP is, it has a lot of syntax rules to learn. For example, curly braces
{} could contain a block of code or an associative array, and "joe!" means run
the joe! function, and "!joe!" is a boolean NOT operator acting on the return value of
joe!
My personal favorite programming language is Python. It has a cleaner syntax
than PHP or Ruby, although an amazing amount of new Python programmers are
burnt by mismatched indentation between tabs and spaces. Python will treat a
tab as the same indentation level as 8 spaces, but your text editor may be
using a different value. Even though python tells you the line where the syntax
error is, the error may be invisible in your editor. If you are interested in
Python for web development, Zope involves learning too much infrastructure for
beginners. You would be better off with Spyce.
Instead of making your students build things from scratch, they may feel likethey are accomplishing more by customizing an opensource program that alreadyexists. You can find a bazillion PHP web portal projects at http://freshmeat.net./
MySQL's text searching is still much easier to set up. You have to apply a patch in order to dump and restore a database with tsearch without adding several steps to your dump and restore process.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=117456&th re shold=1&mode=flat&commentsort=0&op=Cha nge
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, you can get to that page by searching for the "launchpad" project on launchpad, clicking on the "Code" tab, and then clicking on the "lp:launchpad" branch.
https://code.edge.launchpad.net/launchpad
There is a link to the source code on this page.
https://code.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/db-devel/
I just loved Beyond Numeracy by John Allen Paulos. I found Innumeracy to be a little too slow, but it all depends on where you are in your math studies.
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl/9780679738077.html
I think there will still be a large demand for mined diamonds until lab diamonds become cheap enough that every high schooler is wearing one and two carat stones. Financially successful will do everything to avoid looking like a kid and having to explain that they are wearing an "expensive" diamond.
I think you will benefit from reading Beyond Numeracy by John Allen Paulos. His earlier book, Innumeracy, is more of a social commentary, but Beyond Numeracy explains a lot of the reasoning behind the different areas of math, such as algebra, geometry, and chaos theory.
I think a lot of textbooks teach math like a cookbook. Just mix all the ingredients and put it in the oven. Don't ask what the baking powder does. In Beyond Numeracy, Paulos doesn't just say that the area of a circle is pi times the radius squared. He explains how that formula was found without calculus.
Beyond Numeracy does a good job at communicating mathematical concepts, but I don't know how easy it will be for you to apply what you learn to your math classes. I have noticed that people who claim to be bad at math get frustrated when they work on a problem for five minutes, but a person who thinks they are good at math feels challenged by a problem that they can't solve in ten minutes. Then they become almost obsessed with finding the solution themselves. They really don't want anyone to tell them the answer or explain it to them.
Beware of R.O.U.S.es (Robots Of Unusual Size).
I was really amazed at the Linspire live cd for one thing in particular. It automatically recognized my Wifi card, and it was easy to configure it. Even on ubuntu, I have to google for the right windows driver to use with ndiswrapper, which is really annoying.
I would greatly appreciate it if you would share the results you had prototyping in those three packages.
Slashdot has lots of readers who are programmers. I may find more useful information from another source, but it really doesn't take much time to ask slashdot, so there is no real downside. If I evaluate five products and one fits the bill, I'll probably use it. However, if I spend two or more weeks on each product, I'm definitely not going to test 20+ products, so it is very important that I test highly recommended software first.
You are correct. A process is not necessarily instantiated in software. However, when a process exists in a large codebase, it may be difficult to summarize the steps. The code could be refactored in many ways to make it simpler to manage, and using workflow or BPM software is just one possible way of refactoring the system.
Why do you think I am a "business guy"? I am actually a programmer, and I often receive questions about the details of how and when our systems pass information between departments, since the coded processes have been slowly altered over five years by numerous people.
If we run through the same process 5,000 times in one month, it is nice to know that the average time is 10 hours, but 7% of the runs through the process took over 72 hours. Then, it would be nice to look at how long each step took so we can identify that billing took 60 hours, and we can ask billing what difficulties they faced. If we don't decide to use workflow software, we would just log the times in various parts of the code. If we do use workflow software, it would be nice if it did this automatically, so we won't have to add logging code to every single step in each process in order to track this information.
I'm not expecting the workflow software to be exceedingly buggy, but I am expecting certain steps to break. For example, if a process adds a customer's address to the billing system and breaks because of an invalid value, we would just open up a request in billing's queue manually, and then tell the workflow software to go ahead and finish the remaining steps.
Actually, we already have a lot of webservices, so it really isn't an exciting task to write more of them. Some BPM software claims to automatically integrate with certain CRM softwa
You might try just using a chroot'ed installation of your software. If you have a linux installation in /home/foo/testsystem, you will need to mount the proc system in /home/foo/testsystem/proc/. There is no problem with mounting the proc filesystem in multiple directories.
I'm tempted to buy one of these for all my family members that still hunt and peck. That would make me like the Soup Nazi, "No keyboard letters for you!!!" I guess there is a reason it's called Das Keyboard.
But seriously, I think it would be better if all the F-keys and other command keys had labels, so only the letters, numbers, and symbols were blank. I really don't want to hope I'm hitting the Home key instead of the Delete key.
What about the incompatibilities between Netscape's Javascript, Microsoft's JScript, and ECMAScript? Microsoft didn't have to say Jscript is Javascript compatible in order for people to use it, they just included it in their browser. If Microsoft includes a forked Java VM called Lemonade in their OS, only a small percentage of people will download an official Java-compatible VM to run Java applets and applications.
It will be ok to be a web technology idiot once HTML & Javascript can be used like Assembly. There are many programmers that are Assembly idiots, but it doesn't matter since the compilers create perfect assembly code for you. Even though HTML & Javascript are human readable, they are a pain to use directly since you either have to find or build your own higher level widgets and functions. HTML is especially difficult to separate into components when you are writing it by hand, since it is just a big string of text. Because of this, it is incredibly difficult to combine two different groups of widgets since you can't define the parameters or return values of blocks of HTML so that you can validate that two chunks work together.
AJAX libraries have only become possible because development of IE has been stagnant, and development of Firefox/Mozilla has been very backwards compatible. Future versions of IE have the potential of killing AJAX libraries unless the popularity of cross-browser supporting websites prevents new incompatible versions of IE from gaining market share.
You can always solve a problem multiple ways. Depending on the project, the costs involved solving it the hard way may be greater than the costs of paying for licensing if the added features save you enough time.
/ msg00022.php
c kup-online.html
I've migrated postgres from 6.something to 7.1, then to 7.2, then to 7.4, and now we are looking to move to 8.1 to solve some performance problems. With 8.1 we are getting closer and closer to having everything we need, but I have to admit that I am sick of upgrading my database over and over again to get new features.
We migrated to 7.1 to get referential integrity.
We migrated to 7.2 to get the new light-weight VACUUM which doesn't lock the entire table.
We even did an emergency upgrade from 7.2.3 to 7.2.4 to fix a problem where postgres would crash several times a day when the load was at its peak.
We migrated to 7.4 which improved performance dramatically, primarily because postgres' optimizer finally would re-order outer joins.
Now, we are migrating to 8.1, since it finally fixes the problem with referential integrity blocking crud statements if another crud statement is referencing the same row. This can be a big performance problem if you have a foreign key to a table with three rows, so you can have at most three statements updating a table referencing the table with three rows.
For more information on the referential integrity row locking problem that is fixed in 8.1:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-docs/2005-07
Postgres 8.1 will also allow us to maintain an up-to-date backup with point-in-time recovery:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/interactive/ba
How often do you have to upgrade oracle, and how often do you have to dump all of your data and restore it?
I am really sick of upgrading, and I think there are still a few features that we could benefit from down the road. I'm still uneasy about replication in postgres, and postgres still doesn't have binary backups, so I think a full dump and restore takes much longer than necessary.
People think it is a waste of time to learn how to administer Oracle. What about all the time spent updating and testing our application for each new version of postgres? If our application didn't need to run 24/7, maybe all these upgrades wouldn't be so stressful and wouldn't require such extensive testing.
It's really a question of whether you care more about protecting your investment or being in control of the direction of your company. Steve Jobs definitely has cared about the quality of the product he produces more than the quarterly reports, which explains why he was fired from Apple. He cared so much about his dreams that he wasn't willing to give the board of directors what they wanted.
Bill Gates has always cared more about making money. He is perfectly comfortable rolling out a lot of cheap subpar products to control the market place. For example, Windows was bundled with MS-DOS which killed DR-DOS. Explorer was bundled with Windows, which killed Netscape. MS-DOS and Explorer weren't the best product at the time, but it didn't matter.
Steve Jobs tried to replace the floppy at NeXT before it was economically feasible. The NeXT computers' optical drive was extremely expensive. But then, when Steve was rehired at Apple, he introduced the iMac, which had a cd-rom drive and no floppy drive. If you care about your products more than your business, you may stifle your company or save it.
I definitely think a buyout plan in your contract is a good idea. If you are allowed to sell your stock to third parties, you may be fine if your company is on the road to being publicly traded. However, if your company decides that an IPO is indefinitely delayed, you will have a hard time selling your shares, unless the company is required to buy you out.
I am really unclear on your 50/50 split in control. If you have investors, the control will end up 40/40/20 or some such split. What really matters is who controls the majority of the seats on the board of directors, so a 40/40/20 split of ownership may still give you a majority of control.
One thing I have noticed during the refactoring of php apps or python apps with more than 50,000 lines of code is that it is very hard to find all the places a function or variable is referenced in a scripting language. Even if you have unit tests for every function in your code, your tests probably don't cover every branch of every unit test. Using grep works fine if the function or variable has a unique name, but if I am looking for a contact's role, I may be looking for contact.role or c.role or cont.role. Bleh!
In a compiled language, I find out every place that is affected by the change in my objects' interfaces. Of course, strict type checking doesn't protect me from breaking things do to logic changes, but it does make refactoring large projects much less unwieldy. I definitely am more productive creating new code in a scripting language, but I think scripting language developers should be aware of difficulties that they will face once it is too late to switch to a different language.
I really wish that scripting languages had some sort of interface checking. Instead of checking the type and requiring you to extend the right combination of classes and interfaces, it would be nice if the scripting language warned you up front that a function is going access the "first_name" attribute of an object, so passing in an integer is not going to work.
Maybe Firefox can now have a built-in calendar and be able to read all the vcalendar attachments I receive. I really prefer thunderbird over evolution. Maybe, it's because I still haven't gotten ldap to work in evolution, and evolution says it can't subscribe/unsubscribe from folders on my Cyrus IMAP server.
The WWF is not flawed! oh, wait, you said WMF.
One of the best explanations of how employee motivation occurs is the Harvard Business Journal's "One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?" Unfortunately, it doesn't specifically say how to motivate IT workers, but it gives you a plan on how to determine what changes will create long term motivation instead of making them look for the next bonus or perk.
/ en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=388X
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02
I would also recommend "Rapid Development" by Steve McConnell. It covers a lot of topics, but it recommends a lot of books and articles, which is how I found out about the HBR article above.
http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/770.asp
If you are looking for tools that are similar phpmyadmin for postgres, you might take a look at the free version of PostgreSQL Manager.m anager
It's not OSS, but it's nice.
http://www.sqlmanager.net/en/products/postgresql/
A commercial tool for postgres for reverse engineering existing schemas and displaying graphs is Charonware's CASE Studio.
http://www.casestudio.net/
Dezign for Databases will let draw an ERD diagram and then generate PostgreSQL compliant sql for creating tables in your diagram.
http://www.datanamic.com/
This seems like a perfect extension of the disk recovery business. All you need is about 20 old computers with a bunch of old software. You can copy all the old files onto a CD-R in pdf format. Be sure to put your logo on the CD-R, so you can get their repeat business in 20 years.
I think you are confusing the "tab character" and the "tab key". Your text editor may add several spaces to a file when you press tab, or it may add a single tab character. I.e. your tab key could create spaces or tab characters.
When python reads the file, it will treat the indentation level of a tab character the same as 8 characters. If your text editor adds spaces to the file when you press the tab key, you won't have any tab characters in your file. However, your text editor could add a tab character to the file but only display the tab as having the width of four spaces. This will cause problems, since python will treat it as having a width of 8 characters.
Editing Unreal Tournament would attract many boys to the class, but I think it would bore most girls and guys who aren't gamers. Just because you enjoy to play on a computer, it doesn't mean you will enjoy to build something. I think the students who sign up for an Unreal Tournament Programming Class would primarily be interested in the "user testing" portion, and they would get frustrated with how much programming is not gaming.
I think you will be able to attract students to your course by focusing on what you can do in the course and not on what language you get to use. A course on "Building a Blog", "Programming a Robot", or "Building an Online Store" is much more enticing than PHP or Ruby on Rails. When you watch a home remodeling show, they don't advertise it as the show with the coolest miter saws and wrenches. The show isn't about the tools, it is about the end product, a new deck, or new cabinets in your kitchen.
Since you are teaching new programmers, I will suggest languages and frameworks based on how easy they are to start using as opposed to how good they are in the long run.
PHP has excellent documentation. Although its function names can be inconsistent or duplicated (e.g. sizeof, strlen, count), it is fairly easy to follow the code. This would probably be the easiest well development platform to get started on without evaluating different components, since you really don't need to bother with libraries to do MVC for a beginners course. You definitely will want to set up PHP with "xdebug" so that PHP will provide you with a stack trace for your errors. Otherwise, you will only see the line number where the error occured, which is not very useful if the line number is inside a function that gets called in a hundred different places.
Ruby on Rails is a very large frameworks, and you are just throwing names around to suggest this for an intro course. Ruby, the language, and a basic html templating system might be easy to teach, but Rails involves the MVC pattern, object-relational mapping for database access, and an architecture for unit/functional testing. This is NOT good for beginners. The Rails tutorials will also give you a false impression of how easy it is by having you build a bunch of database driven web pages with very little code. After you finish the tutorial, you will still have a lot to learn.
Although I think Ruby is a more powerful language for an experienced developer than PHP is, it has a lot of syntax rules to learn. For example, curly braces {} could contain a block of code or an associative array, and "joe!" means run the joe! function, and "!joe!" is a boolean NOT operator acting on the return value of joe!
My personal favorite programming language is Python. It has a cleaner syntax than PHP or Ruby, although an amazing amount of new Python programmers are burnt by mismatched indentation between tabs and spaces. Python will treat a tab as the same indentation level as 8 spaces, but your text editor may be using a different value. Even though python tells you the line where the syntax error is, the error may be invisible in your editor. If you are interested in Python for web development, Zope involves learning too much infrastructure for beginners. You would be better off with Spyce.
Instead of making your students build things from scratch, they may feel likethey are accomplishing more by customizing an opensource program that alreadyexists. You can find a bazillion PHP web portal projects at http://freshmeat.net./
MySQL's text searching is still much easier to set up. You have to apply a patch in order to dump and restore a database with tsearch without adding several steps to your dump and restore process.
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BTW, when is postgres going to get binary dumps?