Thread: Off-topic: Communication. (was: Connect string again)
Michael, It's generally not considered good form to move a private conversation to a newsgroup or mailing list without mutual consent, but since you have chosen to do so, I don't mind commenting briefly. In fact, among the many mailing lists and newsgroups I read, the PostgreSQL lists are noticably more difficult to read than most, so it might be useful. I'll thus take the opportunity to sum up some common problems below. Michael Meskes <meskes@topsystem.de> writes: > It's horrible, isn't it? There is a way to tell M$ Exchange to not > put the answered mail at the end. But Exchange isn't able to use > international standars, like Re: for reply.- It insist on AW: for > the german Antwort. It is, indeed, horrible. One would think that as time passed, the software available to us for communication would get better, and this was the case until personal computing started complicating things. Those who write software for the mass market know that quality is not worth a large investment of time and money. Instead, products must come out in ever new versions, each with more colors, longer feature lists and more marketing hype than the last. Microsoft is much worse than most (although Lotus and Netscape are not that far behind, to name but two). A reasonable explanation for this has two parts: first, the teenagers who write software for Microsoft have little or no experience with the network community and the way things have been done here since the beginning, and second, they have the secure knowledge that this does not matter. Thus, what they don't know about standards and conventions on the net, they certainly aren't going to bother to find out. What they do will be the new "standard", effective immediately, because of the label on the box. > So I have to stick with Outlook. I feel sorry for you if you have an employer so lacking in common sense that you're forced to use a Microsoft application for email. It is one thing to demand that employees use Microsoft's poor excuse for an operating system, but you should at least be allowed to use what you want for tasks where it cannot make a difference to anyone but you which tool you choose. > > I'm considering telling Procmail to dump anything written with Outlook > > (that's its name, right?) directly into /dev/null. It takes too much > > time trying to figure out what the context of the message is. > > Good move. I suspect sarcasm. :-) Actually, I'd like to defend this as being, indeed, a good move. I always have so many interesting things to do, and very much want to use my time as effeciently as I can. With the sheer volume of traffic on the PostgreSQL mailing lists, this means that I have to make an effort to get as much out of reading the lists as I possibly can. This, unfortunately, includes _not_ reading much of the material posted to the lists. But what not to read? Of course, I try to skip lightly over discussions on topics that I don't find very interesting. That's not the hardest part. The real problem is in the threads of discussion that I really want to follow. In the "good old days", technical mailing lists and newsgroups were generally easy to read, because most people followed the same set of conventions: text was properly formatted for 80 column terminals, common quoting rules made it easy to see what was old and new in a message, and selective quoting of relevant bits of what was being commented on made it easy to follow a thread of discussion smoothly. You could very quickly determine whether a message held interesting material or not. If some newcomer didn't follow conventions, they were pointed out to him or her, and everything was fine. These days, it's not always so easy. In many of the fora I follow, things are still the way they were. The NetBSD mailing lists, for instance, are easy to read -- almost everybody follows conventions. Here on the PostgreSQL mailing lists, however, the picture is very much different: every new message that I read is fundamentally different from the last, so I have to _start_ by figuring out what the syntax and semantics of this particular message happens to be. After sorting out multi-part MIME, quoting, new content only at top or only at bottom, visually coming to grips with overlong lines and quoted printable encoding and so on and so forth, I can finally start to evaluate whether the content of the message is interesting. This takes enough time that I could have digested two or three properly presented messages in the time it takes to get ready to start reading one of the ones produced by newcomers with "modern" software! The whole point of conventions is to ease communication! - Stick to at most 75 characters per line. Monospaced displays of 80 character width are the norm, and lines longer than that are difficult to read comfortably anyway, especially on-screen. - Write plain text. Do not use HTML formatting and suchlike, since it makes it very difficult for those who don't use a web browser to read their mail to read the text. - Quote selectively, using "> " in front of quoted text, and clearly indicating who wrote what you're quoting. (See the early parts of this message for what I mean.) - Avoid MIME "multipart" messages when not needed. Particularly, do not use VCARD and the like, and do not let your email software generate an alternative HTML version of the text. - Above all, remember that you're the one trying to communicate your thoughts to others, so it's your responsibility to do this well! -tih -- Popularity is the hallmark of mediocrity. --Niles Crane, "Frasier"
[First for those who didn't see the begining of this thread, I'm one of those who when emailing from work, has to use Outlook. I'm hoping that I'm going to be able to get procmail or sendmail to divert stuff from these lists to one of the Linux boxes I have there. PS: If anyone knows how to configure sendmail.cf to forward mail to any other host other than localhost or the relayhost I'd be interested in hearing from them.] On 27 May 1998, Tom Ivar Helbekkmo wrote: > > It's horrible, isn't it? There is a way to tell M$ Exchange to not > > put the answered mail at the end. But Exchange isn't able to use > > international standars, like Re: for reply.- It insist on AW: for > > the german Antwort. > > It is, indeed, horrible. One would think that as time passed, the > software available to us for communication would get better, and this > was the case until personal computing started complicating things. > Those who write software for the mass market know that quality is not > worth a large investment of time and money. Instead, products must > come out in ever new versions, each with more colors, longer feature > lists and more marketing hype than the last. It's horrible here - middle and upper management seem to love M$ because its either the presumed standard, or simply because its M$ Worse still, is when a user gets a brand new PC, and moans at us because it doesn't to the same job as their old Dumb Terminal did (the DT proving to be more reliable). > Microsoft is much worse than most (although Lotus and Netscape are not > that far behind, to name but two). A reasonable explanation for this > has two parts: first, the teenagers who write software for Microsoft > have little or no experience with the network community and the way > things have been done here since the beginning, and second, they have > the secure knowledge that this does not matter. Thus, what they don't > know about standards and conventions on the net, they certainly aren't > going to bother to find out. What they do will be the new "standard", > effective immediately, because of the label on the box. What anoys me more with their versions of the "standards" is that they don't even keep to them within their own product range, or even with different versions of the same product. > > So I have to stick with Outlook. > > I feel sorry for you if you have an employer so lacking in common > sense that you're forced to use a Microsoft application for email. It > is one thing to demand that employees use Microsoft's poor excuse for > an operating system, but you should at least be allowed to use what > you want for tasks where it cannot make a difference to anyone but you > which tool you choose. Sadly were going down the M$ Exchange route for email also. Even though it's a log better than what it's replacing (a mail can be 10 lines of 80 chars only), it's a real pig to keep up. Sometimes users call saying that the server's gone down, when it's their PC deciding to forget the servers name, or the server deciding that it would be fun to resent the last months email to every single user (this little gem happens about once every two months). > > > I'm considering telling Procmail to dump anything written with Outlook > > > (that's its name, right?) directly into /dev/null. It takes too much > > > time trying to figure out what the context of the message is. > > > > Good move. > > I suspect sarcasm. :-) Actually, I'd like to defend this as being, > indeed, a good move. I always have so many interesting things to do, > and very much want to use my time as effeciently as I can. With the > sheer volume of traffic on the PostgreSQL mailing lists, this means > that I have to make an effort to get as much out of reading the lists > as I possibly can. I agree with you. If I can sort out getting mail from the lists to arrive at the linux box under my desk, I'd switch over immediately. > This, unfortunately, includes _not_ reading much of the material posted > to the lists. But what not to read? > > Of course, I try to skip lightly over discussions on topics that I > don't find very interesting. That's not the hardest part. The real > problem is in the threads of discussion that I really want to follow. > In the "good old days", technical mailing lists and newsgroups were > generally easy to read, because most people followed the same set of > conventions: text was properly formatted for 80 column terminals, > common quoting rules made it easy to see what was old and new in a > message, and selective quoting of relevant bits of what was being > commented on made it easy to follow a thread of discussion smoothly. This is the reason I prefer Pine. It's text only, but it handles all of the standards correctly, formats for 80 column screens (unlike Outlook which formats it on screen, but a paragraph is still a single line), and it automatically quotes the message correctly (if you want to place a > at the begining of the line in Outlook, you have to add it manually, and format each line manually). > You could very quickly determine whether a message held interesting > material or not. > If some newcomer didn't follow conventions, they were pointed out to him > or her, and everything was fine. I remember when I first started on the "Net" 5 years ago, netiquete was one of the first things you picked up. > These days, it's not always so easy. In many of the fora I follow, > things are still the way they were. The NetBSD mailing lists, for > instance, are easy to read -- almost everybody follows conventions. That's most probably because they are reading them on NetBSD machines. > Here on the PostgreSQL mailing lists, however, the picture is very > much different: every new message that I read is fundamentally > different from the last, so I have to _start_ by figuring out what the > syntax and semantics of this particular message happens to be. This is partly due to the number of different platforms that either Postgres runs on, or the clients run on. -- Peter T Mount peter@retep.org.uk or petermount@earthling.net Main Homepage: http://www.retep.org.uk ************ Someday I may rebuild this signature completely ;-) ************ Work Homepage: http://www.maidstone.gov.uk Work EMail: peter@maidstone.gov.uk
Peter T Mount <psqlhack@retep.org.uk> writes: > What anoys me more with their versions of the "standards" is that they > don't even keep to them within their own product range, or even with > different versions of the same product. What annoys me even more than that is that there is a growing group of people who actually think that Microsoft invented the web, email (even SMTP) and TCP. I know it is hard to believe, but these people exist. They must be stopped. > > These days, it's not always so easy. In many of the fora I follow, > > things are still the way they were. The NetBSD mailing lists, for > > instance, are easy to read -- almost everybody follows conventions. > > That's most probably because they are reading them on NetBSD machines. Some are, some are not. We get many questions on the NetBSD mailing list from "newbies" who format things right. I think the difference is we aren't flooded by Microsloth's Following who just want to run the latest cool toy. --Michael
Hi there, I am just starting to use PostgreSQL, and I couldn't find the answer on the PostgreSQL site...so if any one could help me it would be very appreciated. 1) Good books/reference on PostgreSQL for a novice? 2) How do I delete a columm from a table, I have tried to use the following: DELETE FROM table_name columm_name Thanks much, JP
Joao Paulo Felix wrote: >Hi there, > >I am just starting to use PostgreSQL, and I couldn't find the answer on >the >PostgreSQL site...so if any one could help me it would be very >appreciated. > >1) Good books/reference on PostgreSQL for a novice? I know of no book specifically on PostgreSQL. For SQL, a very good book is "The Practical SQL Handbook" by Bowman, Emerson and Darnovsky, ISBN 0-201-44787-8. >2) How do I delete a columm from a table, I have tried to use the >following: > >DELETE FROM table_name columm_name The command for changing columns in a table is ALTER TABLE. At present, there is no facility to drop columns. Create a new table with the correct columns; copy from the old table to the new; DROP the old table; use ALTER TABLE to rename the new one. -- Oliver Elphick Oliver.Elphick@lfix.co.uk Isle of Wight http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver PGP key from public servers; key ID 32B8FAA1 ======================================== "Wait on the LORD; be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart; wait, I say, on the LORD." Psalms 27:14
On 27 May 1998, Michael Graff wrote: > Peter T Mount <psqlhack@retep.org.uk> writes: > > > What anoys me more with their versions of the "standards" is that they > > don't even keep to them within their own product range, or even with > > different versions of the same product. > > What annoys me even more than that is that there is a growing group of > people who actually think that Microsoft invented the web, email (even > SMTP) and TCP. > > I know it is hard to believe, but these people exist. They must be stopped. Oh, I know they exist. About a year ago, I had a heated discussion with someone who really believed that Microsoft invented Java, and was puzzled why Sun was taking them to court. -- Peter T Mount peter@retep.org.uk or petermount@earthling.net Main Homepage: http://www.retep.org.uk ************ Someday I may rebuild this signature completely ;-) ************ Work Homepage: http://www.maidstone.gov.uk Work EMail: peter@maidstone.gov.uk
Joao Paulo Felix <felix@cyclades.com> writes: > 1) Good books/reference on PostgreSQL for a novice? I've no particular SQL book to recommend, although I hear much good about Joe Celco's "SQL for Smarties". For a very good online tutorial, check out <http://w3.one.net/~jhoffman/sqltut.htm>. > 2) How do I delete a columm from a table, I have tried to use the > following: > > DELETE FROM table_name columm_name That should be alter table table_name drop column column_name; However, it's not yet implemented. You might rename the table, create a new one lacking the offending column, and copy the data over. On the other hand, you might just not worry about it. That's one of the great things about SQL: if you can take the space consumption hit, an extraneous column doesn't matter. Just don't "select *", which you normally shouldn't do anyway. -tih -- Popularity is the hallmark of mediocrity. --Niles Crane, "Frasier"