Category: postgresql

Hiding a CLI-only user account in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

A year and a half ago I installed the excellent PostgreSQL via MacPorts, and had to create a user account manually. Annoyingly, this postgres user shows up in the GUI login screen and Fast User Switching menu under Leopard. I found a fix today.
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Sphinx Search init script for Centos 5.1

Sphinx search is pretty new, and as a result I was unable to find a nice convenient package for it for CentOS 5.1. This is problematic since there is no init script included with the source tarball, and the issue of updating the index is the sysadmin and developer’s problem, and cannot be configured to simply update the index when the data changes.
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Document Databases – New Kids on an Old Block

There’s a new crop of databases that has appeared lately, under the rubric of “document databases”, and there’s quite a lot of enthusiasm for them given that they tend to be slow and very feature-poor compared to the SQL RDBMSs that are the typical persistence mechanism for web applications. What’s mainly appealing about them is that they are easy to use, and theoretically quite scalable, compared to the traditional “one big SQL database server” approach.
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Leopard Upgrade Report: Mo’ Features, Mo’ Problems

(Apologies to The Notorious B.I.G. for the title.)

I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” recently. In short, it’s not ready for mainstream use. There are a few nice improvements, but these are balanced by numerous problems that make me wish I had waited until, say, June 2008 or so. If you haven’t upgraded and aren’t sure that you need to, I suggest that you wait a few months, until some of the bugs have been worked out.
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