ronin coder

I set up an empty PostgreSQL database for use by our telecoms admin here at Reed. She created a number of working tables for an integration project she’s been planning, and now it’s my turn to pull the info out of her database and into our LDAP directory.

Unfortunately, I seem to be having some sort of basic “failure to communicate” situation going on. Poking around the database as the ‘postgres’ super-user, I see the following:

telecom=# \dt
         List of relations
 Schema |  Name  | Type  |  Owner
--------+--------+-------+---------
 public | june   | table | telecom
 public | test   | table | telecom
(3 rows)

Interesting…there really should be more there. Then I remember she’s a recovering MS SQLServer admin, and so may have split her work out into its own schema namespace:

telecom=# \dn
        List of schemas
        Name        |  Owner
--------------------+----------
 Phones             | telecom
 information_schema | postgres
 pg_catalog         | postgres
 pg_toast           | postgres
 public             | postgres
(5 rows)

My first thought was, “Okay, cool; I haven’t had much of a chance to mess around with Postgres schema support. Time to learn!”

On attempting to actually query the data, though, I get the following:

telecom=# select * from Phones.Identification;
ERROR:  schema "phones" does not exist

(I had previously determined that the ‘Identification’ table existed using PGadmin to browse the entire namespace.)

In point of fact, querying from the public schema doesn’t appear to work, either:

telecom=# \d test
               Table "public.test"
  Column   |          Type          | Modifiers
-----------+------------------------+------------
 LastName  | character varying(100) |
 FirstName | character varying(100) |
 Ext       | character varying(100) | default 20
 ListedExt | character varying(100) |
 Room      | character varying(100) |
 Date      | character varying(50)  |
 Cable     | character varying(100) |
 LenPort   | character varying(100) |
 PK        | character varying(50)  | not null
Indexes:
    "UID" UNIQUE, btree ("PK")

telecom=# select count(Room) from test;
ERROR:  column "room" does not exist
LINE 1: select count(Room) from test;

So at this point, I’m basically stuck. Any suggestions from out there amongst the tubes? Is it a charset issue, since she’s working on a Windows client? Am I missing some grants that would actually allow me to get at the Phones schema?

I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Vancouver, BC, trying to sufficiently load myself up with caffeine so I can make it to a normal bedtime. The weekend was tiring and thoroughly satisfying — RubyFringe provided an ass-kicking combination of thought-provoking talks, great food, and more-than-ample supplies of drinks, and I’m actually pretty satisfied with missing OSCON (and all its concurrent geeky fun) in order to spend a few days letting the experience soak in.

If pressed to find a single coherent theme that sums up the whole concept, I would probably have to say that it was the challenge to listen to that crazy voice in the back of your head that tells you to do something different and risky, because the payoff is so huge. Even more importantly, we heard stories of success and failure, which served to remind me at least that mistakes are at least as informative as successes.

The secondary undercurrent to the whole thing, of course, was the relationship between code and music, and indeed between code and art in general. Giles riffed on Nick’s earlier presentation bridging code and jazz with a nod to IDM and Burning Man, and did so with a style that kept people in their seats more than 20 minutes into the lunch break…and then earned him a standing ovation.

There’s already talk of a 10 year reunion, and I’m going to do whatever I can to find a way to spin off a similar event in Portland next year.

Just after Jay Phillips‘ presentation on Adhersion, a small group of us were tossing out other interesting ideas that could be implemented with a full Ruby development stack on top of your call-processing system.

My favorite was the idea of a RBL (realtime blackhole list), as inspired by spam filtering for phone numbers. Basically, you would maintain a distributed list of telemarketers, prank callers, and other folks whose calls you don’t want to answer.