Technical Ramblings

This week, I had the oppourtunity to work with Schuyler in writing stored procedures in Postgres/PostGIS for the first time.

At first, we were writing in plpgsql, but found it didn’t suit our needs… and switched to Python.

Yes, Python. Our database now has stored procedures which decode a cPickle pickle structure from a column (go go unstructured data) and return the output of a key/value pair (based on the key).

It was a very weird thing to see this actually work.

Thanks to Schuyler and Rich Gibson, I now have a spatially aware postgres database.

Later today, thanks to Schuyler and zool, I’ll have a copy of Mapping Hacks, and a bluetooth GPS.

Last night, I learned how to use centroid(), astext(), and distance_spheroid(), and calculated the distance from my house to zool’s house, and from there to Darwin’s, where I ate lunch and used the wireless yesterday. I loaded some data, learned the frustration of having data in different projections, and learned a little bit about the various types of geometry. I loaded data from an ESRI shapefile. I found that “” in Postgres is equivilant to “ in mysql — that is, “GEOMETRY” means ‘the value from column Geometry’, not ‘GEOMETRY’, which is the literal. (If you ever get “Error: column “Foo” does not exist, that might be a good thing to check.)

Last night, I made my first foray into spatial databases.

Last night, I took control of space on my machine.

Tomorrow, I take control of space in the world!

But today, I need to work on things that I’m actually paid for at the moment.