Tom Ivar Helbekkmo writes:
> > Yes, it's  a typo. That happens if you have to use a M$ system for work.
> 
> Another thing that happens when you have to do that is that you follow
> up someone's mail message, and end up generating a message that begins
> with a short answer to no obvious question, then has a legal signature
> separator, then your signature, and finally the entire message that
> you're responding to, including a selection of header lines that your
> M$ software has mangled so that they're now plain wrong.

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.
So I have to stick with Outlook.

> 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.

Michael
-- 
Dr. Michael Meskes, Project-Manager    | topsystem Systemhaus GmbH
meskes@topsystem.de                    | Europark A2, Adenauerstr. 20
meskes@debian.org                      | 52146 Wuerselen
Go SF49ers! Go Rhein Fire!             | Tel: (+49) 2405/4670-44
Use Debian GNU/Linux!                  | Fax: (+49) 2405/4670-10

Wed, 27 May 1998 09:34:24 +0200 (CEST)
Michael Meskes <meskes@topsystem.de>
Re: [HACKERS] 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"

27 May 1998 21:22:36 +0200
Tom Ivar Helbekkmo <tih+mail@Hamartun.Priv.NO>
Off-topic: Communication. (was: Connect string again)

[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


Wed, 27 May 1998 22:03:24 +0100 (BST)
Peter T Mount <psqlhack@retep.org.uk>
Re: [HACKERS] Off-topic: Communication. (was: Connect string again)
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

27 May 1998 16:14:03 -0700
Michael Graff <explorer@flame.org>
Re: [HACKERS] Off-topic: Communication. (was: Connect string again)
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

Wed, 27 May 1998 16:41:06 -0700
Joao Paulo Felix <felix@cyclades.com>
delete columm help
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"

28 May 1998 07:32:08 +0200
Tom Ivar Helbekkmo <tih+mail@Hamartun.Priv.NO>
Re: [GENERAL] delete columm help
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


Thu, 28 May 1998 06:32:45 +0100 (BST)
Peter T Mount <psqlhack@retep.org.uk>
Re: [HACKERS] Off-topic: Communication. (was: Connect string again)
Tom Ivar Helbekkmo writes:
> 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

Oh! Please take my apologies. Up to this moment I haven't noticed that your
original mail was send in private and not via the list. I'm really sorry
about this, since I absolutely agree that this behaviour is not good.

> 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 couldn't agree more. But tell that to my boss. :-( But then I'm leaving
this job anyway, so I don't care about it that much anymore. 

> 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.

And almost noone will use M$ I think. :-)

Michael

-- 
Dr. Michael Meskes, Project-Manager    | topsystem Systemhaus GmbH
meskes@topsystem.de                    | Europark A2, Adenauerstr. 20
meskes@debian.org                      | 52146 Wuerselen
Go SF49ers! Go Rhein Fire!             | Tel: (+49) 2405/4670-44
Use Debian GNU/Linux!                  | Fax: (+49) 2405/4670-10

Thu, 28 May 1998 09:58:13 +0200 (CEST)
Michael Meskes <meskes@topsystem.de>
Re: [HACKERS] Off-topic: Communication. (was: Connect string again)