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Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Converting a database from CouchDB to Mongodb

Posted in Database Management Systems, Still-coding, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 28, 2025| Leave a Comment »

When I began the project I am currently working on (more details will be provided next month – probably), it was initially intended as a small test to determine the capabilities of AI.  Over the last six months it has turned into something that we might take further. 

But I hit a problem. As a little hobby project I chose the database I really really like – CouchBD.  CouchDB is elegant, simple yet very functional and efficient. Close to the perfect database management system (DBMS).  But to take it further I need to involve other developers and it turs out that CouchDB skills are few and far between. Truly it is the Betamax of DBMSs.

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More adventures with AI

Posted in ai, Still-coding, tagged , , , , , on January 20, 2025| Leave a Comment »

My previous blog post outlines my success in converting a data structure definition from one format to another. Both ChatGTP and Gemini had a really good stab at it. The result was mainly accurate and extra information had been added for me. ChatGTP managed to make a mistake on the second attempt at the task, and when I asked it why, it used a completely made-up (and incorrect) rule about SQL Databases as an excuse. So Turing Test passed!

I gave it another task. Convert a routine from using the SQLite3 data base management system, to the higher performance MySQL. This is a straightforward, if tedious task. How did it do?

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AI to the rescue – Part 2.

Posted in Database Management Systems, Still-coding, Technology, tagged , , , , , , on January 11, 2025| Leave a Comment »

In a previous post I showed how an AI system (ChatGPT) was an easy way of converting an SQL Schema to a JSON-Schema. It was very successful and could save hours of donkey-work when dealing with a legacy database. I am coding in TypeScript so I asked for a TypeScript schema as well. It also did that perfectly.

I asked Gemini to do the same job.

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AI to the rescue

Posted in Database Management Systems, Still-coding, tagged , , , , , on January 9, 2025| Leave a Comment »

I have been working on my hobby project, which is a generic database updating tool. It uses an extension of the JSON-Schema standard. But how do you deal with a new database from a legacy database.

I found a really simple solution, I asked ChatGTP to produce a JSON-Schema based on a database dump – which happily is a set of SQL statements.

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New Outlook not an improvement

Posted in Business, Technology, tagged , , , , on November 27, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Lat week my wife’s desktop Outlook stopped working. It wouldn’t even start in safe mode. All the fixes we found on the web didn’t solve the problem. So the obvious solution was uninstall it and reinstall it. All our data is replicated on Outlook.com, so it would get downloaded from the Outlook server and she would be back in business.

We went into the control panel apps page. Because Outlook is part of Office 365 we ran the Office 365 uninstall and install programs. This didn’t solve the problem. OK – no problem we can just install Outlook as a stand-alone. This worked fine, the mails were all downloaded and we were back to normal.

Except we weren’t.

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What are these MRP election forecasts?

Posted in Maths, tagged , , on July 2, 2024| Leave a Comment »

In the past, election forecasts have been made on a country-wide basis. A sample of people is carefully selected to represent the population as a whole and they are asked who they will vote for. The percentages for each party are normally pretty good, but how do you convert that to seats in parliament? Just because a party gets x% of the vote doesn’t mean that get the same percentage of seats – a fact well known to the smaller parties. In the past there have been rules of thumb, but these are very crude.

Now there are forecasts by constituency based on a technique called MPR. This stands for “multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP)”. How does this work?

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Welcome to VOIP at home.

Posted in Technology, tagged on January 17, 2024| Leave a Comment »

I remember talking to a comms consultant in the 1980’s about packet switched networks like the Internet, which was new-ish technology at the time. He had this dreamy look in his eye. “one day there will be packet-switched voice”.

Well he was right – we have it and it is called VOIP (Voice Over IP (Internet Protocol)). All the telephone providers in the UK are switching over to this now, which means your telephone has to plug into your router, wherever that is. In my case this is not in the hallway, where a telephone belongs, but next to the television on account of my broadband provider being a cable company.

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Remember Usenet?

Posted in History, Technology, tagged on December 11, 2023| Leave a Comment »

I was looking at the page telling you about Moving to Python from other languages and it referenced “comp.lang.python” without any explanation of what it was. That took me back. It is referring to a Usenet News Group. They were the first social media dating back to the 1980s. This was before Facebook, before Reddit, before online forums, before the World Wide Web. I thought they were long gone. But no – they are still alive and well.

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IT Pioneers: Charles Bachman – Database Pioneer

Posted in Database Management Systems, History, tagged , , , , on September 19, 2023| Leave a Comment »

If you are asked to name the most important pioneer in database development, the name Edgar Codd is probably the first name that comes to mind. He pioneered the concept of relational database. But another person deserves credit as well. Nearly a decade earlier Charles Bachman did fundamental work, developing the first database management system.

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I have to do what to fuel my car?

Posted in Technology, tagged , on August 31, 2023| 1 Comment »

There is an EV charging station just opened near our house in Ealing. I am bemused by the way they are going about doing this. I mean I can buy a railway ticket, or pay for petrol for my car just by tapping a machine with my credit card. But to pay for a charge to your EV you have to go through a grotesque procedure that involved giving the supplier a lot of personal information for no obvious reason. Click on the thumbnail on the right to see the full set of instructions.

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