Derry Hamilton
Derry Hamilton

Dad to cats, Uncle to actual humans.

Professional wire wrangler, bit banger, and database poker.

Connecting a Cisco 8831 to Asterisk
Connecting a Cisco 8831 to Asterisk

Derry Hamilton - 03/11/2023

Cisco VOIP phones have the benefit that their advertised features usually work. At least minimally, once you've figured out the right incantation, and how to sidestep the broken bits. Which is more than can be said for most of their competition (stares hard at Avaya). The downside is that...

Microtik RB750gr3 vs. OpenWRT extroot
Microtik RB750gr3 vs. OpenWRT extroot

Derry Hamilton - 13/10/2023

The Microtik RB750gr3 is a very nice router for the money, and plays nicely with OpenWRT, too. However, it comes with very little flash, so it needs an extroot on a MicroSD card. Unfortunately, the stock OpenWRT 22 appears very picky about the card it will work with. ext4_check_descriptors:...

Disambiguating variables, or a “this” keyword, for plpgsql

Derry Hamilton - 07/11/2019

Some names, like account_number, or customer_id crop up in a lot of places, and when you’re juggling tables inside a plpgsql function, it can be a bit of a pain. Postgres allows you to disambiguate names by qualifying them with the function name, or the block name. CREATE FUNCTION app.a_long_function_name(id integer) RETURNS...

Why does Postgres call Rows Tuples?

Derry Hamilton - 21/11/2018

Postgres isn’t alone in referring to rows as tuples; it’s a term from mathematics, specifically it’s used in relational algebra which technically underpins the relational model. But there are other reasons… Postgres was (re)built from the ground up as an Object-Relational Database. So while the most common place people...

Changing Postgres Foreign Data Wrappers

Derry Hamilton - 28/09/2017

Migrating from a commercial server to Postgres meant that we needed to change the underlying connection type for the Foreign Data Wrappers. At this time, there’s no ALTER SERVER command that will do the job, but it’s possible to update the system tables instead. UPDATE pg_foreign_server SET srvfdw = (select oid...