Mercian Labels are now recruiting for a Graphic Designer

Posted by rich on Aug 23, 2010 in Open Source | 0 comments Mercian Labels located in Cannock, Staffordshire are now recruiting for a Graphic Designer (published 23 August 2010). The role of Graphic Designer is to assess and prep electronic design files for digital pre-press work and the production of printing plates, ensuring maximum continuity, the highest quality and efficiency of operation. 100% desk based. Detailed responsibilities * To reconcile...
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Getting a refund for your Microsoft Windows License

Posted by rich on Jul 28, 2010 in Open Source | 14 comments I recently purchases a new Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop from Amazon.co.uk This came with Microsoft Windows Vista pre-loaded, but being the Open Source advocates we are here at Mercian Labels, I bought this laptop with the mind to install Ubuntu 10.04 right away. Whilst installing Ubuntu 10.04 was easy, a few issues arose with getting the wireless working with the chipset, but thats another story;...
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Multiple Accounts using a single Alias in Zimbra

Posted by rich on Mar 30, 2009 in coding | 0 comments A little back end tweak here to allow multiple Zimbra email accounts to use a single alias. Normally, you can only assign an alias to one single user, otherwise you are presented with a similar error: Cannot add alias: Account user@domain already has alias aliasuser@domain We needed to be able to allow two user accounts to send emails from the same account (alias); there may be other ways to do...
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Open Source not just limited with software and the computer market!

Posted by rich on Jul 23, 2008 in Open Source | 0 comments It seems that although “Open Source” isn’t exactly a new term or idea, the area in which it is used is beginning to spread. Not only do we have abundances of newly created open source software, but it seems even musical bands are beginning to take open source to a newer level; or at least pushing the idea further. The latest band to take advantage of open source is Radiohead,...
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Postgresql: Calculate work days (none weekend days)

Posted by rich on Feb 15, 2008 in coding, Postgresql | 4 comments Coming from a MsSQL database with access queries/macros/modules and so on, its easy to be able to work out weekend days from two given dates, ie if you have two dates you can calculate how many days between them aren’t weekdays. In postgresql, this isnt so easy! there aren’t many examples on the net, without creating mass functions, but i’ve come up with this: SELECT count(*)...
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Postgresql: Converting money type to numeric!

Posted by rich on Feb 14, 2008 in coding, Postgresql | 0 comments Quick post here, as I was having trouble finding any information(that worked, or indepth enough to work for what I needed). The type money is now deprecated from postgresql, and a few of our tables contained this data type. This is fine, and worked as we wanted, until there came a time I needed to do a query such as: select * from mytable where (mytable.charge > 0); seems easy enough, but if...
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The MVC fun continues…

Posted by rich on Mar 21, 2007 in coding | 2 comments Well.. we finally decided that we should give the MVC framework process a chance, to see if we could truly benifit from it. I’m going to be using a simple ish MVC framework and Smarty for the templating system, this seems to be working both logically and easy for us, or fairly easy anyway. The way im going to do this is have a main page which will control the configuration etc, and then a...
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Shall we use a MVC framework..

Posted by rich on Mar 20, 2007 in Open Source | 4 comments As mentioned in the previous blog, we’re currently deciding how our new project should flow. By this I mean, do we use the more conventional methods we’re used to (hard coding our php for each individual page) or to take the plunge and go the Model View Controller (MVC) route. I’d decided a few days ago to look into MVC, although i’d touched on this within Ruby on Rails,...
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Auto Increment on PostgreSQL follow-up..

Posted by rich on Mar 14, 2007 in Open Source | 0 comments Just a quick follow-up post here regarding how to achieve auto incrementing on a PostgreSQL field. Thanks to the advise from Senokian I was able to create our database with the exacy same functionality as our MSSQL one. The only field we were concerned with was the customerid one, which should increment by 1 each time a record was added. An example of this is: CREATE TABLE customers (customerid...
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PostgreSQL AUTO INCREMENT PROBLEM

Posted by rich on Mar 13, 2007 in Open Source | 2 comments MSSQL has the lovely added functionality of Auto Increment. Meaning that when you add a new record to a table, it automatically gets added to the next ID. To clear this up, an example is. Customer A has an ID of 1, we add a new record to this table, and it’s automatically given the ID of 2, so the table is logical in the way it flows. If auto increment was not in place each time we add a...
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NULLS AREN’T GOOD!

Posted by rich on Mar 13, 2007 in Open Source | 2 comments The reason for our previous problems now became apparent. This is down to data types; PostgreSQL has a different data type for some of the fields, such as: MSSQL — POSTGRESQL Bin — Boolean Datetime — Timestamp Nchar — Char ntext — Text nvarchar— Varchar This wasn’t the end of the world, it just meant that each field in our database that would need...
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Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) to PostgreSQL Migration

Posted by rich on Mar 13, 2007 in Open Source | 0 comments As already mentioned in a previous blog, we want to migrate our database from MSSQL to PostgreSQL and the first step of this was to see if this was even possible. We decided on a fairly straightforward table (customers), that had many fields and many records (20000), but little in the way of constraints. There are a few guides online showing the easy steps to go from a typical MSSQL database to...
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