Databases, Ghandi

Kris and I went to see Arun Ghandi speak last night. It was informative and quite entertaining, although it didn't turn me into a pacifist. The roots of Ghandi's argument were:

• Everything is interdependent; recognize this and try to form positive relationships with everyone (on all levels from personal to International Relations), and the world will be a better place.
  
• Getting angry is human nature, but if you perform mental exercise and focus on positive resolutions to issues that make you angry, you can turn it into a positive rather than a negative.
  
• "Right over Might" - the old argument that simply having might implies an inability to focus on what is right.
  

All of these arguments were couched in humorous tales, talk about religion, and the occasionally painful anecdote. Ghandi didn't portray himself very well; at times he came across as a demagogue for his grandfather, rather than a thinker in his own right; I think I'd have been happier if he had built on his grandfather's ideas more than happily shouting from his shadow. Still, it was a good lecture - even if I remain convinced that pacifism isn't going to work without the cooperation of everyone else. Relations, Conflict Resolution and possibly Intervention remain the three pillars of International Relations in my book - even though Intervention should be used much more carefully than it is by the current Administration.

On a less theoretical note, today I've been wrestling with a client's database. They have kept their records in a WordPerfect file for years, using a table to roughly emulate a poorly designed flat-file database. TSG created a relational database system (wrapped in a PHP website) for them that does the same thing - the last challenge was getting the data out. It took me several hours to transform data from WordPerfect into Excel, fix the formatting errors (WP puts linefeeds in odd places), break the table into subtables, and then import it into PostgreSQL. I messed it up horribly the first time, but the second try worked pretty well. PostgreSQL did a good job of catching referential-integrity errors, and Excel/Access provided me with the tools I needed to make things usable; overall, though, it was a giant pain in the arse.

Mood: tired
Music: None