Unutterably Silly So what are you doing RIGHT NOW?

[recluse]

That's not Tom.
It's Mom!

Kenny, the squirrels aren't incompetent.
They're trying to tell you something.....
it's time for a bath!

[kindlekitten]

getting ready to go to the Renn Faire

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Libby Cone

I just took a BBC brain gender quiz and found that I scored exactly smack dab in between male and female; I think my ability to rotate 3-D shapes in my head is what pushed me away from the female spectrum (plus my poor reading of faces).
Yesterday it was finally cool enough to sit outside; I took my knitting, my copy of Infinite Jest, and my Kindle (for the dictionary). I am using hand-painted yarn; whenever I got to a small bit of magenta (every 10 rows or so) I'd put down the knitting and read some of the book. After having to look up so many words (fantod, parget, reglet), I'd tire and return to the knitting, digesting what I had just read. I hope this weather continues!

I just took the test and discovered I am a perfectly average man. I scored 50% on the male spectrum!

[happy_terd]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

getting ready to go to the Renn Faire

Take some candid shots of the scantily clad serving wenches for us.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by happy_terd

Draw me next! How come Tom always gets to go first?

Bite me!

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

getting ready to go to the Renn Faire

Keep your clothes on!

[WT Sharpe]

Wow! The Renaissance Faire's clothing optional? Where do I sign up?

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Libby Cone

I just took a BBC brain gender quiz and found that I scored exactly smack dab in between male and female; I think my ability to rotate 3-D shapes in my head is what pushed me away from the female spectrum (plus my poor reading of faces).
Yesterday it was finally cool enough to sit outside; I took my knitting, my copy of Infinite Jest, and my Kindle (for the dictionary). I am using hand-painted yarn; whenever I got to a small bit of magenta (every 10 rows or so) I'd put down the knitting and read some of the book. After having to look up so many words (fantod, parget, reglet), I'd tire and return to the knitting, digesting what I had just read. I hope this weather continues!

Interesting I just did this and came up only 25% male! not sure if I should be concerned or not....

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Wow! The Renaissance Faire's clothing optional? Where do I sign up?

You must be thinking about Burning Man -- H_T's area of expertise.

[happy_terd]

I wouldn't go to a burning man type event.

People always want to show off their naked form but never want to keep it in shape.
--------------

[recluse]

The only thing you'll get from the Burning Man is a burning sensation.
At a Renaissance Faire, you can meet Al Gore's science advisors.

[happy_terd]

I do like getting the giant turkey legs at the faire.

I usually end up going home about 5 lbs heavier.

[happy_terd]

I do want to dress up as an elf one day and show up at a Renaissance Faire. They get pretty mad when you pretend to confuse them with AD&D nerds.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by devilsadvocate

That was a concern of mine as well; I did not one but 2 articles to that effect on my site (also stressing about the tightening use of Java). Incidentally, just read that Oracle bought the company that makes InnoDB back in 2005; that's where that connection probably comes in.

Possibly. I don't offhand know when MySQL introduced InnoDB as a database file type, but I think it predates Oracle buying Sun.

MySQL as former Sun IP might be Oracle-owned but the source is still GNU GPL'ed, at least for those of us who don't use it on an enterprise level,

Not sure it matters if you do. It reminds me a bit of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The open source version of that is Centos, and AFAIK, the only difference between CentOS and RHEL is the branding. You can get an RPM to apply Red Hat branding to CentOS, so if you run CentOS and want commercial Red Hat support, you apply the RPM, the call Red Hat and say "Hi! I'm running RHEL and I'd like a support contract. What are my options?"

It think what makes MySQL Enterprise is the presence of a support contract.

and it was never really meant for that in the first place (though it scales up surprisingly well, being used by no less than Facebook and Wikipedia).

A co-worker at a former employer was bringing up MySQL Cluster for internal support purposes. He wound up biting the bullet and installing MySQL 5.1 carrier grade, which was technically beta, because all the issues he was having were due to bugs fixed or limitations removed in 5.1. The boss wasn't enthusiastic about beta code for production support, but it worked fine.

One reason I don't see Oracle killing MySQL is that it generates a revenue stream from support. Former employer investigated that option, and had a "They must be joking!" response to the quoted prices. I suspect I could live happily on the interest to the amount Facebook pays (and I can't image Facebook not having a support contract.)

A few forks of MySQL are already in production such as MariaDB which was started by the same guy who founded MySQL (back when it was a standalone company before Sun took it over).

Not familiar with MariaDB, but no surprise.

When it's a relational DB? A database that groups tables, fields etc by a particular attribute (i.e. how one table relates to another). RDBMS is the software which enables us to access and work with (i.e. manage) the data. That's my Alex Trebek answer.

The key characteristic I think of for a relational DB is normalization: there should be one copy of any data element, and anything that needs to access that particular element should have a pointer to it rather than a copy.

You can achieve the same end result in other ways, and effectively hide the fact that you aren't truly relational. And it may be necessary for performance and efficiency reasons to have more than one copy of some elements and not be fully normalized, but you run risks. How do you assure those multiple copies are in sync and the same? What happens if they aren't?

My hunch is you'll love it.

I know a bit about relational DBs. What I'm not familiar with is the details of MySQL.

From what I'm finding it's a question of horsepower, really: ISAM is non-relational but faster and easier on resources, and InnoDB is the opposite, which is not to say it's a bad performer (I haven't used it myself but I may invent a reason just to find out).

If you have the hardware to throw at it, performance shouldn't be a problem.

ISAM may well be faster and less resource intensive. But it is non-relational. My concern is that an awful lot of folks who jumped headfirst into MySQL may not properly understand that, and may get bit when they run into a case an ISAM file doesn't handle well.

The web has produced a generation of developers who began with web technologies, and managed to miss a lot stuff folks doing traditional development had to learn. Some of it, like database theory, is very relevant to web stuff.

BASH FTW.

BASH is what you get when you can't decide whether you want to use the Bourne/Korn or the C shell, so you compromise and create a shell that combines them.

What I'm still looking for is a good guide that details the stuff only in BASH.

Also, I can see why things are the way they are in vi, but even though I come from a pre-mouse, pre-GUI era I still can't justify (for myself, today) learning all the things which make it so powerful. It appears to me that most of the logic in vi is merely to enable the user to "move around" within the program instead of actually editing text; while this was a major part of the design, it feels more like a hindrance to me now and I tend to use nano any time I have the option.

I had a former boss who was a highly experienced developer and SysAdmin. The first thing he installed in a *nix box was nano - he couldn't stand vi. He did any real development in UltraEdit under Windows and moved the results over to *nix, so he didn't really need a powerful editor on the *nix side.

I learned vi back when for the same reason I learned WordStar in the MS-DOS days: I might prefer something else, but it was likely to be available on whatever machine I had to work on, while what I preferred wouldn't be.

Vi's real power derives from two features: it supports regular expressions, and it supports the concept of piping the contents of a buffer (or a selected portion of a buffer) through an external program or script to perform editing beyond what vi itself can do.

See Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov's classification of editors as Eastern Orthodox and Western Orthodox at
http://www.softpanorama.org/Articles..._editors.shtml

Nikolai sees vi as the arch-typical Western Orthodox editor because of RE and piping support. Eastern Orthodox editors are characterized by a command line and a script language, with the canonical example being IBM's Xedit, scriptable in REXX.

Many editors straddle the fence and have elements of both, but I think his fundamental distinction holds water.

They're still trying to reinvent themselves; if I was a betting man I'd say watch for a takeover/buyout of Novell within the next 12 months.

I concur. I'm actually surprised it hasn't already occurred.

MS has no need to be that forceful on the desktop;

Er, what would you call Vista?

(I'd call it a solution stuffed down the market's throat 6 months to a year before the hardware to really run it well was in common use, because MS wanted to End-of-Life XP and generate a new revenue stream.)

they will in a few years however, unless they can come up with some serious innovation (preferably without ripping off open-source). On the enterprise front, they're pretty much sunk except for the fact that corporations tend to move more slowly when it comes to technology adoption.

They have to. Corporate wide upgrades are complex and fraught processes. Lots of big shops still run XP on the desktop, deliberately skipped Vista, and are thinking hard about whether and when to jump to Win7.

For internal stuff, like desktops, networking, file sharing, and email, MS rules. For externally facing stuff, they have to at least look at Linux.

Steve Jobs on the other hand appears to be able to sell a Hefty bag to a Greenpeace member.

I'll give Apple credit where credit is due: they have learned that design sells, and Apple products look good as well as work well. They also remember their roots in being easy to use, and put a lot of thought into the UI.

I'm not thrilled with their "Have it our way!" approach to systems, but I'm not the user Apple aims at. And for the users they do aim at, Apple's way is just fine.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Hard to find silliness among the Tech Talk eh?

Depending upon your viewpoint, Tech Talk may be silliness.
______
Dennis