Journal stoolpigeon's Journal: I Can't Leave Well Enough Alone 10
My desktop machine at work is now running Fedora 19. It just came out, I'm busy - what the heck is wrong with me?
So something about how stuff works regarding the nvidia drivers, the kernel and what not changed. So that saga continues. Getting both my monitors working was a real exercise in pain. I tried a lot of stuff before I ended up with it working and I went down so many different trails that I don't remember for sure how I got here so I'm not even help to anyone else. Stand out moments were that lots of paths that included just plugging in the card and both monitors led to lock ups at various points in the booting up or getting KDE going process. So while I don't remember specifics I can say that in general- I did the main install using the on board video (intel) and a single monitor. When I got that all working (mostly) then I put in the Nvidia card and hooked it up to a single monitor. Then I installed the nvidia drivers. All was fine (mostly) and it was hooking up that second that made everything go square shaped.
What fixed it? I don't freaking know. The order of how things went? What was hooked up first and then second? I really don't know. I just know now that the nvidia drivers are working and it is using both screens and they look rather nice. That's all I know.
Oh but get this -- I posted a lot about my struggles with Firefox. Well right at this moment Chrome crashes X and kicks me back to logging in. Firefox works fine - and google hangouts works fine with Firefox. What?! I don't know. I can't explain it. It just is what it is. Starting Chrome makes SELinux complain - maybe that's related. Maybe the Google folks will fix it at some point. They update Chrome pretty regularly. I like Fedora better anyway. And Opera works fine. Konqueror too of course. Oh man - there were some early attempts where Konqueror was all that worked and those were fun times.
I've got the new kscreen deal for setting up screens. And it's so much better than the old stuff but frankly I'm terrified to go anywhere near it right now. I'm sort of scared of messing stuff up. The nvidia x server settings program runs and that seems sufficient. I had fun earlier when using either of them locked up the system and it wouldn't take input from the keyboard. That went away do to some amazing, smart thing I did without knowing it.
It's not all that crazy different from my F18 setup. Oh - I've got MariaDB now instead of MySQL and they don't have the MySQL workbench (data modeling is still borked) in the repos any more. I can't say I'm totally on board with this decision. Now I've got to keep track of it and update it when appropriate. And I get that Oracle is the evil - but whatever. If I'd been running the world back in the when it would be PostgreSQL everywhere and I wouldn't even have to worry about this.
Here's a fun error message that apparently doesn't really matter - "A start job is running for Wait for Plymouth Boot Screen to Quit." Have fun parsing that puppy.
MySQL workbench (Score:2)
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I like relational dbs, but SQL is kind of a crap language to access them. The default join is a Cartesian which is almost never what you want. The defaults for UPDATE and DELETE are to affect every row in the table. Yes, transactions prevent data loss here, but transactions aren't there to save us from crappy syntax.
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Sure, I use Cartesian joins, like, once a year, if I'm doing some find-unmatched report, and need to inject some records.
I guess the syntax could've been more regular or something, but I think they made INSERTs and UPDATEs look radically different for the casual reader, not the experienced pro generating the SQL on the fly.
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Nope, all of those are horrible too. I have not actually put a lot of thought into what I would like a relational query language to look like. Now that I'm thinking about it, though, I'd like to give the problem some consideration.
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Regular expressions are cool, and extremely powerful. Now if only everyone could agree to ONE SYNTAX (sigh).
Back to SQL: not only is it a terrible language, but relational databases are all wrong for the typical use case. Don't get me wrong, RDBMs are infinitely valuable for the data storage/retrieval operations they were originally designed for, but they are just not designed for object persistence. They work (sometimes with great effort) to accomplish the task, but they simply aren't optimized for it.
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and
"just not designed for object persistence" -- do you mean all of the overhead of normalizing data and casting it to canonical data types, as opposed to just dumping it to some key/value store a-la MongoDB?
I mean, sure, there is no universal tool that scales from a boot image to a data center. Yes, fanbois are tedious. But, other than PHP, I can find a little something to love in just about an
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RDBMs are designed and optimized to handle data that naturally fit in tables. They're close kin to spreadsheets. There's a lot of data that behaves this way, and it's nice to have a solution tailored to them. A lot of data structures, though, especially dynamic ones, just don't fit well in a table. From the human perspective, it can be unreasonable to try to debug how a data structure is being stored. Ever try to store a B-tree in SQL? Even a doubly linked list can be trouble (especially when the data
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Two strategies for dealing with a syntax (perhaps naively) designed for easy non-nerd legibility:
a) Encase the sillier bits into strings, and interpolate (safe) data into the strings for execution,
b) Use an API against pre-compiled command objects, where the string interpolation/compilation is a performance bore.