I am consistently impressed by the progress. This is Corporate America verbiage here, in a very unconventional format.
Edgy may not be the best Ubuntu so far (clearly Dapper right now, as my programming/server escapades this summer can attest), but it’s definitely going to be cool while it’s not crashing.
I had some slop time this morning at work, and I have a request:
Could someone please test this webpage in Firefox? You should see the following behaviors:
The reading is thick to the point that you can chew it into a grainy pulp, but I’m really convinced that foreign key constraints are da shizzle, as they say.
“ON DELETE CASCADE” and “ON UPDATE CASCADE” says most of the SQL you traditionally write for webapps goes away.
For the layperson [sane person?], let’s say you have the following tables (comma-separated fields):
Domains (domain)
bloodmoney.net
antesonic.org
Users (name, domain, password)
brandon, antesonic.org, pw
brandon, bloodmoney.net, pw
somebody, bloodmoney.net, pw
Let’s say field #2 in Users (the ‘domain’ field) was given a foreign key constraint to ‘domain’ in Domains. If you tried to change a domain in Users from bloodmoney.net to brandon.com, the update would fail because it didn’t match a domain in Domains. In real life, you would never want a query like this to be successful, but in many less-advanced databases (as in, Access forevermore and MySQL before 5.0) would dumbly allow this, corrupting your data in a big way.
If you have ON UPDATE CASCADE, if you changed antesonic.org to antesonic.net, it would change in Users. This is normally handled with program logic.
In fact, this was one of the biggest problems in SUM, and one of the main reasons I resisted allowing deletion; if you killed a “type of material,” what happened to all the material of that type? If you had ON DELETE CASCADE, it would be deleted automatically and there would be no inconsistencies in the database.
Children, gather round. Johnny, put down that sharp stick. Now. Ahem. Let me tell you a story, a story about a woman named Sleeping Contractor.
Sleeping Contractor is not a princess. No ballroom gowns and tiaras for her. No sir. In fact, Sleeping Contractor barely maintains business casual. In strictly clothing terms, Sleeping Contractor’s real is only marginally kept.
Sleeping Contractor lives in Cubetopia, which is an underpopulated, predominately sheet-metal-and-gray-fabric-walls establishment, under constant assualt from the vicious Thumbtack armies and the dread Squealing HuffalaPewter (known locally by some as the Squealing HP).
[As a sidenote, even those intimately familiar with HuffalaPewters are unable to determine why the Squealing HuffalaPewter squeals so much. So… don’t ask.]
Back to business: Sleeping Contractor lives a lonely life, visited only occasionally by Unknown Supervisor, who only leaves more work. These visits generally happen in the morning, which means those postprandial afternoons are quite lonesome indeed.
However, Sleeping Contractor has a secret, or at least little-known, tactic: Sleeping Contractor retreats to a darker corner of Cubetopia, suspected to be named “Section D.” Sleeping Contractor leans forward, puts down her head, and goes to sleep!
Despite even the occasional roar of the Squealing HuffalaPewter, other residents (rather: the other resident) of Cubetopia can hear the snoring quite clearly.
No one can tell how this secret has remained kept (at least from those with power over Cubetopia) for so long. In fact, it is widely assumed that Unknown Supervisor has caught Sleeping Contractor doing the deed at her normal desk! It is a mystery, if some arcane skill or spellcraft allows Sleeping Contractor to remain in Cubetopia, safe from exile, despite these normally quite unbecoming behaviors.
Will it be happily ever after for our dear Contractor?
This blog, or its predecessor, has been going for about 600 posts and one month shy of three years. Wow.
Apparently, according to the news media, any device that emits sound is now an “iPod-like device,” which means I’m going to have to start calling my new computer an “iPod-like device” as well, because I’m listening to music on it quite a bit.
I have that unpleasant sick feeling you get when you hardcore pass out after dinner, wake up within two hours of normal bedtime, and zombie around for too long so you can do it all again the next day. I should have learned something when I did this once a week in Port Arthur last summer.
Sigma got a very incremental, very trivial upgrade and is now able to report that n rooms have been added to the rooms database, but they are inaccessible at this point. I also don’t support room names, descriptions, or exits, but who’s counting? I am at a tipping point now, because with just a bit more program logic I will be able to get feature-superior to the C++ version.
The Counting Crows’ Recovering the Satellites is such an interesting counterpoint to August and Everything After. It’s kind of like imagining Mozart screwing around with an electric guitar or something like that. Lacks polish, a little out-of-band in terms of expertise, but still excellent.
Fuel’s Something Like Human is a remarkably memorable sophomore album (at least w.r.t. mass consumption). Of course, Sunburn as an album (aside from the saving graces of “Shimmer”) was rotten dog excrement. “Jesus or a Gun” as a song title? This isn’t death metal, guys. Learn the lesson of Incubus: consider the audience.
Speaking of excrement: etymology request for this term, please.
I hear that Five for Fighting has a new album out, and I’m always up for warbly falsetto + piano (actually not kidding in this case).
I found Juggernaut (Academic Challenge) on Facebook and Friend’ed him. I wanted to leave him a message with the sole text “JUGGERNAUT!” but I’m afraid he wouldn’t even remember the joke. If I get hauled out of my cube in ‘cuffs, it should at least be for something fancy like fraud.
I really like the programmer of Postfix:
These changes do affect external behavior. Therefore they had better be configurable, to ensure that there is a way to keep Postfix working with software as before.
I don’t care that the breakage is not Postfix’s fault. It worked, and it must be made to work again.
We make this mistake all the time of introducing an improvement without providing a way to turn it off, so we’re not learning.
Nice to see someone more important than many of the fanatics is thinking this way. (For reference, the incompatibilities being discussed on the mailing list were Outlook-related.)
Given the complete nonsense this story represents, I would say that this may be the best Slashdot comment I have seen in a while.
The new “Sigma Page” link is now in its proper place.
BUG #2 STATUS: CLOSED, MARKED #FIXED#
This kind of average user is why it’s a little bothersome to be thinking about trying a server with Ubuntu. For reference, the T30 doesn’t look much like a server.