Yanking The Window Shade

WTF kind of muttonheads are people turning into?? Land of the free, home of the brave? Not the good old US of A, founded by a bloody revolution. That must have been some other country. That reminds me of all the nitwits on /. (well ok, that is rather redundant) and other forums that justify all manner of horrid corporate abuses with "well that's capitalism!" Not in the sense that yeah, some folks will do anything to get what they want, but in the sense that it's OK and no one should complain.

Mush-headed nitwit ignernt mutter mumble....

Heh. It reminds me of Jerry Lee Cooper http://jerryleecooper.com/

I think that is a big part of the issue.. I found his Matrix analogy scarily fitting. Most people seem to think that Microsoft has ultimate control over all software (or at least all legal software)... They don't know better, and when told differently they can't believe it because they've been so programmed that MS IS software and anything else can't possibly be good and/or legal.

You owe me a keyboard, NoDough. Now I understand the math behind microshaft's TCO and ROI figures!

Ok, so is JLC totally ignorant, or writing posts designed to be totally clueless/stupid? (I did find that latest post rather funny though) I'm confused...

From his about

About

This is Jerry Lee Cooper’s Un-Offical Fan Site

JerryLeeCooper is a net guru with a internet cult following rivaled only by Bill Gates him self.

Jerrys insight is often mocked but his wisdom is well beyond his years and will go down in history as one of the nets leading authorities.

Yikes. Or maybe he's just having a good time.

Ken I got the following error messages when I attemprted to post a comment.

Quoting: Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (111) in /home/helios/public_html/blog/include/db/mysql.inc.php on line 263

Warning: mysql_select_db() [function.mysql-select-db]: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (111) in /home/helios/public_html/blog/include/db/mysql.inc.php on line 264

Warning: mysql_select_db() [function.mysql-select-db]: A link to the server could not be established in /home/helios/public_html/blog/include/db/mysql.inc.php on line 264 serendipity error: unable to connect to database - exiting.

Also it might be an idea to have a generic message that doesn't tell people about the innards of the application that just errored out.

TC, I'll just credit that keyboard to the several you owe me. You're posts are not only more frequent, but imminently more humorous when intended to be so.

The Jerry Lee Cooper sight is actually a compilation of various posts (mostly on InfoWorld's forums, IIRC) by someone claiming to be JLC. Whether he's a real honest-to-goodness idiot or someone posting for the sake of satire, I do not know.

alc -

Jerry Lee Cooper invented the internet two years before Al Gore did it.

When Steve Jobs and the Woz were wasting time on the 8 bit Apple II, JLC perfected the 64 bite apple pie.

Cower before his genius.

And all this time, I thought Al Gore invented the internet :~)

Thanks TC, it's good to know someone is listening, the blokes seem to have gone off on a pissing up the wall contest.

Quoting:The point I'm making is not that mySQL is good or bad. It's the website that doesn't hide these system messages from the general user that are bad.

...and it's PHP which makes it harder to prevent it which is bad too.

Yeah. Error handling is one of PHP's Achilles heels. I sure hope that they fix that with PHP 6 and adopt a stance similar to Python: Everything is an exception. Right now, some PHP modules emit errors. Some exceptions. Some both (configurable) and some neither (relying on old-fashioned returning FALSE).

Other than that, I do like PHP though :-)

>MySQL is better for a CMS, forum, and blog than other styles because of performance. If my host, 1and1, were to utilize other database formats, my site, which is on a shared server, would slow down quickly.

That's an age-old myth based on the way things *used* to be - 10 years ago. As MySQL has *tried* (and with minimal success) to become more enterprise-ready, their so-called "speed advantage" over PostgreSQL has disappeared. And their reliability issues, as so vividly illustrated with this incident, have not really improved.

If your data is worth Creating, Retrieving, Updating, Deleting (CRUD for you DB old-timers) then it's worth doing all that reliably. MySQL has not proven its reliability, in my experience (professionally speaking).

For those who claim that I'm bigoted against MySQL, you might want to re-examine your definition of "bigot". I'm not making these statements based on any "prejudice" (pre-judgment) because I've reached my conclusions about MySQL based on real-life experience.

>Quoted: >>The point I'm making is not that mySQL is good or bad. It's the website that doesn't hide these system messages from the general user that are bad.

>...and it's PHP which makes it harder to prevent it which is bad too.

And blaming the scripting language for its inability to mask the database engine failures is something I'd expect from MS supporters.

I'm with you 100% Anonymous DarrenR114. A lot of the problem is that mysql lets you shoot yourself in the foot and you don't even have to aim.

"That's an age-old myth based on the way things *used* to be - 10 years ago. As MySQL has *tried* (and with minimal success) to become more enterprise-ready"

Read what I stated again. I never mention enterprise level, but for a CMS, forum, and blog. I also neglected to mention that the databases themselves on my site don't reach anywhere near 100 MB.

> I never mention enterprise level,

It's all in what your needs are, and even enterprises can make good use of MySQL for predominantly read-only tasks.

If you insist that an enterprise use one and only one tool for all of their db tasks, then, no, MySQL isn't enterprise-ready.

But --

large enterprises tend to have a diversity of applications.

Quoting:When I clicked on ¨Full Story¨, I received this series of errors: Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (111) in /home/helios/ public_html/blog/include/db/mysql.inc.php on line 263

I didn't realize MySQL printed such fantastic errors. How did it know that PHP was calling it from line 263?

That appears to be a design flaw by a PHP programmer. Either the module designer didn't offer the web programmer the option to deal with the error gracefully; or, the PHP module has the option, but the PHP programmer decided not to use it.

I'm pretty good with PHP. The error isn't hard to catch.Not at all. It seems to be a flaw in Helios' CMS. I think it's Joomla.

> I think it's Joomla.

Cringe. I've been using Joomla for a site. I've got the old one (pre 1.5) because it took me FOREVER to figure out why 1.5 wasn't working on my server. Unfortunately, all of the nice programmer's doc is now for the 1.5 release. Grrrrrr.

Have found Joomla to be powerful and hair-pulling, slick and buggy. Not all of that is the fault of the CMS. Like all things PHP, it can be thwacked by regressions in PHP. My problems turned out to be a function of problems in PHP 5.0.4.

Quoting:Thanks TC, it's good to know someone is listening, the blokes seem to have gone off on a pissing up the wall contest.

Boys will be boys Tracyanne!

Quoting:Like all things PHP, it can be thwacked by regressions in PHP.

That's the difference between being able to program PHP and really knowing PHP. I regulary test my PHP code across different PHP versions. I've written automated unit tests to make this easier for me. I rarely run into problems.

Most problems occur with packages who want to run on PHP4 and PHP5. There are quite a few gotcha's when trying to run PHP4 code on PHP5. I use PHP5 exclusively for all my work and I don't support PHP4. This avoids most problems automatically. The rest is just a matter of proper programming practices. I don't rely much on esoteric PHP functionality or things that "should work". I test, write checks and failsafes and generally try to keep my code as simple and straightforward as possible.

Not that PHP has it's fair share of problems, but it's not as bad as a lot of people make it out to be. The only thing I really dislike is it's haphazard error/exception handling.

So DarrenR114 - you say that mysql is garbage, a toy at best, based on your experience, and that your viewpoint is not an example of bigotry. I don't doubt that you might have had some bad experience, but that sounds like an anomalous data point to me.

My own experience with mysql has been good. I originally started using it because I wanted a web database and mysql was not only lighweight and easy to use, but blew the doors off postgres, which I had also used.

Mysql isn't a replacement for oracle, but it is a perfectly fine database in it's niche. We're using mysql on linux as the back end for spam quarantine database which has 17,000 busy users. The database is around 40 GB in size, not gargantuan, but not tiny either. It's held up amazingly well in 24/7 use since 2005.

I'm curious about the folks who say its speed is due to the MyISAM storage engine - I've found mysql to be *much* faster with the innodb table type, than with MyISAM. With MyISAM, you can't lock a row, but have to lock an entire table. With innodb, you can do row-level locking and that makes a *huge* difference under heavy database activity.

And fast for read-only? sure, but I've found it pretty fast for writing as well. But don't believe me - why not ask slashdot, live journal, google?

I leave you with this question: why did sun just pay a cool billion to buy Mysql AB, if mysql is really just a crappy little toy as you say?

>why did sun just pay a cool billion to buy Mysql AB

For the same reason they bough Star Division?

Or Cobalt?

Quoting: For the same reason they bough Star Division?

To open source it, then offer a commercially supported version as well?

Quoting: Or Cobalt?

Aha, to kill it off?

In any case, amusing speculation - but back to my still unanswered question: why did sun pay a billion if mysql is worthless? do sun have too much money?

> Or Cobalt?

That's the one that worries me. Cobalt had good products and Sun killed them, whether through neglect or malice (I've heard arguments made both ways).

herzeleid -

Sigh.

Yeah. Sun makes nothing but golden investments.

Quoting:why did sun pay a billion if mysql is worthless? do sun have too much money?

Sun bought MySQL for multiple reasons, killing it off is not one of them. They simply can't since it is GPLed and can be forked by anyone.

The group at the helm today don't share the same ideas with the people of the past. The new group knows, for Sun to survive, or any company for that matter, they can't just depend on hardware any more, they need to get into the IT service business. MySQL opens the door into the database area.

Quoting:Sun bought MySQL for multiple reasons, killing it off is not one of them. They simply can't since it is GPLed and can be forked by anyone.

As I pointed out in another thread, that's true for the MySQL software, but not for the MySQL documentation. Any fork must create all-new documentation from scratch.