A mysql inmigrant in an Oracle world

Last few years I've been living in MySQL. A quiet city full of good food and nice people.

Two months ago I had to relocate to Oracle, a "fast-food-city" where people forget what they are and become slaves of projects, budgets, estimates and more parasitic MBA vocabulary.

Life style is quite different, even if both cities are close to each other. Just one switch away.

Beeing I MySQL citizen the first thing I tried to do was to go to the Oracle's city council and sign up for a new database. What a surprise when the public servant ignored me. I was so upset that I didn't known what to do. Fortunatly a gentle citizien next to me laughted and heading to me with a smile in his face said:

- "I couldn't avoid hearing your conversation. You are new in the city, right?"

- "Yes am I" replied. "I just arrived in the city a few hours ago and ..."

- "and you tried to sign up for a new database as you ussually did in MySQL", interrupted him with an increasing smile and then continued ...
- "you can't do that in Oracle. People here don't like it. Don't worry about that, just do next thing: Tell the officer you want a new user for the existing database. That will automatically provide you with your private schema. The schema will have the same name than your user and you will be able to do whatever you like in it as you previosly could in your private MySQL database."

-"Thanks you, I was completly lost!" I replied.

-"You are wellcome. I came time ago from the beatiful PostgreSQL countryside and it was taugh to get used to a bloated big poluted city like this. Still, it's not that bad once you get used to it. have a nice day"

Now it's time to find a good server to hire! Servers in Oracle are quite expensive when compared to the prices in MySQL. I don't want an luxury one with swimming pool and a garden just something small to pass the night and good neighbours, you known, I don't like conflictive hard-disks next door. Guess me good luck!

There is live after dead...

... at least if you have been cached by Google before dying:

Windows Licences comming to a dead-end

The image above reflect real prices for the Zotac ION. The snapshot is dated 2010-03-25.
Prices start at 164.37Eu (220Dolars) and with such price we get a noise-free nettop with an 1.6Ghz Atom and an Nvidia ION able to play 3D content and FullHD videos. It comes also with a useful handle to hang it on the back of any VESA monitor or TV with HDMI input so in practice, it wastes no space at all.

The Atom is not big deal but is more than just enough for 90% of common office tasks and the Nvidia ION chipset can do magic.

Another "feature" is that these equipments come without CD/DVD. Just an internal laptop HD with 160Gb. Enough to install any OS. Anything else must go into the SD slot or conected through USB. The price is so adjusted that it doesn't even come with a Windows Licence. When you go bellow the 200€ price per unit that's not possible. A bunch of extra euros is too much when you have put all the efforts in getting a final low-price.

This is an start. But something that is going to be more and more normal. Prices will drop down the 150 barrier, then 100. Finally, PCs will be for free for final consumers in maybe one or two years, and most people will get them from its Internet provider.

People will still be able to buy an expensive quad-core and waste 200 Watts power to write a letter or check their emails, paying a "funny" extra bill each month to its power-supply company, bear with the annoying fan sounds and the hot air comming from the inside of the bloated cages that reminds of a old diesel engine. Yes, the will, but most will not. Today is even possible to get Atom equipments for around 100€ by dropping all the goods of the Nvidia ION.

In this context I see no place for the Microsoft tax. Whether they like it or not, it's something not in their hands. Hard times are comming for the old Windows monopoly. Microsoft will need to fetch money from anywhere else. I guess they will try to get it increasing licences fees from their loyal (and somethinglike naïve) customers. They will raise server licences, SQL licences, "whatever" licences. Loyal customers who bet for Microsoft and ignored opensource alternatives, just because Microsoft was a giant in the stock market will now have to confront a world dominated by opensource alternatives. Loyal customers will pay more and more for less and less.

A final note. When using Linux, it's quite easy to make the Zotak ION start through the PXE network protocol. Since network swithches with 48x100Mbs + 2x1Gbs Uplink ports are around 300€ (and droping) that mean we can drop the internal HD and get even a more adjusted price per unit. And having all network based means software updates and central administration comes for free, even for a farm of hundreds (maybe thousands) of PCs.

Just one extra piece is needed. A central NFS server acting as root file system. And today such server can even be placed in a virtual machine. Great, isn't it?

The King paper has died, God save the new King

It has been many years of joy reading news and books using such a great invention that our ancient egipcians called "per-peraâ", later on renamed as "papirus" by the greeks, "papyrus" but the roman empire and more recently "paper" by the english who speak English.

But now it's time to say "goodbye paper!".

Modern electronic-ink and books will of course compete, but this weekend I found a much more lethal enemy for our lovely paper. The digital camera.

I was thinking how to get rid of all those books I've been collecting over the years and that have slowy been deposited in my bookself. You know, all those books you don't think you are going to read in the next comming years/life but are too good to leave appart. But our 3D space is finite and sooner or later we must surrender to the evidence. There is no place anymore for them.
And so, no without pain, I started to think about how to digitalize all their pages before burying them into the obscure junk room where they will rest in peace.

My intuition told me that if I wanted to digitalize something I had to scan it, and nothing is better to scan than an scanner... but my intuition was wrong. I tried with my first book and *slow torture* is the only way to define my experience. Nearly 30 seconds per page, and that multiplied by 300pages on average per book was something I just want for my worst enemy. Even more, placing the correct frame per page was all but easy and around one over fives times, I failed to properly place the page in the scanner so I had to reposition the page in the scan and repeat.

Frustated as I was I deciced a second strategy. A few weeks ago I bought a cheap camera for arround 120€. Nothing great for such price, but still with a maximum 12Mpx marketing resolution. I was amongst those who thought 12Mpx is an aberrant pixel definition for a camera, but for once such an army of megapixels made my day. I tried to take a shot at a page and compare the result with that of the scanner. Not without surprise, the result was much better. The foreground black text looked sharp with a yellowish background. The shot took about 7 second per page and the previous problems to place correctly the page in the scanner vanished in the air. Scanning with the camera was so fast that it took me no more than 1 hour to digitalize a 300 pages book, and with jpg compression the final space was about 200 Mbytes or around 1/2500 of my 500 external USB HD.

But the real test came next. Reading the digitized text on my 24" screen and comparing with a normal lecture on paper. It was then that I realised paper had become past (and great) history. The difference in favor of the electronic option was so big that I can't think to go back to normal paper in the rest of my life. My eyes were much less fatigated and I could read the pages at nearly two meters of distance. Suddendly all the pages had become a PowerPoint. Next come a picture that tries to reflect what I'm speaking about. Up is the text in the 24" monitor, down in blueish color that same text in my old friend "the paper".
(The picture camera senses the monitor 60Hz refresh rate and some strange distorsion effects appear on this picture that are actually invisible to the human eye, specially the aurea around the letters).

Mi primer circuito integrado.

Allí está. Con un par. Si no me lo dice nadie, me lo digo yo: "Torero", "campeón", oeeeeh, oeeeh, oeeeeh, oeeeh, ..

Voilá, no sin muchos aims y más efforts aquí están la foto del recien nacido:

Ha salido a su padre. Tiene mis mismos ojos y esa sonrisa ... Snifff, snifff. Todavía no sé que nombre ponerle. Estaba pensando en Z80, como el Zilog de 8bits de mi primer ordenador.

¡Larga vida a Wikibooks!

Siempre estoy apuntando chuletarios por aquí y por allá. (¿Alguien ha notado el nombre de este blog?). Unas veces en un fichero de texto, otras en papel, de vez en cuando en la intranet o en el blog. Ummm, ninguna me convencía. No era el lugar correcto. Pero al final y tras largos años de angustía y lenta agonía lo encontré. La solución es Wikibooks.

Lo siento Google, no es nada personal, pero la wiki te vuelve a ganar.

Las cuatro cifras del sistema binario

La lógica binaria tal y como se explica en los libros de texto se representa con dos cifras, el cero y el uno.

En el mundo real, la lógica binaria se apoya sin embargo en cuatro símbolos para poder describirla correctamente:
Los dos primeros símbolos representan el cero y el uno bondadosos. Los dos últimos describen a sus gemelos malvados.

Para que todo funcione correctamente es necesario elegir el primer par y mezclarlos como deseemos, sin importar si es un cero o un uno.