[Bendug] Knock/KNock

[Tim Howe]

On Thu, 29 Dec 2005 19:58:11 -0800 (PST)
"Gary E. Miller" <gem at rellim.com> wrote:

> Well I just love PHP and MySQL.  You only have to play with Oracle a bit
> to see how great a job the MySQL folks have done.  Not seen any good
> reason to pick up Ruby/Rails yet.  If it is still around in a few more
> years then maybe I'll check it out.  I have web sites up over 10 years
> and I liek stuff that will be around.

	PHP is one of those things that I look at from a lot of different
points of view.  Often, to me, it's kind of like cola...  Lots of people really
like cola.  They drink it constantly.  There is an entire aisle of the stuff at
every grocery store.  It's in every country.  It's huge.  It also makes you fat
and rots the teeth out of your head and is basically just sugar water.
	PHP is everywhere.  Everyone knows it.  It's pretty fast and can manage
to do just about anything.  It gets the job done.  I personally find it ugly
and unexciting, but that's just me.  Some people are pop drinkers; I'm not.
	My kids think Sprite is the greatest thing in the world to drink --
ambrosia of the gods.  I think a hand-crafted heffeweizen with an aroma of
gentle Cheq Saaz hops and a fruity finish is a good drink.  My kids would turn
their noses up at that and fail to understand how I could drink something so
strange, but they may change their mind as they get older and try new things.
Then again, for some people, Sprite is just their thing...  Obey your thirst I
guess.
	Can I whip a metaphore to death or what?

	I don't have very nice things to say about MySQL.  I'll just say I
greatly prefer PostgreSQL and leave it at that.  This email is long enough and
if I start ranting about MySQL I'll never get to bed.  Oracle and DB2 may have
stuff that you can't get with a free system (not sure what that would be), but
you need to have serious money to throw around for that stuff to seem worth
it.
	OneEighty used Oracle---and I mean they used the hell out of it---but
the licensing was a killer.  We came really close to throwing Oracle out and
moving to PostgreSQL, but someone found some cheaper (still thousands of
dollars) way to license it.  Too bad, really, Oracle seemed to be pretty
tempermental.  I'm glad I didn't have to run it.  My past experience with DB2
was fairly pleasant, but I would still never spend money on it.

	I don't have much use for Rails or Nitro either.  At least not right
now.  But I do find the ORM systems they come with kind of interesting.  Rails
comes with ActiveRecord and Nitro comes with Og.
	The only reason I have any interest in Rails or Nitro is because I
really dig Ruby.  People who get into Rails without really getting into Ruby
are cheating themselves.

> I've been throwing out stuff with a lot more power than that.  If you have
> an ATX case I might still have something in the junk pile for 'ya.  I guess
> you missed the sale at Staples where 200GB was $50.

	I don't really buy anything...  Don't throw stuff out.  If we can throw
an entire computer together there is ussually some poor geek out there who
could benefit from it.

--TimH