Comic for September 24, 2017
Amazon Canoeist Emma Kelty: It Should Have Been A Defensive Gun Use
Whenever pro-gunners suggest that a victim of rape, murder or torture should have been armed, the anti-gunners accuse them of “blaming the victim.” No, the blame for any violent attack rests squarely on the shoulders of the attacker or attackers. Full stop. But providing we’re talking about healthy adults . . .
the responsibility for self-defense lies with each of us. That’s why millions of Americans carry a firearm. And it’s a damn shame that Amazon Canoeist Emma Kelty wasn’t armed during her trip down the Amazon river.
The British headmistress brutally murdered by Amazonian pirates turned down a safe boat ride through one of the most lawless stretches of water in the world, MailOnline has learned.
Emma Kelty was specifically warned about the danger of the river she was about to paddle through but insisted on sticking to her schedule as she was ‘losing time’.
In her last known conversation, the 43-year-old said she felt she had no choice but to carry on in order to complete her 4,000 odyssey from the Amazon source to the sea.
Tragically, her bravery and determination led her straight into the path of cold blooded killers who shot and stabbed her in her tent.
I get that Ms. Kelty was determined to complete her Amazonian mission despite many dangers — everything from animal attack (including insects) to dehydration. I assume she took precautions against those dangers: insect repellant, water, first aid supplies, maybe even a sat phone. And a quick trawl through YouTube reveals that Ms. Kelty took some precaution against a violent attack . . .
Clearly, Ms. Kelty was aware that she needed to protect herself against a violent attack. So why did she enter the territory of known murderers without the best possible form of personal defense (outside an armed escort): a gun?
Whatever the reason — personal, legal or PR (her trip was all over social media) — Ms. Kelty paid the price. Which she might have done anyway, even if she had been armed. But life is about managing risk, not eliminating it. It should have been a defensive gun use.
via The Truth About Guns
Amazon Canoeist Emma Kelty: It Should Have Been A Defensive Gun Use
Lesson 04: Modeling and Designing Databases
Notes/errata/updates for Chapter 4:
See the official book errata at http://ift.tt/2gJZlRE – Chapter 4 includes pages 109 – 133.
On page 114, it says “For some applications, no combination of attributes can uniquely identify an entity (or it would be too unwieldy to use a large composite key), so we create an artificial attribute that’s defined to be unique and can therefore be used as a key: student numbers, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and library card numbers are examples of unique attributes created for various applications.” This is known as a “surrogate key”, because the number is a surrogate for the “real” unique way of identification.
On page 131, it says that reverse engineering an ER model from an existing database in MySQL Workbench is in beta testing phase. This function has been stable for a long time, so it’s safe to use.
In the chapter it talks about making sure your data doesn’t repeat itself, and how to design so that there aren’t consistency problems. If you want to learn more about normalization, feel free to listen to the OurSQL Podcast (www.oursql.com), episode 7 about normalization and episode 64, about different normal forms.
As you are reading this chapter, if you are wondering how a model relates to reality, know that for the most part, entities become tables and attributes become fields in a table. Relationships may or may not become tables, though for many-to-many relationships, they usually do.
For the homework, DO NOT USE MySQL Workbench to make Entity/Relationship diagrams. It is not a true E/R diagram and you will not be able to show everything you need to (e.g. the symbols for a weak entity do not exist in MySQL Workbench). Use flowcharting software or just draw it on paper and scan it in or take a picture, and submit the scan/picture as the homework
Topics covered:
Entity-Relationship diagramming
Supplemental material – podcasts on normalization:
Normalization concepts and 1NF: http://ift.tt/2xUHyCd
2NF, 3NF and when to denormalize: http://ift.tt/2xWhXcl
Percona Support with Amazon RDS
This blog post will give a brief overview of Amazon RDS capabilities and limitations, and how Percona Support can help you succeed in your Amazon RDS deployments.
One of the common questions that we get from customers and prospective customers is about Percona Support with Amazon RDS. As many companies have shifted to the cloud, or are considering how to do so, it’s natural to try to understand the limitations inherent in different deployment strategies.
Why Use Amazon RDS?
As more companies move to using the cloud, we’ve seen a shift towards work models in technical teams that require software developers to take on more operational duties than they have traditionally. This makes it essential to abstract infrastructure so it can be interacted with as code, whether through automation or APIs. Amazon RDS presents a compelling DBaaS product with significant flexibility while maintaining ease of deployment.
Use Cases Where RDS Isn’t a Fit
There are a number of use cases where the inherent limitations of RDS make it not a good fit. With RDS, you are trading off the flexibility to deploy complex environment topologies for the ease of deploying with the push of a button, or a simple API call. RDS eliminates most of the operational overhead of running a database in your environment by abstracting away the physical or virtual hardware and the operating system, networking and replication configuration. This, however, means that you can’t get too fancy with replication, networking or the underlying operating system or hardware.
When Using RDS, Which Engine is Right For Me?
Amazon’s RDS has numerous database engines available, each suited to a specific use case. The three RDS database engines we’ll be discussing briefly here are MySQL, MariaDB and Aurora.
Use MySQL when you have an application tuned for MySQL, you need to use MySQL plug-ins or you wish to maintain compatibility to support external replicas in EC2. MySQL with RDS has support for Memcached, including plug-in support and 5.7 compatible query optimizer improvements. Unfortunately, thread pooling and similar features that are available in Percona Server for MySQL are not currently available in the MySQL engine on RDS.
Use MariaDB when you have an application that requires features available for this engine but not in others. Currently, MariaDB engines in RDS support thread pooling, table elimination, user roles and virtual columns. MySQL or Aurora don’t support these. MariaDB engines in RDS support global transaction IDs (GTIDs), but they are based on the MariaDB implementation. They are not compatible with MySQL GTIDs. This can affect replication or migrations in the future.
Use Aurora when you want a simple-to-setup solution with strong availability guarantees and minimal configuration. This RDS database engine is cloud-native, built with elasticity and the vagaries of running in a distributed infrastructure in mind. While it does limit your configuration and optimization capabilities more than other RDS database engines, it handles a lot of things for you – including ensuring availability. Aurora automatically detects database crashes and restarts without the need for crash recovery or to rebuild the database cache. If the entire instance fails, Aurora automatically fails over to one of up to 15 read replicas.
So If RDS Handles Operations, Why Do I Need Support?
Generally speaking, properly using a database implies four quadrants of tasks. RDS only covers one of these four quadrants: the operational piece. Your existing staff (or another provider such as Percona) must cover each of the remaining quadrants.
The areas where people run into trouble are slow queries, database performance not meeting expectations or other such issues. In these cases they often can contact Amazon’s support line. The AWS Support Engineers are trained and focused on addressing issues specific to the AWS environment, however. They’re not DBAs and do not have the database expertise necessary to fully troubleshoot your database issues in depth. Often, when an RDS user encounters a performance issue, the first instinct is to increase the size of their AWS deployment because it’s a simple solution. A better path would be investigating performance tuning. More hardware is not necessarily the best solution. You often end up spending far more on your monthly cloud hosting bill than necessary by ignoring unoptimized configurations and queries.
As noted above, when using MariaDB or MySQL RDS database engines you can make use of plug-ins and inject additional configuration options that aren’t available in Aurora. This includes the ability to replicate to external instances, such as in an EC2 environment. This provides more configuration flexibility for performance optimization – but does require expertise to make use of it.
Outside support vendors (like Percona) can still help you even when you eliminate the operational elements by lending the expertise to your technical teams and educating them on tuning and optimization strategies.
Watch Sand Magically Flow Like a Liquid When Pumped Full of Air
GIF
The playground you frequented as a kid was probably blanketed in sand to help soften the impact every time you tumbled off the jungle gym. But did you know that something magical happens when you pump a pile of sand full of air? It suddenly enters a liquid-like state.
The effect is known as fluidization, and it will happen with almost any fine powder or granular material when you introduce a constant flow of air from underneath. As the air makes it way towards the surface and through the particles, it gets in-between each granule and reduces the friction that normally makes sand behave more like a solid. The resulting mixture moves and flows like water, even allowing certain objects to float or sink.
In theory this approach could be used to surround and protect your home with a moat full of switchable quicksand. You’d be easily able to walk across it, but when an intruder is detected, switching on a compressor would cause them to sink like a stone.
via Gizmodo
Watch Sand Magically Flow Like a Liquid When Pumped Full of Air
World’s FIRST Automatic Railgun Tested by US Navy
Yes, you don’t own a flying car, but at least some of the promises of the future are coming true: The United States Navy has successfully tested its railgun prototype in multi-shot (autoloading) mode, earlier this summer. Although the US Navy has been testing railguns since 2006, this latest test was the first time such a […]
The post World’s FIRST Automatic Railgun Tested by US Navy appeared first on The Firearm Blog.
via The Firearm Blog
World’s FIRST Automatic Railgun Tested by US Navy
Computer Science Degrees Aren’t Returning On Investment For Coders, Research Finds
According to a new survey, coders with a bachelor’s degree in computer science
only earn 3,000 British Pounds (BP) more a year than those who don’t have one
. The survey of 4,700 developers in the UK was conducted by Stack Overflow, a community site frequented by developers for answers to technical questions. The Register reports the findings:
This is despite the average degree now costing 9,000 BP a year in tuition fees alone. Average student debt is now more than 50,000 BP, according the Institute of Fiscal Studies. The research found that the median salary of those who did not have higher education was 35,000 BP per year, while those who gained a bachelor’s degree earned 38,000 BP and postgraduates took home 42,000 BP. It found that 48 per cent of developers with less than four years of professional experience currently hold a Computer Science-related undergraduate degree, while 49 per cent had completed an online course instead. The research also found that JavaScript developers were most in demand, with almost 27 per cent of jobs advertised on Stack Overflow now requiring this skill, followed by Java (22 per cent), Python (16 per cent), C# (15 per cent) and ReactJS (9 per cent).
via Slashdot
Computer Science Degrees Aren’t Returning On Investment For Coders, Research Finds
Netflix’s ‘Punisher’ trailer shows us a haunted, murderous antihero
While the second season of Netflix’s Daredevil didn’t quite measure up to the first, Jon Bernthal’s take on antihero The Punisher was a standout addition. The streaming company wasted little time announcing the haunted criminal-killer would get a show of his own, but we’ve only really gotten teasers. Today, Netflix dropped The Punisher‘s first full trailer, giving fans a glimpse of a family-friendly Frank Castle before the deaths of his wife and child set him on his criminal-slaughtering path.
At the beginning of Daredevil‘s second season, viewers met a grizzled, world-weary Punisher eager to wipe crime off the streets with lethal force. Secretary-turned-journalist Karen Page bonded with the occasional antagonist, so it makes sense that she’ll appear in The Punisher. Otherwise, the series looks like it’s striking out on its own, departing from the tightly-woven Defenders mini-cinematic universe to tell Castle’s story.
The trailer portrays Castle tortured over the sins of his past, as his part in black ops CIA missions leads to the deaths of his wife and kid. With no street heroes in his way, it seems like The Punisher will kill his way to the truth. If you wanted a darker take on the antihero with a body count to match, this looks up your alley. Naturally, we still don’t have a solid release date, though we know it’ll be sometime in 2017, riling up speculation to whether Netflix will drop it early in October or wait til just before Thanksgiving.
Source: Punisher trailer (YouTube)
via Engadget
Netflix’s ‘Punisher’ trailer shows us a haunted, murderous antihero