Dec 20, 2008

Ubuntu & Firefox Resize Buttons

If you are facing the "loss of resize buttons" on FireFox 3.x on Ubuntu 8.x and here is the solution to fix this problem:

Go to System/Preferences/Appearance and select the "Visual Effects" tab. Then choose the option "None-Provides a Simple Desktop Environment with out any effects" and it will solve your problem.

I had this problem and the above solution fixed it. I also read about executing the following cmd in terminal window but never tried...
"metacity --replace" &
"compiz --replace".

Hope this helps.

Dec 15, 2008

Good bye SQL

The SQL, the language behind data bases access is one of the widely used languages in last 20 years or so in the computer history. A great language and played a major role in both client/server systems and Web 1.0 systems. It became part of the infrastructure to provide the "state" to the "statless" http protocol in the web 1.0 systems.

Now, the data scalability requirements for web scale computing has gone beyond data base capabilities and SQL is not always needed to built the modern systems. Also, the data is accessed through "HTTP" it self and it unifies the system from entry to end inside the datacenters.

It's the first time, i am seeing that some very big web scale systems are built with out SQL. Also, i am started hearing that even some wall street/financial companies are starting to use just file systems to store & retrieve data using technologies like ZFS. So, here also in side an enterprise environment, SQL is starting to loose it's value.

The technologies like "Object Databases" were try to kill RDBMS/SQL but failed. But now SQL is "slowly" starting to loose it's importance as it's not able to meet "web scale" computing requirements. There are already web systems built to serve millions of web pages on a daily basis w/o SQL.

Personally, I like SQL and used SQL to built systems. But time has come to say "Good Bye".