Computer Log

I just want my OS to work with minimal interaction from me. Right now I’m trying to study and get better at Julia and Python/pandas and that can occupy enough of my time right now. And after that…maybe docker. There’s always plenty to learn. That’s what I want to spend my time studying…NOT OS’s. Not Mint or Manjaro or Arch. Only Mint manages to do this year after year. I use a OS to study these and other topics…NOT the OS!!!!!! So OK Manjaro kind of screwed up so I’ll just bounce over to my backup distro and continue right? Noooo…once again Mint is crippled I think because Manjaro likes to fiddle with grub. I understand when the Kernel is updated it needs to update grub. But just use what’s already in grub.cfg for my other OS’s…no need to try and figure it out…just use what’s already there! I’ve mostly gone about 6+ months on Manjaro without many big problems. So that is progress.

Was nervous because this was a big update, almost 2GB of updates and 450 packages.At the very least offer smaller chuncks to update.

So when I reboot my 4 virtual desktops aren’t coming back and no menu bar. My cube only has only 1 side. Not sure it is update related. Because that baloo cpu hog is running and also kwin_x11 is using 97.3-100%. So I restart and that baloo crap is running again. Finally I do a complete shutdown/restart and x11 progs no longer cpu greedy, and my desktop looks more normal, however the baloo crap resumes with it’s own resource hog ways.

Choose to boot Mint in grub and screen resolution screwed up…suspect grub again!

Successfully used a Python library from Julia! May not sound like a big deal, but have tried unsuccessfully in the past. Suspect problem at my end, possibly install issues between Python 2 and Python 3. But now Python 2 has gone bye bye!

I remember when a million customers records was a good size database…not so much today. I talked about Big Data recently. In this article Programming languages: Julia touts its speed edge over Python and R. They mention a benchmark that looks at Apple stock price states – open, high, low and close – using a 2.5GB dataset with 50 million rows and five columns. Fifty million rows…Wow! With the Internet and computers everywhere, data growth is rampant.

I’ve been very lax in the use/upkeep of my NextCloud server. So finally updated from 18.0.3 to 18.0.7

I really need to play with and explore NextCloud more.

The Good
Server mostly turned off and disconnected from the network

The Bad and the Ugly…and stupid!
Crossed my fingers, rolled the dice…and updated without doing a backup.

For some reason the lastest version of Julia 1.4.2 doesn’t work [I get “Illegal instruction (core dumped)] on Linux Mint Mate 19.3. Which is what I’m using at the remote location I’m at during the day. But Julia V1.0.5…does work! I checked the checksums also.

And the SQLite changes work also. However the version for both say’s 1.05 and at my house they say 1.4.2. This makes me wonder if SQLite is reporting correctly?

I was watching a YouTube video on Julia by RichardOnData and he talked about the Time to first plot problem. Which I’ve experienced using the SQLite package but never knew it was a Julia thing or heard the term before. Evidently it’s because Julia is a JIT language and compiles modules the first time run in a session….something like that!

Added the IJulia package in Julia so I can use Julia in Jupyter Notebook! So from julia REPL type:
using Pkg
Pkg.add(“IJulia”)

I have recently been interested in exploring a new programming language…Go and Rust. But now that I again see a future in Julia. I think it will scratch that itch…for a while anyway. I used it enough to be productive with it, but not enough to call myself much more than a beginner.

My log reports that I first started using Julia in August 2018. But as of today when I use the search button…that post doesn’t show up. The first entry, that does show up is in October 2018…2 months later…strange! There were actually another 5+ posts I did, that really showed my excitement at discovering Julia. It’s a WordPress bug because I’ve seen others mention it…even 3 years ago.

It seems to be a language heavily aimed at math and data science, however I like/use it for general programming. It has a very Python like feel about it. And yet…for me anyway (probably not others) Julia works in a way that make more sense. I won’t rehash everything I’ve already said. But at the top of the list is array indexing and the way slices work.

Found some odd behavior. I usually press F5 (because I’m lazy) to run my programs…and if I made no errors they seem to run fine. However the startup seems slow. Anyhoo because I’ve been working with Jupyter Notebooks a lot lately, out of force of habit I pressed <Shift><Enter> and the program ran very fast. This is not documented in the Run menu. However <Ctrl><F5> which says Run Without Debugging…is! So I thought perhaps <Shift><Enter> is an undocumented way to do <Ctrl><F5>…except!

When I press <Ctrl><F5> which says Run Without Debugging I get a message that begins “Warning: Package VSCodeDebugger does not have SQLite in its dependencies:”. Why do I get a message about debugging when I’m trying to Run Without Debugging?

And I don’t get this message when I try and run with debugging.

The best answer is probably that this extension is version 0.17.1.

While I’m excited to get back into Julia, I think I should take it slow with any program using the SQLite package. A quote I always liked kept popping up in my head overnight… Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it – George Santayana. And if history has shown me anything it is I can’t rely on this package not to break down the road.

So yesterday I was finally, once again, to able to do basic SQLite activities…connect to the database, perform a SQL select and retrieve rows, in a very basic program. I will hold back for a while doing anything meaningful using SQLite in Julia and continue using Python3 for that purpose.

Besides my most meaningful Julia/SQLite program to date was my generate fake random customer data program. Which at the time was a rewrite on my Python program and proved much faster. However as I returned to Python 3 and found the mimesis package, I no longer feel the need to persue speed increases using Julia.

So…for a while as each new version of Julia comes out, I will run this basic SQLite program as a test, until I feel a sense of stability.

I should mention, at the time of this post…
Julia is version 1.4.2 and SQLite.VERSION reports the same…version 1.4.2