Is it Steamy in here?

Much excitement is occurring in the Secret Underground Lair. On Valentine’s Day, 2013, Valve Software released Steam for Linux. According to the Steampowered website, “Valve- creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the release of its Steam for Linux client”. Our son was virtually beside himself, waxing long and eloquent on the virtues and possibilities for this new iteration of Steam. This, of course, is genius, as an oft heard complaint about Linux is that there are very few high quality mainstream games available. This could be a game-changer.

Oh, and could he install Steam on my workstation.

In actuality, the request was neither unanticipated nor unwelcome. I had been planning to run Linux on that box for some time; in fact, it has had Linux installed on it several times over the past few years as I’d dabble with a new distro every so often, but always felt a need to keep it more permanently configured as a Windows machine because of the need or desire to run certain pieces of software. That excuse is no longer valid as I have a Win7 box sitting right next to an XP box. I guess its Ubuntu or bust now. This is going to be about a one day project, as all three PCs and the monitor need to be rearranged. My son will also need to get a working familiarity with Ubuntu, as has never used it before. He already has the OS on a USB stick, and that’s how he plans to install it. I don’t think he’s aware, however, that he can run Ubuntu without installing it.

Back in database land, I made a decision to fix a few things. First, one of the tables got renamed to more accurately reflect its contents. Second, and much more significantly, I fixed the Time table: I got rid of all of the extraneous characters, and cut it down from 43,200 pieces of data to 3,600! This makes me exceedingly happy. I still have a major fix to do which I had alluded to in an earlier post- I need to create a “titles” table. I think it might even be worthwhile to eliminate the “Songs” table altogether and merge that data into the proposed “titles” table.

As far as speeds and feeds go, only two major changes to report today: the shrinking by over 90% in the Time table, and 170 song titles were added.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.