Archive of November 2009
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16
Mormon church backs Salt Lake gay rights bill
Just want to throw this out there:
Dear Mormons,
You’re sending mixed messages. Please make up your minds about whether you love or hate and shoot us an email (but please don’t actually shoot at us) when you’ve made up your minds. I realize that you’re vehemently opposed to people loving who they choose to love, but I’m not sure that I understand why you’re backing this bill. Are you slowly trying to about-face your position on gay marriage? Are you trying to pull the Fox News card (interspersing stories about miracle kittens and crippled veterans finding hope through tic-tac-toe) by sprinkling your message of acceptance and support on top of your message of hate and oppression?
My theory is that you figure that if the GLBT crowd has equal rights and civil unions are drawn out to the extent of marriage, there won’t be much of a fight for same-sex marriage. You could stop spending money on fighting us, you could improve your image…hell, it’d probably even draw new members into the church. Instead of being sneaky, try taking a page from Google: don’t be evil.
Best Regards,
Matt
13
Google Search - “real time comments”
Not to boast or anything, but my realtime comments widget is officially the first application listed on the corresponding Google search! What does this mean? It means I’m more realtime than Echo and Disqus, two of the major real time comment apps out there.
If this were a face-to-face conversation, I’d be blushing with pride right now.
11
Project Betas
I’ve been working on my database abstraction layer quite a bit lately and think I have something that is moderately presentable. The MySQL driver is feature-complete (to the spec for version 0.5) and the Amazon SimpleDB driver is almost half done. I’m hoping to have a SQLite driver ready by the end of the year.
The trouble with writing an abstraction layer for SimpleDB is that it’s not a standard relational database. For instance, consider this: in order to sort by a particular column, there must be a comparison or conditional being executed on that column. What does that mean? Well, you can either run two overlapping conditionals (i.e.: col_1 IS NULL OR col_1 IS NOT NULL), or you can use escaping logic to do the work for you.
Whoa whoa whoa…did I just make that term up? You bet I did: SimpleDB can’t handle numeric values, only textual data. Thus, numeric values need to be padded with zeros on the left (to be able to sort numerically) and zeros on the right (to retain decimal precision in floating point values). If we know that a column contains numeric data, we can run a simple comparison against the values that will never occur. For example, if we have floating point data, we can compare it to, say, a decimal (99999.99999 vs. .), which we know will never just “happen”. Granted, it’s a hack, yes, but it’s an abstracted, automated hack.
What about string data? Well, we can safely say that if this does happen, we’re prepared to break out our IS NULL OR IS NOT NULL trick. That’s always a keeper.
That’s orthogonal, though. I’m considering putting the code out there on tour soon. It’ll be on the official Cloud website for download. When? Soon. How soon? Soon enough to be blogging about it.
10
Webmaster?
I was just thinking about the term “webmaster.” Who calls themselves a webmaster anymore? You’re either the IT guy, a web developer, designer, or a programmer. Maybe you’re even “the guy that does the website,” but I sure as hell don’t think anyone actually says, “I’m the corporate webmaster” these days. It’s just silly.
But yet, apparently people do call themselves webmasters. Google shows that there was a sharp decline in the use of the term until 2006, but it has held fairly steady (except for that massive inexplicable spike smack in the middle).
So why do people call themselves webmasters? Here’s my opinion: they’re not good at anything other than using a WYSIWYG editor and they have a vague idea of how to use FTP. Simple as that. In the interest of job security, they mash the topic of their “specialty” (“web”) with a term that makes them sound valuable (“master”) and say that they have experience with a myriad of web technologies. FrontPage, Dreamweaver, FTP, HTML. Sometimes even CSS! Once you take two steps out of La-La Land, you notice that their previous position was typing up the company newsletter (in WordPerfect, no less) or that they still think that IE is the best browser because it comes with the computer.
Unfortunately for all of us, this “meme” of sorts is self-perpetuating, leaving the rest of us with a sense of bland dissatisfaction, yet utter indifference. Oh well.