vignette

[dragonlady7]

I made an omelette with cheese for breakfast, and a pot of tea. Z had three cups of tea. He is now hyper.
He is standing beside my bed with his socks in his hands (he just picked them up and was going to put them on but didn't yet), and is gesticulating with them in excitement as he explains about the new database he's writing for work. It supports spatial coordinates! Storage and searching of spatial coordinates, see, so if you hooked it up to a geocoding database to translate addresses into coordinates, you could search for places in relation to one another, and it'd be so rad.

I just had to capture this moment for posterity.

But isn't that cool? he asks a bit plaintively.

Comments

[silverwerecat.livejournal.com]

Z had three cups of tea. He is now hyper.

After three cups of tea I usually am not hyper, I have to move inside the bathroom with a good book because of the amount of fluid that leaves my body...

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

But what does it mean? Kathleen responds plaintively.

[(Anonymous)]

What does it mean? What does it mean?!

Well, let's say you're building a standard, run-of-the-mill doomsday device in the basement of your office, using bits of computers that you company isn't using anymore — hypothetically, of course. Now, every mad scientist has a list of his enemies; the difference is all in how well it's organized. Most mad scientists will keep their list in a marble composition notebook. This is the simplest method of listing one's enemies, and quite effective, but when doomsday arrives, having to calculate ICBM coordinates by hand can cause unexpected delays. Your more organized mad scientists will store their enemy list in an open-source SQL-compliant database such as MySQL, which will not only keep them organized, but also allows them to save money and exploit the altruism of wide-eyed college-aged computer hackers at the same time [how very, very ev0l]. However, while typical SQL databases will let you store the locations of your enemies, they will not necessarily help you do anything with these data, possibly delaying doomsday while time is spent coding spatial-coordinate support functions.

But, the very adept mad scientist who does a modicum of research into open-source SQL-compliant databases will eventually arrive at PostgreSQL, which supports a wide variety of geometric primitives [points, lines, paths, shapes] along with the more standard numeric and character datatypes. This will spur the mad scientist on to either creating a large database of, like, random shapes, or to add latitude and longitude data to his enemies records, and to use the rich set of geometric operators [intersection, orientation, proximity, and the like] to maximize the ROI of his weapons systems - on-time, and under-budget.

When you're holding the moon for ransom, you value stability in an application. (http://www.ubergeek.tv/article.php?pid=54)

- Z

[lenine2.livejournal.com]

Why are you thinking about this on a weekend?

[(Anonymous)]

Because the won't let me build my doomsday device in the basement during work hours. Duh!

- Z

[lenine2.livejournal.com]

Wha? They won't? What kind of fascists do you work for? I've built my own doomsday device on my various lunch hours and coffee breaks. Unfortunately it's written in PL/1 and runs on a Focus database.

[(Anonymous)]

I work for a pinko alternative newsweekly. On the one hand, they don't bat an eyelash if you start smoking the ganj during business hours, but even just mention ushering in a new world order and they get all touchy and weird.

Jeez, man … PL/1. You are a mad scientist. And here I thought I was all badass because I wrote my doomsday Applescripts in vi.

And yes, my doomsday device really is scriptable.

- Z

[lenine2.livejournal.com]

I wrote my doomsday Applescripts in vi.
I think I wuv you.

[(Anonymous)]

doomtronix-5% whatis vi
vi(1) - text editor which, inexplicably, chicks dig
doomtronix-5%

How come I never seem to read the manual until it's too late?

- Z

[tehta.livejournal.com]

I don't know much about actual databases, but does he mean that the records are arranged in some structure that mimics their spatial relationships? Because that would be sort of cool.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes and no. It's just a regular SQL database (http://postgresql.org), and records are stored the way they're usually stored in an SQL database. But, in addition to your usual B-tree indexing that sorts values from lowest to highest, it can also do something called R-tree indexing on its geometric values, which sorts them two-dimensionally according to location and size. I'd never heard of R-trees before, so Wikipedia can explain them way better than I can. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-tree)

- Z