Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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got that wrong
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Like my brownhouse:
   all our friends have babies
Saturday, December 22 2007
I continued work on my database mapping system, finding and deploying wz_jsgraphics.js, an intriguing Javascript library capable of drawing various mathematically-definable shapes on a web page. This was my initial method for drawing relations between columns in the various tables. I created a space-and-pipe-delimited list of all foreign key relationships which ended up as a Javascript variable that I then scanned through, finding the matching columns and tables in my rendered map. Then I calculated the positions on the map of those columns and used wz_jsgraphics.js to draw the lines. These ended up in precisely the right places, but there were three problems. One was that there were a lot of lines and tended to obliterate all the text near their destinations. Another was that the lines were diagonal and defaced the interveneing tables. Finally, rendering those lines was so computationally intense that the browser would throw a "this script is taking too long" error if I tried to render more than about thirty relationships. The problem is that there is no native graphics support in Javascript and wz_jsgraphics.js is basically a hack that does it by drawings scads of DIVs (the same basic principle I used to render mathematically-calculated Javascript designs over ten years ago when web browsers ran a tenth the speed they do today). But since a DIV can only represent a rectangle of a single color, to render a single diagonal line requires hundreds of DIVs. To overcome this problem, I'd have to write scripts to render my relationships in simple L-shapes. At least now, though, I knew how to proceed. (To give you an idea of how out of it I've been with the latest developments in web design, I still use spacer gifs to ensure that a web browser gives me exactly the spacing I want and not that additional spacing I don't want. wz_jsgraphics.js is beyond all that.)

Gretchen's friend Nina and her husband Karsten (along with their eight month old offspring Jonas) arrived today to partake of a vegan feast, socialize by the fire, and spend the night in our normally-53-degree guest room (whose temperature was now in the sixties due to the miracle of electro-resistive heating. It used to be that we went to a lot of weddings, but we don't do that anymore. Now we've moved a year or so down the cursor of life and all our friends (except Penny and David) have babies.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?071222

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