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detour into an alternative universe
Monday, December 19 2016
Today felt like the present was passing through a cusp in time between some boring past and a terrifying future. I just happened to go over to the website of the New York Times when, at the top, was a dramatic picture of a sharply-dressed gunman gesturing flamboyantly after shooting (and killing) the Russian ambassador to Turkey. This act, terrible as it was, seemed a little beside the point in the grand scheme of things, but its coldly cinematic Kubrickian quality made reality feel even more like it had decided to make a detour into an alternative universe where all the rules we'd grown up with no longer applied.
Then, of course, later today the Electoral College, the last possibility of stopping the presidency of Donald the Mad, signed off on that dystopian future. Now the only real hope is that those generals Donald Trump has surrounded himself with will quickly figure out what an ignorant, petulant menace he is and stage a bloodless coup. That's some pretty grim stuff upon which to pin hope. But we're in that alternative universe now, and the old rules don't apply.
I spent most of the afternoon working on an editing and viewing system for a specific set of tables. In the process, I built out a number of generic features that should be useful in the future. The most interesting of these occurred to me late at night when I realized a "type" of input for my generic report generator could be a paginator that looked up to see how many records the report generated and then produce the navigation to all the pages (given a records/page variable). I could even make it so it dynamically calculated different numbers of pages as the other items in the form are changed. I did this by adding event listeners on all the inputs. Doing (or reading about) such a thing had once seemed like a crazy arcane computer sciencey move, but I know Javascript so well at this point that I barely had to look anything up to get it working. I then went further and made it so the presence of paginator automatically added the correct LIMIT clause to the end of the report's SQL (first trimming off any that might already be there). It all worked, but for reports on large tables it was annoyingly slow. Still, it's a good tool to have in the already-impressive reporting tool system.
Yesterday for some reason I'd begun watching the seemingly-endless movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I made further progress today, watching Benjamin age into his prime of life. I became curious how they would handle Benjamin's youthful end, but not curious enough to interrupt the flow I had with the code described in the earlier paragraph. Overall, it was coming off a bit too Forrest-Gumpy-by-way-of-Titanic for me, right down to the fake New Orleans accent and wildly out-of-place Siberian hummingbird.
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