Over the past few years I’m beginning to see a sort of plateau of creativity or originality of web applications, or applications for that matter, on the world wide web. I’m not just talking about the Facebooks and Twitters of the world, but the lower level start ups; there are millions of them out there.
I just get this sense of mental stagnation. Maybe I’m just delusional on my approach on the state of the internet becoming essentially a meme machine. I agree that everyone enjoys a good meme or irreverent video; however, I see the world wide web primarily becoming an outlet for that and not much else. Just traverse your web browser around the top 50 or so sites enough, and you notice a trend: everyone is obsessed with flashy designs which makes the ability to read content harder; in addition, it prohibits intelligent discourse of a video, article, or anything else for that matter exponentially more difficult. Look at video sharing sites for instance. If Google or Vi … (continued)
The question isn’t who is going to let me it’s who is going to stop me. – Ayn Rand
Everybody is a genius. If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid. – Albert Einstein
I’ve wanted to write a post on compound and composite keys for a while so I could tell myself that I completely understand the differences between two.
A compound key is when two simple keys (or columns) on a table in combination can only exist once per table. For example, you can only have one order_id and item_id in combination that are the same. So if order_id = 1 and item_id = 10 there can be only one row per database table that have those values for those attributes.
A composite key is when at least of one those two attributes of a compound key by itself is not a simple key, such as order_id potentially above could be a primary key.
Like most Ruby developers I’ve grown accustomed to the unless statement. The unless statement evaluates if a condition you are checking is false, and if it is, evaluate the block of code directly underneath it.
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Example
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one_hundred = 100
unless one_hundred == 101
puts "one_hundred does not equal 101"
else
puts "one_hundred equals 101"
end
#=>"one hundred does not equal 101"
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The tiny code snippet above defines one_hundred variable equal to 100, then goes into the conditional block beginning with unless and checks if one_hundred is equivalent to 101, and if it is not, which it is, output the "one_hundred does not equal 101. Pretty simple if you’ve grown accustomed to Ruby and its isms.
The reason why I wrote this post today is because of the code review of one of the other developers at my job. He was using the if ! instead of the unless , they mean the same thing, but in my opin … (continued)
I recently stumbled upon wikipedia talk pages on articles, and I’m surprised at the lack of discourse in some topics that I thought were somewhat note worthy. I’ve always wanted to contribute to Wikipedia, but I’m always doubting myself thinking I wouldn’t have much valuable content to add. I simply have to overcome that I guess, since if I’m able to articulate a topic better than what was previously there, on a page, it would be beneficial to the enlightenment of someone, well, enlightenment is a bit much, but you get my drift.