Ok, finally done it www.tangerineworks.com is reincarnated once again.
A little more involved than last time, but far prettier I think. Going through all the things I’ve done in the past is quite mind-boggling… and to be honest, the “previous-work” brain-dump only covers half of it. There’s so much that winds up on the cutting room floor.
Still there it is. Finished.
Giz a job etc.
So that’s what I’m doing today… massive tables linking to massive tables linking to massive tables, killing my server.
So, against everything I was taught at uni, I’m doing what everyone does and that’s abandon normalisation in favour of expedience… flat tables. I saw the DBA from Digg do a talk once (to a packed audience. Geekery is the new rocknroll, I tell you) and this is one of the things that Digg do to cope with the phenomenal amount of idiots data they have to deal with.
Anyway, for me It’s a big one - I have a couple of tables with more than 2.5 million rows each (the data model required to describe a football match is actually the most complex I’ve ever come across. Believe it or not). To get the “players who played for this team, also played for these teams” data was taking about 12 seconds. With a fairly inoccuous flattening of the table (adding keys that should really belong elsewhere), the query now takes about .19 of a second.
It’s got to be done. Trouble is, there’s now scope for referential integrity errors, so I’ll need to build automated tools to deal with this… but it’s… one of those things you know?… once you’ve done it, myriad problems solve themselves like popping bubbles all over the place. You kindof know it’s right because it allows you to chop out massive knots of code.
The better your code, the less of it there is. In a perfect world it would simply be “om” I think. That’s not an acroynm, it’s just a noise. Say it. Out loud.
So that’s what I’m doing today. I’m writing less code.
If you google “internet explorer pie chart”, then look at the images, the very first thing… the very top of the list is this:
Right now I’m trying to put together my CV site - and it’s working in all browsers except IE, and the reason it doesn’t work in IE, is that if you set the opacity of an absolutely positioned element, it (and this is the magical part) removes the browser scrollbars.
Why? Why in the name of anything remotely sane would anyone want to do that?
I’m gradually coming round to the notion that I should just boycott IE. People who use it need to get used to the idea that it simply doesn’t work very well… but this is supposed to be a CV site. It’s supposed to showcase things working… so I’m spending a large (look at the pie chart) chunk of time that I could spend on something else, dealing with a dismal anachronism.
(Cut to) One of my favourite TED things is Clay Shirky talking about Cognitive Surplus.
It revolves around the measure of time that entire populations have free, simply to think… (and as a natural extension, create, build etc). In the late 20th century television took up a lot of this potential, but that is starting to change. “The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.”.
He’s inspired (and is inspiring) about the possibilities created by this sudden explosion of available, collective intelligence. .. and inevitably, being a web developer, I see the hours, days, weeks, months I waste with Internet Explorer in these terms.
Internet explorer is a crashing waste of cognitive surplus… and more specifically, it’s a crashing waste of cognitive surplus to MY industry. My people. The people who are building this digital revolution that’s unfolding before our eyes. It’s wasting our time… if Internet Explorer didn’t exist, we’d be able to do… not twice exactly, but… 10%? 20%? 30%? more than we’re currently doing.
This is holding us back.
There has got to be a way of stopping this. The reason that pie chart is at the top of google is because every web developer that has to deal with it feels the same. This is our internet… we live in it and we built most of it… if anyone can get rid of this thing it should be us.
Ok - For the last month or so I’ve been working on creating an API / Plugin thing for the massive database that runs behind 11v11.com.
Having built an html-only plugin thing myself, I decided it might be an idea to go with someone who already makes these thing : http://www.clearspring.com - so they can plug in to pretty much anything: Your content has a little box thing that appears at the bottom… and you choose what sort you want and away you go.
Example of a match plugin here
Which creates a plugin like so:
After a bit of faffing (like days of faffing) I managed to get it to go. Even with something where they’ve obviously absolutely killed themselves to make it simple (and it is actually quite impressive), it’s still very complicated.
The next bit of complexity of course is that I need to load these matches onto a page using ajax… and the JS that lives on clearsprings’s site doesn’t want to play and nothing seems to make terribly much difference. I contacted their forums 5 days ago - no reply. I do have other things to be gettin on with (like a major database upgrade script that’s running as we speak) but this absence of support coupled with the fact that I can’t get the thing to do what I need it to could turn out to be a bit of a show-stopper alas.
I can’t abide failure.
Bit of a pain
And to be honest, I actually started in early 2000, but I’ve only started writing down what I do each day (work-wise) today. At some point http://www.tangerineworks.com will have a condensed version of the backlog. But not yet.
So today I have mainly been putting together the new tangerineworks.com site, and adjunct to which is this here blog, so I’m doing this as well.
Why? Because I’ve taken a couple of months off to work on personal projects (aka http://www.11v11.com) and the time has now wound around to the point where I need to find some new freelance/contract work… for the first time in about a year, so everything on the old site is out of date.
It used to look like this:
The new mockup looks like this:
I’m not sure if that’s an improvement or not. It’s certainly different though - from mine and everyone else’s… whether it impresses people or scares them away remains to be seen. If it scares them away I’ll put a warmer, fuzzier picture in the background.
Test post.
