On Christmas mornings Gretchen usually prepares me a pair of wool socks stuffed with candy, nuts, a flask of booze, and other small items. This is the extension of a tradition my mother developed some time during my teenage years. Now that Gretchen is a vegan, though, the socks can no longer be wool. This morning they weren't even socks, but slippers instead. Since they couldn't contain the volume of a pair of socks, Gretchen had gone for quality over quantity. Instead of the usual Paul Masson brandy and cheap chocolate, it was Hennessy cognac and Endangered Species chocolate.
As I was drinking my morning coffee Gretchen asked if I'm back to having heart palpitations since resuming my coffee habit (which I'd successfully kicked a year ago). The last thing I wanted to discuss during my Christmas morning coffee was its health implications, but for some reason Gretchen insisted and we ended up having a squabble that lasted all day and torpedoed this evening's plans for Jewish Christmas. Gretchen eventually went out with Penny and David, but I stayed home all day perfecting my database map display tool.
The tool allows the user to pick tables to map and arrange them interactively using the familiar idiom of drag and drop. The relationships between tables are all determined by the a table in that database (in MySQL, under the most popular storage engine, there is no way to explicitly save relationships between tables, so I do so in a user table). Unlike in, say, Microsoft Visual InterDev, I don't yet have a way to interactively create relationships (although I have written a database scanner that can suggest relationships based on the names of columns). Because I want the relationship lines to be maintained as I drag tables around in the map, I've made it so that all these lines are drawn by Javascript from data written into a single Javascript string. All of them are cleared and redrawn after a user completes the moving a table (even the tiniest amount). Doing so takes about half of a second on my computer (which runs Firefox 3.0 beta on a single core Athlon 64 3000+). Most of my work today focused on perfecting the rendering of relationship lines in certain special cases. It's amazing how little code is required to make a spaghetti bowl of relationship lines behave like some sort of intelligent creature.
Later in the day I developed a system for saving the maps (into a table that can itself be included in a map). But by this point I was struggling with extreme nausea, brought on (it seems) by my foolish decision to eat an entire Endangered Species chocolate bar in one go. That stuff contains a lot more chocolate than your standard non-vegan milk chocolate bar, and honestly I felt like I'd been poisoned. At some point I took a bath and tried to relax but what I really wanted to do more than anything else was puke. I half-heartedly tried sticking my thumb down my throat but I just didn't have the will (the last time I'd done that successfully was after I'd accidentally swallowed gasoline twenty five months ago).
My database mapping tool in action.
To show you what it looks like in actual use, I've uploaded this clip to YouTube.
