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63A490 vs 53A38F
Thursday, March 16 2017
A fun (for me) remote workplace project I've been working on this week is making it so currencies can be mixed in a database table containing information about donations. In the past the donations were all treated as American dollars, which wasn't actually accurate, since a good number of donations had been made in Canadian dollars. In such a system, currencies would need to be converted to American dollars at the time of reporting. But to do this in any way that could stay in the MySQL layer (thereby having all of SQL's sorting, narrowing, and computing capabilities) would require fresh conversion data available to MySQL. Since the amount of data was small and since I wanted to simplify the syntax of converting, I decided to make a user function, something I'd never actually done. But when I tried to write a function using examples I found online, the syntax kept being rejected. This was partly because the syntax of a user function requires semi-colons (much like Javascript or PHP) to indicate the ends of lines. But in MySQL semicolons also mean the ends of statements, and a function must be entered as a single statement. This means that the semicolon has to be overridden as a statement delimiter before a function can be entered. Then everything has to seemingly be declared upfront as though I'm writing something to be compiled into the kernel for a smart lightbulb. And then it turns out that when creating a MySQL function from within PHP that all that delimiter overriding has to be removed from the code. My code's job was to gather the conversion info from an API and then rebuild a conversion function in MySQL having the conversion factors hardcoded in it. After some work (mostly involving frustrations with the syntax), I got it all working. This allowed me to do things with money that had been impossible before, such as compare sums of money from donors in which I treated Canadian dollars as American dollars to sums where they were converted first.
The floor in the laboratory is looking great after much slow-but-steady progress (done whenever I've had the time, which has been often). The recent colors, done in Sherwin Williams satins, has produce a nice solid surface on the floor. I've had less luck with Benjamin Moore Arborcoat stain (which I got for free from the Tibetan Center). It makes sense that a stain wouldn't work well on a painted surface; but I'd assumed it was paint and hadn't read much of the label. Still, I like the color of the blue-green ("Summer Basket Green"). So I did my best to find the closest Sherwin Williams colors, sampling the colors form the respective web pages and comparing their hexadecimal values. Summer Basket Green turned out to the be 63A490, and the closest I could find to that on the Sherwin Williams website was Jargon Jade (53A38F). It's a shame that these paint sites don't allow searches and matches on hexadecimal values, since they have become sort of the lingua franca of color descriptions. The fact that they don't reminds me of all the mapping applications that conceal latitude and longitude values from their users so as to... make the world a sadder, stupider place?
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170316 feedback
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