Background on the home search page ? WTF Google ?

Today I went to Google (as I do most days) to search for some stuff, but today when I got there, I was greeted with a horrible looking background on the search. My very first thought was "Did I just go to Bing by mistake ?", then I looked closer at the page and realized it was indeed Google. Needless to say, I was incredibly pissed. Why did Google change their signature search page ? It was great the way it was ! That was specifically why I went to Google. If I wanted to use a search engine that looked like a piece of shit, I'd use Bing. In my mind, this is nothing short of an epic fail on Google's part. And apparently, I'm not alone in this feeling.

Cool MySQL tricks

It's been a while since I've written a blog post, and I figured this was a good topic to write about. For the most part, I don't use SQL. There's numerous ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) tools and frameworks out there (ie Hibernate) that abstract away all the boiler-plate CRUD code. When I do have to use SQL (be it on the command line or with a query browser), I'm not afraid to dive right in, and it's interesting to learn new things about SQL because there's so much to learn and it's such a ridiculously powerful query language.

I had to update the configuration in one of my databases, but the configuration required inserting numerous new lines into a table for user roles. I could've written a stored procedure to do it, but given my (admittedly somewhat limited) knowledge of SQL, I figured this would take too much time and I didn't want to do it. (This is what I like to call constructive laziness). I kept Googling and found MySQL's INSERT INTO ... SELECT syntax, which allows you to conveniently insert the results of one query into another table. I'm sure that most other database implementations out there have a similar convenience syntax, but I happen to work with MySQL so there you go. It took what would've been a numerous line script with looping and separate SELECT and INSERT statements down to a one liner. If you use MySQL (especially with LAMP / AJAX) I recommend that you read about it.

Deleting .svn folders

Subversion is a great tool, but unfortunately it has to store metadata somewhere, and like all other code repository tools, it stores them in metadata directories ... for each directory in whatever project you're working with. I recently found that I have to copy parts of my project documentation out for some of our clients to access our APIs, and I wanted to quickly delete all the SVN metadata and trim certain other files where necessary. I figured the quickest way to do with would be a simple command. Windows PowerShell provides a good (though not great, and certainly not as good as bash) way of doing it :

Get-ChildItem -Recurse -force |where {$_.PSIsContainer -AND $_.Name -match "svn"} | foreach ($_) {remove-item -force -recurse $_.fullname}

Two Google queries yielded the above command from this blog. Happy reading.

Google Disappointment

...do it. You just might find a page with me ... pointing at Google on my screen.

Today I was messing around with some of the CSS styling in my API documentation for one of our company's merchant partners, and I found that some of the elements weren't quite right. I then remembered an article I had read on Digg regarding CSS reset stylesheets, and how Google and Yahoo both use them in their free APIs to provide consistent styling results across browsers, so I went to investigate using one of said reset stylesheets to help me out. I figured I'd Google it first (no pun intended), and upon not finding anything relevant quickly, figured Google would be smart enough to use their own reset stylesheets in their own pages. I pulled up the source on one of my query pages, only to discover a developer's horror : inline styling all over the place, and google didn't even use their own stylesheets anywhere in their main site! The code was horrible spaghetti. I ran the page through the W3C web site validator, and it didn't pass a single standard, ie HTML 4.01 / XHTML (any flavour). As one of the big Web 2.0 sites, I would have expected you to have higher regard for international web standards. I'm very disappointed in you Google.