2.7 million dots
- Find raw data for 2.7 million cities.
- Import it into MySql.
- Generate Pov-ray data to render each city as a tiny red sphere on a large black sphere.
I’ve made a lot of progress on my image gallery. It’s in ASP.NET, and initially my idea was not to use a database at all. Instead I’d just store image names, locations, tags, and descriptions in an XML file.
I got all that working, and all the lookups using XPath, but then I started wondering if this is a wise strategy. I like the idea that I can back everything up with a single file, and that I don’t have to mess with connection strings and all that jazz, but on the other hand, I’m sure to have threading issues, and the XML file could grow to be quite large.
Furthermore, I’ve been told both that XPath is slow and that XPath is fast, so I’m not sure if performance will be an issue either.
So last night I confirmed that I can access a MySQL database from ASP.NET, and now I’m thinking that is the safer way forward…
At any rate, I’ve learned a great deal about XPath and ASP.NET along the way, and may post some examples soon. With XPath in particular, it seems like the examples that are on the web now go from dead simple to esoterically complicated, with not much between.
Incredible as it seems, I’ve been at my new job for seven weeks. In that time I’ve worked on four different projects, and gotten my Sitecore level one developer certification. I’ve learned a LOT, but not any one thing very deeply. It’s been very much a survey of web technologies.
Codehouse specializes in Sitecore, a Content Management System (CMS) that is very impressive. The entire authoring and development experience is browser-based. That’s not revolutionary, but in this case the UI looks like Windows. It has a start button, start menu with applications, a control panel, etc. It feels a bit like you’re in a virtual PC image, but you’re just in a browser.
On the one hand it’s profound — one can really see that the browser is becoming the platform. One can imagine that computers will become little more than dumb terminals that run either IE, Safari, or Firefox, and all applications will be written in Javascript and Flash. (Except games, of course, but they’re all headed over to XBox and Wii anyway.)