Category: Rants

Things that make me mad about stuff related to my work. Like “Thoughts” but in a more angry fashion.

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9 reasons why I prefer MySQL to MS SQL Server

Reading Time: 2 minutes

In the past, I used MySQL for any of my DBMS needs. It wasn’t really an informed decision based on solid facts, actually I had never really given it any thought. It was what most developers used, it was what vBulletin used (one of the main projects of my company is based on vBulletin), it was what most hosts had pre-installed, in other words, it was the popular choice and I went with the crowd.

Unlike most decisions taken that way, this one turned out to be correct (so far at least). In the university where I study (yeah, I do that too occasionally 😛 ), there is a great and extremely useful class on Database Systems offered in my semester. The only drawback is that it’s done on MS SQL Server. Consequently, I had to work with it quite a lot, and my conclusion was that MySQL is far superior (mostly syntax-wise as I don’t have the deep knowledge required to judge them fairly for other things, so don’t expect a deep analysis about performance or security – as far as I’m concerned, they are equally good at those).

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Advocacy of JavaScript

Reading Time: 4 minutes

I frequently meet these “hardcore” developers that deep (or not so deep) inside them, tend to underestimate JavaScript developers and boast about their own superiority. I’m sure that if you spent an important percentage of your career working with JavaScript and are even barely social, you definitely know what I’m talking about. It’s those desktop application programmers or these back-end developers that tend to consider JavaScript a toy, and try to convince you to engage in “more serious stuff” (if they appreciate you even a little; if they don’t they just mock you endlessly and/or look down on you).

Funnily enough, when most of these people are required to write JavaScript for some reason, one of the following happens:

  1. They write 2000-style code, which is usually the reason that most of them underestimate JavaScript so much: They think that everybody codes in JavaScript like themselves.
  2. They desperately look for “a good library” because “it’s not worth wasting my time to learn that stuff”.
  3. They actually learn the darn language and the relevant browser quirks and change their attitude towards JavaScript developers.

Douglas Crockford did it much better than me, but I would like to take my turn in arguing against their most frequent claims, if I may.

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100% Cyan in CMYK is NOT rgb(0,255,255)!!

Reading Time: 2 minutes

As I mentioned in an earlier post of mine, I have to create a color picker, so I’ve already started to write the code for the Color class it’s going to use. I need it to natively support RGB, HSL, Lab and CMYK. And the latter part is causing unexpected trouble.

It seems that there is the notion out there that conversion from CMYK to RGB is easy. Newsflash: It’s not. As every graphic designer knows, the CMYK color gamut is smaller than the the RGB color gamut (even the sRGB color gamut). You can’t take a CMYK color and convert it to an out-of-CMYK-gamut RGB color! That’s nonsense! And it’s precisely what most conversion algorithms and color pickers out there do! Even Adobe Kuler!!!

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