Westside Programming Ramble

Spreadsheet Interface for Database Queries

I went to the Westside Proggers meeting yesterday evening. About a dozen or so folks showed up, a couple of them I recognized from other meetings/events. One guy (sorry, I've forgotten the name) showed us a project he had been working on. It was a front end for working with a database. He has one screen for concocting queries, and then the results of the query are displayed like a spreadsheet. He used a bunch of fancy new tools/languages/libraries that I hadn't heard of to implement this wonder with a minimal amount of code. Being as most of the database stuff I've run into appears to be about as transparent as Perl (i.e. totally inscrutable), he may be onto something. So far I have been able to make do with using spreadsheets for all my data organizing needs. Or maybe the pain of mastering SQL (Silly, er, Structured Query Language) was more than my perceived benefit.

Kitchen Table Display Screen

Afterwards we were talking about stuff and the topic of electronic text (Twitter, newspapers, Kindle, e-books) came up. Some people have no use for newspapers, but I like mine, mainly for the comics. First thing every morning: cup of tea, reading glasses, pen and the comics page. What am I going to do when the newspaper folds up and dies? Am I going to have make do with some kind of clunky electronic tablet? That I will have to BUY and supply with POWER, CARRY around, and PROTECT against getting whacked? I'm sorry, but that does not sound like an improvement to me. Sounds like a giant pain in the neck. And let's not forget the ritual morning weather check. To retrieve the paper, you have to go outside, where you will be exposed to the weather, which is much better than any weather report you might get. Actually, this a moot point here. My wife gets up earlier than I do and she's the one who goes out and gets the paper, but theoretically speaking my point is still valid.

Then we have this whole vertical industry devoted to producing newspapers:

• growing and harvesting of trees,
• production and delivery of newsprint,
• making and installing printing presses, and the buildings that house them,
• writing the news, producing the ads, and actually printing the paper,
• delivering the paper, and
  
• collecting old newspapers for recycling.
  

We have been refining this process for a couple of hundred years and we are getting pretty good at it. I imagine it takes at least a hundred subscribers to keep one person employed in this production chain, and the subscription fees pay for less than half. I am pretty sure that advertising picks up the larger half of the bill.

Still, producing a newspaper is expensive. I read one recent story that claimed the amount of money the NY Times spends on printing, paper and ink for a year, would be more than enough to buy every subscriber a Kindle.

I don't like portable devices. I have recently seen some people working with table top screens, i.e. the screen surface is horizontal, like a table, and it is big as a table. We can certainly make big screens, though I don't think we can duplicate the resolution of a large printing press. A single sheet of a newspaper (one side, two pages, say three feet square) is going to have 100 million pixels, which is roughly 25 times more than you get with a big screen TV.

When did 640 by 480 (VGA) first become popular? 1990? If so, then it has taken us 20 years to get to slightly more than 4 times higher resolution. How long is it going to take before we get another 25 times better?

Here is a multi-touch table top screen. I don't know about the resolution, and I don't know whether it is actually a flat panel. It might be a rear projector. Lots of stuff on YouTube about multi-touch. I am sure it's wonderful, but they aren't answering my question.