Wikipedia for Star Wars!

I stumbled upon an interesting website last night. It calls itself Wookieepedia, the star wars wiki. It is created by a community of dedicated star wars fans and has over 60 thousand articles on characters, places, equipments and events portrayed on different Star Wars franchises(movies, games, TV episodes, comics etc.).

Apart from the name, the site logo(a picture of the infamous Death Star in battered condition) is also a mock of the Wikipedia. Being a star wars fan, I found the site really helpful. I played the hit game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 :The Sith Lords a few years back. I never fully understood the story, even after finishing the game twice(both as a good and bad Jedi). The articles on Wookieepedia were a great help. Now I’m thinking about giving the game another try.

May the force be with you.

Silly SQL query, not-so silly thoughts

I noticed a silly query written by a member of my team today. I was done for the day at work, and got tired of poking my friends on Facebook after a while. So out of boredom, I started going through the log which keeps project-wise record of SQL queries written by the developers, along with their names. And I stumbled upon the following

SELECT username FROM user WHERE username = ?

I couldn’t think of any situation where this query will be of any real use. Then I found another one

SELECT email FROM user WHERE email = ?

I couldn’t help but the ask the writer of these hilarious pair of queries, about their real purpose. Apparently he was involved in building a User Registration system for the project, and these queries were written to check if a user record with a certain username/email already exists in the database. We are writing the software on an MVC framework, so he could simply try loading a Model using the username/email, returned true if it loaded, and false otherwise! The guy wasn’t a newbie programmer, he has been in the company for over a year. This reminded me of a blog post I read very recently. Is the ridiculous simplicity of PHP is a curse rather than gift, as it attracts mostly average level programmers, thus creating a bad reputation for the language itself?

What kind of weapon is a programming language?

Inspired from this post I tried to create something funny on my own. If your favorite programming language were a weapon, what weapon it would be?

Java

Java is a Rocket Launcher. It packs a deadly blow, blasting away any problem that gets in the way. You cannot wield this weapon without great strength. And if you are not careful enough it will blow you away when it recoils.

Perl

Perl is the Swiss Army Knife, the all purpose weapon of the MacGyver programmer. With this in his pocket, he is capable of building any complex tool, solving any problem, surviving any situation.

PHP

Murphy’s Law redefined: “When you have a PHP hammer in hand, every Web app looks like a nail.” It’s cheap, easy to use and it gets the job done!

Ruby

Invented by the Japanese, Ruby is the blade of honor of Samurai programmers. Followers of the code of pure object-orientation, there is no challenge big enough for these guys.

C

C is the Lightsaber, the classic weapon carried by Jedi programmers. It can cut through solid metal making the impossible to possible, and even deflect blaster fires to save your neck. If you fall to Dark Side, you can do damage with it.

JavaScript

JavaScript is a Sub Machine Gun. The unique weapon of the commando programmer, who is summoned to fight in the closed quarters of client-side development. His ultimate nemesis: Internet Explorer!