A Path Less Taken

On Sunday, March 21, 2010 the US Congress took another step towards the president’s goal of health care for the uninsured. Rather than end the fighting in Washington this latest partisan move has defined clear battle lines along which people of many ideologies are now locked in heated battle. One weapon which both sides seem content to use is fear. They create perceptions of the “worse case scenario” that will occur if their obviously righteous path is not taken. Although much of it is all noise to me, it does put me in the mind of some of my favorite quotes about managing fear. I thought I would share them with you in hopes they might help clear your mind and allow you to see things as they are.

Ok, right off I have to tell you this article is a biased perspective on the difference between MooTools and jQuery. The bias is not mine, but that of the author. Aaron Newton (of Clientcide fame?) and a core committer to the MooTools Javascript Framework penned jQuery vs MooTools. Apparently it was a blog post of such gravity that Aaron decided it needed it’s own domain name. Sweet! You might wonder why Aaron wants to spend so much energy comparing MooTools to jQuery, a competing Javascript Framework. I think the answer is simple. jQuery is kicking the proverbial dog dodo out of other Javascript Frameworks in terms of user base and general popularity.

I am not sure where this comes from as I only have it on a piece of paper, but the comment about points leads me to believe this is a Weight Watchers recipe. None the less it is super easy to make and one of my personal favorites so I thought I would share it with others.

• 1 lb Lean Ground Beef
• 2 cans Pinto Beans, Undrained
• 1 can Whole Kernel Corn, Undrained
• 2 cans Stewed Tomatoes, Undrained
• 1 pkg. Taco Seasoning
• 1 pkt. Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing
• 1 and 1/2 cups Water

All you do is brown the ground meat in a large soup pot and drain. Then you add everything else and simmer until heated through. It says it makes approximately 11 cups, but I like to eat it in bigger bowls.

That’s all there is to it. I hope that you enjoy it. I tried to find one like this on Recipezaar and there were a lot of similar ones, but none that were an exact match.

Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tools allow developers to interact with databases through objects. The basic object in the typical solution is the model. The model is essentially an object representation of a single table in the database. In fact, implementations that subscribe to the activerecord design pattern will often view the model as an object representation of a single row of a specific table. Since the target data store in most cases is an RDBMS (excluding the recent surge in distributed Document based DB’s) the typical ORM needs some way to represent foreign key relationships in an object oriented way. To facilitate this the field has evolved a set of conventions or names for foreign key (FK) relationships in the DB based on the object’s (table’s) role in the given index. Here is a brief but hopefully useful explanation of four relationship types.