Finally!

Google announces an honest-to-goodness relational DB for App Engine: Google Cloud SQL. And it's the nice, familiar MySQL engine with virtually full support and very few limitations. Notably missing from that FAQ is anything about limits on how long a statement can take to complete (I've asked the question), but other than that...

Potentially Good News on Software Patents

There's some potentially good news on software patents. The Federal Circuit appeals court has rejected a patent claim on the basis that it's just an "abstract idea," a door that was very slightly opened in a recent very narrowly-drawn Supreme Court patent decision. Might reason ultimately prevail over avarice and bullying...? Paraphrasing something a good friend of mine said to me once, I'm prepared to believe there really are patentable software ideas. I'm not sure I'm prepared to believe they number in the thousands, possibly not even in the hundreds.

Nifty Snippets bite-sized morsels

Sometimes the pressure for a proper "article" is too much and I end up not posting something here that I run across that I think is interesting. I thought "If only there were a service tailored to quick thoughts and links..." and of course, immediately thought of Tumblr (yes, and Twitter, but I was looking for something in between blogging and tweeting). So may I present: The Nifty Snippets tumbleblog, Nifty Snippets in bite-sized pieces.

The tumbleblog is for quick thoughts and observations, not necessarily critically reviewed and possibly fleeting. Things I don't want to commit to my proper blog. Where's the line? I have no flippin' idea. More fully-baked ideas go here, but if you like something more immediate and less wordy, go follow...

Copying table structure in SQL Server

Why didn't I know this? For so many years I've bemoaned the fact that SQL Server doesn't have MySQL's CREATE TABLE LIKE statement:

CREATE TABLE NewTable LIKE ExistingTable

Um, er, except it does:

SELECT TOP 0 INTO NewTable FROM ExistingTable

The INTO clause of SELECT...

"...creates a new table in the default filegroup and inserts the resulting rows from the query into it." (MSDN link)

And of course, if you use TOP 0, there are no rows — but the table structure still gets created. (Naturally, if you want to copy the data as well, just leave off the TOP 0.)
Sometimes, you think you know something doesn't exist, and it turns out you just haven't looked hard enough to find it...
Happy coding,

Google Apps migration and multiple accounts

Non-coding post today. If you use Google Apps for your Domain, you've either been transitioned to the new "full" infrastructure or you soon will be. If like a lot of people you have this crazy idea that your personal and professional lives should be separate, and so you have separate accounts for personal and private stuff, you'll run into the problem that your Google Apps stuff and your Google stuff now share an account cookie, and so trying to (say) view your personal email when you're logged into a Google service with your professional account will fail because you're logged in with your personal account. Sigh. If only there'd been a way to anticipate that this might be a problem and design and implement the solution properly before involuntarily migrating people over.

The good news is that Google now supports multiple account login in many of its services. You lose offline mail and calendar (huh?) and there are some other caveats, and it's still a PITA to use, but when/if you do manage to get signed into your multiple accounts on the services you mostly use, it does sort of work, a bit.

Hopefully as time marches by, the multiple accounts stuff will improve and spread to their other services.

Release: place5 placeholder emulator plugin (alpha)

Just briefly, folks, I'm writing to announcing the alpha release of my place5 jQuery plugin. It's just a dead-simple plugin that emulates HTML5 placeholder attribute behavior on browsers that don't support it natively. On browsers that do, it stays out of the way (unless you tell it to take over), but it quietly does the job for you on browsers that don't do it themselves. Check it out! This is alpha, throw issues into the issue tracker on the project site if (when!) you find them.

Appending to an array

JavaScript's Array#concat function is handy and cool, but it creates a copy of both arrays. That is, given array a and array b, a.concat(b) will create a third array c with the contents of both of them, leaving a and b intact. Now, sometimes that's what you want, but other times you just want to append b to a without creating a copy of a.

While JavaScript doesn't have a dedicated append function, there's a surprisingly efficient and concise way to do it:

a.push.apply(a, b);

That calls the push method via apply, which accepts a context argument (what the this value should be during the call) and any array-like object providing the arguments to give the call. Since push allows you to push multiple elements with a single call, that works a treat. And somewhat unusually for JavaScript, it's probably the most efficient way to do it on all platforms (where normally this sort of thing is faster on some and slower on others)

Now, if you do this in code other people are going to have to read, I'd recommend a comment saying "Appends `b` to `a` in place" or some such, because otherwise it's pretty opaque to people who don't know JavaScript well. Or, of course you could always add an append method to arrays:

(function() {
    var push = Array.prototype.push;
  
    function Array_append(array) {
        push.apply(this, array);
        return this;
    }
  
    if (Object.defineProperty) {
        Object.defineProperty(Array.prototype, "append", {
            enumerable: false,
            value: Array_append
        });
    }
    else {
        Array.prototype.append = Array_append;
    }
})();

As always, if you're doing that on platforms that don't have Object.defineProperty (and there are still a lot in the wild), make sure you don't have any broken for..in loops lying around.