Comment On Stupid Coding Tricks: The T-SQL Mandelbrot

Isn't it called "Mandelbrot"?

"Madelbrot" has a slightly different meaning in German :)


Note from Alex: Ugh... fixed! I really should start writing these before 2AM...

OK, I admit it, I've been known to stare into the cosmic wonder of the Mandlebrot Set while under the influence of a mind-numbing ... uh, margarita.

But in this case I think it would be much more interesting to gaze into the depths of the brightly colored source code.

Alex Papadimoulis:

The bar for entry into CodeSOD is pretty straight forward: professionally-developed code that elicits that certain What The— reaction.

Is there really any point to censoring the phrase "What The Fuck" when everyone knows what "WTF" stands for anyway?

Come on, this is a submarine! This is not a monastery!
Can you say s u b m a r i n e?
Ah, forget it. I'll pull something from my personal library.

And this is why programmers should not be math majors.

The T-SQL Madlebrot
I could use T-SQL to generate... Madelbrot."
a text-representation of a Mandelbrot Set.

Three different version! What the fuck?

Rhywden:

Isn't it called "Mandelbrot"?

"Madelbrot" has a slightly different meaning in German :)

Which would be...? "Mädelbrot" macht keinen Sinn, "Madenbrot" scho, aber "Madelbrot"?

This reminds me of when (many years ago now) we sent a postscript file to our brand-new 300dpi printer which computed and displayed the Mandelbrot set at maximum resolution, with all computations performed in the PS interpreter. I don't remember if it was an overnight job or an "over a long weekend" job, but it was definitely awesome...

No, I don't have the code.

I like it, let's see more like this. Probably like most folk here, I wish I had more time at work to be bored and produce similar inanity.

I coined a term for this type of entertaining, yet uselss code a long time ago: "MSSQLbation".

Dammit, Alex, now I'm going to have to rewrite one of the questions on our 15 minute handwritten pre-interview test.

tdittmar:

Rhywden:

Isn't it called "Mandelbrot"?

"Madelbrot" has a slightly different meaning in German :)

Which would be...? "Mädelbrot" macht keinen Sinn, "Madenbrot" scho, aber "Madelbrot"?

In Austrian dialect, Mädel is maiden (Mädchen), and who knows, maybe there is some kind of bread made by maidens. Or maybe, if you put it into the context of the file "Hostel", bread made out of maidens...

zikko:

The T-SQL Madlebrot
I could use T-SQL to generate... Madelbrot."
a text-representation of a Mandelbrot Set.

Three different version! What the fuck?

Seems like the text was generated by a Mandelbot...

that easily owns any of my usual bored activies.

I take it this is SQL Server 2005+ only, I bravely tried to crash our server running this but just got syntax errors!

How about [i]Impressively Useless[i] Coding Tricks?

Could be an interesting regular feature!

Just for *fun* I took the ispell 354984 word list and rot13'd it. then I checked how many *encoded* strings matched real words from the original list.
Zero matches :( I am very disappointed. I expected at least 1% to *encode* into another valid string.
I was amazed how quickly the following commands ran
cat ROT13.LST | uniq -u > BIG.LST
cat mword10/SINGLE.TXT | uniq -u >> BIG.LST
cat BIG.LST | uniq --repeated > ROTRES.LST
ROTRES.LST was empty, uniq -u removed any duplicates.
echo owl >> test.file
echo fox >> test.file
echo owl >> test.file
echo owl >> test.file
cat test.file | uniq --repeated
Gave the correct result "owl"

Depends on the region. Here in Bavaria, it's "Madel" for girl. So "Madelbrot" would be girlybread?

- Oliver

My WTF on this is why was he at work on a Sunday (10-12-2008) with nothing better to do?

2005+ (as it uses PIVOT).

It only took 11 seconds to run on my local VM, so I think you'll be alright ;)

This reminds me of a friend of mine, who was working on writing a raytracer in SQL last time I talked to him.

dkf:

This reminds me of when (many years ago now) we sent a postscript file to our brand-new 300dpi printer which computed and displayed the Mandelbrot set at maximum resolution, with all computations performed in the PS interpreter. I don't remember if it was an overnight job or an "over a long weekend" job, but it was definitely awesome...

No, I don't have the code.

http://warp.povusers.org/MandScripts/ps.html

The Article:

What's the most useless thing I could do with my time without actually doing anything?

How about this website?

http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html

I made a 2.5D rolling ball application made out of WinForms buttons once.

facilisis = the new syfilis, get it NOW!

Here’s an ASCII mandelbrot in dc(1) i made a few years ago:

[lolssdsl0lqx]sx[1+lddd*lld*-ls+dsdrll2**lo+dsld*rd*+4<kd15>q]sq[q

]9ksk[d77/3*2-ss47lxx-P1+d78>0]s00[d23/.5-3*so0l0xr10P1+d24>u]dsux

Oh, since the article mentioned quines, i might as well include a dc quine:

[91PP[dx]93PP]dx

TRWTF is that you made a screenshot out of plaintext you had on hand. Clearly you should have pasted it into Paint first, shot that, and pasted that into another imaging app, and included a shot of that.

blah:

TRWTF is that you made a screenshot out of plaintext you had on hand. Clearly you should have pasted it into Paint first, shot that, and pasted that into another imaging app, and included a shot of that.

... on a wooden table.

Stupid coding trick? This is awesome! :D This is a clever waste of time, not a WTF!

BadFellas.org:

Stupid coding trick? This is awesome! :D This is a clever waste of time, not a WTF!

Acknowledging that I took the time to read these comments is a true WTF/WoT (Waste of Time)

Heinz 53:

tdittmar:

Rhywden:

Isn't it called "Mandelbrot"?

"Madelbrot" has a slightly different meaning in German :)

Which would be...? "Mädelbrot" macht keinen Sinn, "Madenbrot" scho, aber "Madelbrot"?

In Austrian dialect, Mädel is maiden (Mädchen), and who knows, maybe there is some kind of bread made by maidens. Or maybe, if you put it into the context of the file "Hostel", bread made out of maidens...

Doesn't "Mandel" mean tonsil? Back in the day we used to laugh about old tonsil bread and his set. Seriously.

Someone You Know:

Is there really any point to censoring the phrase "What The Fuck" when everyone knows what "WTF" stands for anyway?

This is Alex we're talking about. The same guy who renamed the site because of his grandma.

Courtesy of the great JoCo:

Take a point called Z in the complex plane
Let Z1 be Z squared plus C
And Z2 is Z1 squared plus C
And Z3 is Z2 squared plus C and so on
If the series of Z's should always stay
Close to Z and never trend away
That point is in the Mandelbrot Set

Mandelbrot Set you're a Rorschach Test on fire
You're a day-glo pterodactyl
You're a heart-shaped box of springs and wire
You're one badass fucking fractal
And you're just in time to save the day
Sweeping all our fears away
You can change the world in a tiny way

blah:

Someone You Know:

Is there really any point to censoring the phrase "What The Fuck" when everyone knows what "WTF" stands for anyway?

This is Alex we're talking about. The same guy who renamed the site because of his grandma.

I guess I thought that mentality had been put aside with the demise of the "Worse Than Failure" idiocy.

Besides, people don't really think he actually changed the name because of his grandmother, do they?

It's an inkblot test. I see my wife's episiotomy.

Someone You Know:

s there really any point to censoring the phrase

Is there really any point to spelling out the phrase "What The Fuck" when everyone knows what "WTF" stands for anyway? Or are you just some juvenile script kiddie who still gets his kicks saying bad words.

While everyone knows what it means, some of us appreciate the censorship so that it's a little less NSFW. You know, those of us who are grown up enough to actually have jobs? You'll get there someday, kid, if you're lucky.

zikko:

Three different version!

Great. Another loser heard from who has to get his kicks from criticizing typos. Yay.

We adults with basic reading skills knew what he meant. Perhaps you should take a class.

OH NO!

And here we thought that a text-only display could prevent us from BLIT. :P

Upon reading this, I got all excited and decided that my sql client had to show me this work. The screenshot was just not enough.

As I was watching it *think*, I realized I just ran some sql found on the interweb without really reading or understanding it. Wow. TRWTF is me.

This is awesome. I want that guy on my team.

[quote user=memals]
Zero matches :( I am very disappointed. I expected at least 1% to *encode* into another valid string.
[/quote]

You have to sort the input before using uniq; it only looks at adjacent lines.

Ouch!

Käsebrot, imo.

Chris:

Upon reading this, I got all excited and decided that my sql client had to show me this work. The screenshot was just not enough.

As I was watching it *think*, I realized I just ran some sql found on the interweb without really reading or understanding it. Wow. TRWTF is me.

TRWTF would have been if you ran it on a production database server.

Arancaytar:

Chris:

Upon reading this, I got all excited and decided that my sql client had to show me this work. The screenshot was just not enough.

As I was watching it *think*, I realized I just ran some sql found on the interweb without really reading or understanding it. Wow. TRWTF is me.

TRWTF would have been if you ran it on a production database server.

I did the same thing, only I went "huh, the only thing it does is select letters" and hit F5.

Jaw droppingly cool...

But how do you get it to "zoom in" to one of the curls?

KenW:

Someone You Know:

s there really any point to censoring the phrase

Is there really any point to spelling out the phrase "What The Fuck" when everyone knows what "WTF" stands for anyway? Or are you just some juvenile script kiddie who still gets his kicks saying bad words.

While everyone knows what it means, some of us appreciate the censorship so that it's a little less NSFW. You know, those of us who are grown up enough to actually have jobs? You'll get there someday, kid, if you're lucky.

Well done! Hadn't had a good laugh yet this morning.

memals:

Just for *fun* I took the ispell 354984 word list and rot13'd it.
...
...
...
cat BIG.LST | uniq --repeated > ROTRES.LST
...
...
...

uniq expects the list to be sorted.

From the man page:

NAME

       uniq - report or omit repeated lines



SYNOPSIS

       uniq [OPTION]... [INPUT [OUTPUT]]



DESCRIPTION

       Discard all but one of successive identical lines from INPUT 

      (or standard input), writing to OUTPUT (or standard output).

...

...

...

you should be using sort | uniq there.

Someone You Know:

Is there really any point to censoring the phrase "What The Fuck" when everyone knows what "WTF" stands for anyway?

It stands for "Worse Than Failure". If you're filling in the other phrase, it's coming out of your own nasty mind. :D