Geek Corner

I hate database programming. As far as coding tasks go, it tends to be one of the more monotonous and unstimulating forms of computer programming areas. It’s also highly corellated with business apps, since 99% of business apps are database oriented.

However, sometimes a database is the right tool for the job, so reluctantly, I must mention a sweet little database package I’m playing with now called HSQLDB. It’s a pure java DBMS that can run either as a recular JDBC server, or as a integrated embedded database system right in your java app. How sweet is that! No end-user deployment issues.

The next version of OpenOffice.org uses HSQLDB for it’s new database component.

Why the hell am I playing with it? Well, as much as I like my CalorieKing software for tracking my diet, I find it lacking in that it only tracks basics like calories, protein, carbs, fat, & fibre. For a good CRON diet, I need to make sure I’m getting my RDAs of all the important nutrients. There is some software out there that does this, but it’s poorly designed, poorly supported, and not free. So naturally, I’m now coding my own super kick-ass nutritional tracking software.

I’m currently importing the nutritional data for nearly 7000 food items into my hsqldb database. The data is published by the US Department of Agriculture and contains amounts of vitamins, minerals, amino-acids, and any other important goops and compounds we know about.

Now I’ll be able to figure out if my daily intake is deficient in any important nutrients, and then I can have the program search the database and recommend food items that I could eat to satisfy the contraints.

Why yes, I am a geek. How did you know?