Recently, I wrote a program that manipulated client data in a large commercial database. While I wrote and tested the program, rather than trying out my code on the real data, I used what was called the sandbox. \u00a0By using the sandbox, my program read and manipulated data in a test database, not in the production database. The sandbox was a duplicate of the live data which would be refreshed periodically from the real database. \u00a0No changes to the sandbox were ever preserved in the actual database. \u00a0So, if a buggy section of test code accidentally \u00a0destroyed or corrupted data in the sandbox, no real harm was done. At the next refresh, all was restored.<\/p>\n
I have been thinking how much this is like life. \u00a0In a world where the second law of thermodynamics rules, human actions, whether good or bad, tend to get washed away with the passage of time. Even the monuments built to last get worn away eventually.\u00a0See Shelley’s Ozymandius.<\/em>\u00a0The conclusion I draw from this is that the world is not changed much by the people who live in it in spite of the ambitions of every young person to “change the world.” It is the people who are changed by living in the world. The world is like a sandbox where the children go to play for a while. Rainstorms wash away the fortifications and castles but the children who play there grow up and move on. \u00a0I heard that Woody Allen was once told that his movies would live on \u00a0forever, to which he is said to have replied, “I don’t want my movies to live forever–I want to live forever.” And so it is.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recently, I wrote a program that manipulated client data in a large commercial database. While I wrote and tested the program, rather than trying out my code on the real data, I used what was called the sandbox. \u00a0By using the sandbox, my program read and manipulated data in a test database, not in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.mmmind.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.mmmind.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.mmmind.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.mmmind.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.mmmind.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/wp.mmmind.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39,"href":"https:\/\/wp.mmmind.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions\/39"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.mmmind.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.mmmind.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.mmmind.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}