Unit 9: Databases Part I

The most difficult part for me this week was learning the system of notation in the ERDs and trying to develop a sensible ERD for my own database. That said, I’m really, really excited to learn about databases and relational databases which I first heard about in the summer of 2006 but had no real idea about until recently. At that time I was working for a plastic surgeon’s office populating a Cumulus visual database with before and after pictures of his variety of procedures (URL available upon request). I think the manager was going to create this database and administer the website with Drupal, another application I am just now getting to know in a functional manner.

A few weeks ago while emailing a friend who is a retired programmer (retired at 33 because he made a fortune) and he told me “It’s all about the db's, man!” I am realizing that yes, it is all about the db's and pretty much any web service or social media site is going to be entirely driven by users accessing servers which call up content from databases (and I guess the content in the database is managed by a CMS). So this is the stuff we will really want to get to know if we are going to be useful. So that's a real motivator.

Oh another hard part was figuring out where I had downloaded MySQL because I now have three servers in Ubuntu-land and had run the apt-get command from the virtual server, but for some reason the application downloaded to Virtual Machine #1.

No wait, the hardest part and something I'm not sure if I have fully comprehended this correctly was the  Third Normal Form. I get the first two forms, and I comprehend the concatenation thing of folding two rows into a single entity. However, it seems that a lot of people have been trying to explain a lot about databases because you can find a LOT of clips on Youtube attempting to explain parts of databases.  Oh yeah, I worked as a contractor as a project coordinator at Oracle from November of 2006 to February of 2007, I would have hoped to have picked up database knowledge by osmosis, but I guess that doesn't happen, not even if you've seen Larry's helicopter land on the campus. And no, they didn't play "Ride of the Valkyries" over the PA while that happened. However I stand firm, the Third Normal Form was the hardest thing for me. Maybe Fred Coulson can set it to music? Well I just ran a search at Youtube and got over 10 pages of results for "Third Normal Form" and most of them actually do look like they are referring to RDBMS's, (as opposed to being about dogs on skateboards or cats on pianos) so I know what I'll be doing tonight...

Unit 8: Technology Planning

This week’s readings were broad and varied widely. Some of the subject matter was familiar to me having taken IRLS 674 Managing in the Digital Environment, so Don Sager’s article on Environmental Scanning looked a lot like the SWOT analysis material covered in 674. Michael Stephens’ article on Technoplans vs. Technolust seemed sensible and although technolust got equal billing, it only accounted for a small portion of the reading, which was actually good because technolust, although it is a real trap organizations with limited budgets or limited needs can fall into, is a minor problem in the big scheme of things.

The Bertot reading on federal funding for library tech upgrades was really informative and moved the agenda into real nuts and bolts as to how LSTA funds are disbursed through state libraries (whose existence was heretofore unknown to me) and local libraries submit their technology plans to United Services Administration Company and how libraries are currently dealing with the LSTA program.

In Whittaker and company’s “What Went Wrong?...” we got an analysis from a business consultant regarding technology projects that don’t make the final cut and why they failed. Her analysis seemed to ring true with my own experiences where she sees project failure happening due to poor planning, weak relevance of the change to business mission, and lack of management support. I honestly think that her assessment of 31% failure rate might be a little on the charitable side, but when technology changes go wrong, they are pretty public, but I’m sure that there are many smaller technology changes which fail but can get swept under the rug. Otherwise, a lot of what Whittaker et al say seems right on the money. The excuses of unrealistic planning seem valid including underestimating training time for new tech as well as her focus on undelivered products from third party vendors, a huge gripe in some projects I have worked on.

Gwen Gregory’s “From Construction to Technology” article was another good nuts and bolts summary about how LSTA affects libraries and how LSTA differs from the previous LSCA. It seemed helpful when I read it but doesn’t really stand out a couple days later.

Eric Chabrow’s State of the Union was focused on organizations which had done technology upgrades and had suffered for their efforts. It was an easier read than the “What went Wrong” article by Whittaker, but was in the same vein, but focused on government agencies in the “Security Sector." If your job is hunting bank robbers or tracking terrorists or making sure corporate malefactors pay their fair share of taxes, having to deal with technology issues or a rough transfer in technology can only be an additional burden to a tough job. Chabrow makes a couple of really good points about business, technology and government. In the enterprise sector, if a transition seems to be failing, a manager will pull the plug and probably do so at the first sign of trouble. In government, where results are not as accountable to “audit culture” a project that is flagging can be kept on life support indefinitely. Chabrow’s great advice is, “If you’re going to fail, fail fast” i.e. don’t prolong the agony, just pull the plug.

Chabrow also takes a good look at what projects in peril can do regarding the toll they can take on management, he points out that rough business transitions can lead to a huge out-migration of staff and management, but he also points out that a project taken up by several managers (who have to be brought up to speed after the project has begun) can be a kiss of death to projects that might have succeeded had the manager initiating them stayed on. I can tell you from experience, having a new manager come in, one who does not know the daily problems of a department will have a hard time developing credibility with his staff. Chabrow also scores in talking about issues with third party contractors in projects and the frictions that will arise from having a project run by teams with differing perspectives and differing needs. As far as articles on planning technological change and organizational change, the Chabrow reading was the best.

In Dugan’s Information Technology Plans, we get down to the nitty-gritty of actually writing a technology plan, the kinds of evaluation a library will need to do (including assessment of the environment as Sager pointed out) to get that technology plan together.  His best piece of advice: “A question that should be continuously answered is: why is information technology necessary to fulfill this need? Each response should be outcomes based.”

The OCLC reading on Environmental Scanning could have been put higher in the stack (at an earlier position) because many main points in it were already made but it was also showing its age as being created at the beginning of the Web 2.0 era, but it was right on when talking about the trends of self-service in the library, patrons being satisfied with less if they were not aware of other information options that a librarian could provide them and most of all the trend toward a seamless information environment (although in the 11 years since this scan was made, some libraries have caught on to the usefulness of social media).

The Gerding and MacKellar piece is probably one of the most practical pieces from this unit. It made the best argument for a library having a technology plan and also seemed to guide the reader through all the steps to getting a modern conduit of funding for a library to acquire the technology to reach its goals. If I knew someone from a library or cultural memory institution that was up and coming and looking for a way to get their technology plan initiated, I would probably recommend that they read this article first. Some of the great advice offered here includes organizing collaborative efforts with like-minded organizations as funders take grant proposals with partners more seriously and that having a technology plan in place provides potential funders with proof that the organization seeking technology funding is serious with concrete plans and funders will react positively to organizations which have already determined how they will use their technology. The Gerding and MacKellar article then describes the kinds of technologies that were trending wen it was written, varieties of grants available from the Institute for Museum and Library Services have made available through state libraries and summarizes with success stories of libraries and a dense distillation of tips for success.

Unit 7 Web servers 2 and more of the networked world

XML and me, Could it be love?

OK, now I am seeing why there has been so much emphasis on keeping tags well nested and giving tags closing tags and the requirement of quotes on attributes as I was learning updated html. This stuff didn't seem as important back in my BBEdit4.0 early days of coding by hand. But with the rise of CSS and XML these things are now ironclad laws. In fact my boredom with html over the past 16 years just might give way to a budding new interest.

My wife loves to make analogies between anything she's talking about and dating, i.e. how looking for jobs is like dating, how choosing classes for next semester is like dating. I'd like to give my own analogy: me acquiring new software languages and dating. Html was like a high school affair: learning all the ins and outs what you should and shouldn't do, but carefree and consequence free. Linux/ssh has been like a college relationship, dark, cold, unresponsive and requiring that already I know the rules of the game really well or knowing all the commands already if you expect to get anywhere. Yeah, that relationship went nowhere. But I've heard so many good things about XML for so long, that XML could handle all my data sorting needs, that XML has extensible tags that are human readable! It's like that early stage of a crush when you can't stop listening to Hard Day's Night-era love songs over and over again. I think when the reading mentioned that XML has lots of uses for librarians I woke up and took notice.
I'm also realizing that a few humorous things in blogs that I thought were mock-html just may have been actual XML and that what I was calling "pseudo-html" in terms of the markup for writing a Wikipedia entry might very well be XML.

Before I began taking DigIn or SIRLS classes, I had built up a colossal file of reference images and wanted to develop a systematic means of attributing data to these images, so XML might be the way to go with that, i.e. it could be a good school project in a nice sandbox environment and beneficial to my outside interest to create this for that database.

So, I watched the Mark Long videos, that guy is a cut up. I guess after that, James Pasley, the guy with a thick Irish brogue was not as helpful. The words from the W3 Consortium were a good distillation of the Mark Long videos, but it helped to watch the videos before reviewing the W3C's notes. THe best note "XML doesn't DO anything!"
I realize that XML must run in browsers and not in any specific XML application. I'm also thinking that last week's question about web applications might have led me to wonder how those servers query their databases and I am now assuming that it with XML. I am also curious about XSL and XSLT and how they are used.

Unit 6 Web Servers Pt.1

I learned html in 1998 while attending a fly-by-night trade/night school for graphic design in San Francisco called Platt College. It was about a year and a half between me graduating and me getting a job doing graphic design at Kinko's in San Francisco's Financial District and just four months between there and me getting the job at National Geographic. Back then you wrote up html by hand in TextEdit and put it into BBEdit 4.0 which ran html4.
In the summer of 2005, after getting laid off from NGMaps, I acquired Dreamweaver and put together a very nice online portfolio that got me agency gigs. This semester, I have been taking IRLS475/575 with Martin Fricke and part of the workload has been taking online html courses in Codecademy. Codecademy was a good refresher in nesting my tags correctly, in making a table by hand and still keeping my tags correctly nested. Keeping one's tags neatly and correctly nested is really important. I had forgotten how to have an image map and make the images clickable by hand before last week.

Many of the tags seem to have changed since 1998, but I was game for setting up a one row, three column table by hand. This entailed typing everything out in my old friend TextEdit. This went nicely and I was able to keep my tags neatly nested by creating the beginning and end tags together and placing content within them.
When I realized I might want the text to line up with the pictures, I realized i was going to have to make the table two rows and three columns. Time being in short supply, I did this part in Dreamweaver, and maybe I should have done the whole project in Dreamweaver. I'm old, I think that there's some kind of "character" in doing stuff by hand instead of in an automated manner, but with the calendar showing "Oct.7" I didn't have time for keeping all my tags in order.
While trying to configure the fixed IP today, I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what went wrong when it dawned on me that I had typed in "netmaask" instead of "netmask." I guess haste makes waste. It's these tiny details that must be adhered to intensively in every aspect of technology. And that reminds me of my days of BBEdit when I had a whole page which would not load because I typed a comma instead of period and had to comb through all that code, in a magnified form (so I could actually read the punctuation) before I was able to figure out what the problem was.

U System was actually more of a challenge compared to setting up my webpage. I was banging my head against a brick wall for a while before my wife pointed out that I had gotten disconnected from the VPN. I started up the Cisco and fired up the FileZilla and we were cooking with gas!
I will be interested in knowing how html coding can unlock all of the back-end features of html5. My website seems to have some em or bold tags gone awry, but I feel that had I continued working on it, I would not get it done today.