Database - Order to Disorder

This week SQL and creating a database! It is difficult, particularly developing the matrix and constraints of the database. It is probably the most difficult thing that I have come across in this course. One reason why it seems so complex is that there is a methodology that isn't clear to me. Maybe it is as simple as just making sure that you don't have any repeating attributes and that the subject of the database is broken down to its simplest elements. Isn't that all normalization is? A friend once gave me a sweater made out of wool. It caused me to itch, it was very uncomfortable. I wore it for some time. Eventually it stopped itching and became my favorite sweater. This is what I expect will happen with database management systems. I will keep doing it, get some feedback, and will be more comfortable with it. Sometimes you have to see the relatives you don't like.

The Plan or Where's the Money?

This week there were a number of readings about the creating a technology plan. Some were interesting from the point of what not to do or how to guarantee failure. Eric Chabrow, State of the Union article from the Nov 28, 2005, Information Week discussed why certain Federal government's tech initiatives went bad. Now I know why the IRS computer system didn't work out.

Two articles that were helpful were Robert Dugan's "Information Technology Plans", from The Journal of Academic Librarianship, v(28)n(3) and Gerding and MacKellar's Applying for Technology Grants from Computers in Libraries, July/August 2006. Both were very practical.
Dugan gave sage advice on all the aspects need to go into a technology plan stressing that it all should go back to the goals. Gerding and MacKellar makes two points in applying for funding. the first partner up and the second is know the trends. I read that as know what is being funded and go after that for your organization. Also know about who you are asking for the funding.

XML - It's a List

Learning how to do it was rather simple. Once again I found the W3schools tutorial very easy to follow. I also looked at Mark Long's videos on XML. Long seems very good at making it sound easy. The best way to learn though is do it. I did with few problems. Most of the difficulties turned out to be typos. I now have a list of photos with data added about the photos. I did look at the unit on namespaces. Also I skimmed the unit on java script which I hope that I will find time to go back to.

My stand alone demo machine is humming along. Connecting remotely went well. It works! One thing though, the terminal font seems smaller accessing it remotely.

HTML

This week it was make a web page using html. It has been almost 12 years since I've done any work in html and have forgotten most of it except for a few commands which I use at my current job at the Vanderbilt Television News Archive when writing descriptions about the shows. So you can say I was starting from just above scratch. The tutorial that was most helpful was from the W3 Schools. It was better in its layout then the Maricopa Center html tutorial Once I got down to making the web page I also looked at html tags from other sites to see how it was done. My web page can be viewed at http://www.u.arizona.edu/~davissc/class.html.

Finally, I've gotten my demo system to work. There were two other attempts with two different machines. One was a Pentium II, small hard drive, not enough memory, wasn't suitable for this situation. I found a P-4, a $10 garage sale wonder. It needed more work then I had time for to get it running. I found a GX260 on Craig's List. It is up and running, the server's IP address is recognized. So far so good! There are some issues with Webmin not opening up but I'm sure I will be able to resolve them.