Unit 10: Getting My Hands Dirty

Since last week was mostly conceptual, I was really excited to finally get into actually doing some coding. I love getting my hands dirty, figuratively of course. I have to admit that I really didn't have a hard time with any of this weeks work. Instead a lot of it was a great way of reflecting on the things that we've learned throughout the semester. 

It was really neat to rehash learning about creating users and security levels just like we did about Linux, but this time in MySQL. I really did enjoy the coursework video and Joshua’s choice usernames for his sample accounts. There's something about having both a teachers pet and that best friend that will mess everything up as a great example for showing everyone how everything can get screwed up by letting someone you don't trust into your system.

Next I got to rehash all of what we learned about installing Webmin. When I first used Webmin, I was very unimpressed with it weeks ago. But it was really cool to be able to create tables and databases very fast and with ease. If I wanted to add a ton data really fast, I think I would use Webmin to do it, because for me it’s the quickest way of doing.  Of course everyone has their own personal choice for how they like to enter data and I'm sure many people would disagree with my favorite being Webmin.

Next installing, installing and installing was the name of the game, and it brought me back to when we first created our LAMP server. This time we installed phpMyAdmin. This software is definitely my choice for testing MySQL Queries. I think the fact that you can simply copy and paste from one window to another and then apply and see what happens it a lot easier than creating a query on the command line and continually getting errors until you get a working product. I'm assuming that's why I was told that this is probably the preferable program for using MySQL and creating a databases.

Last but definitely not least we made a text file and turned it into a table. It's really nice to know that there are so many different ways to do the same thing. I think that was the point of this week. This week we learned the versatility of being able to create databases and tables for MySQL in so many different manners.

To end my exciting week it was very cool to create my very own queries made of all kinds of different verbiage and testing them out.  Sometimes my code worked and sometimes it took forever to figure out what I was doing wrong. All in all this was a very exciting week, and I love learning and creating something and then being able to look back and see the architecture.

Unit 9: Something to Figure Out

I have to admit, that I had a really hard time with this project. I always thought of myself as a very adaptive person. If you put a piece of software in front of me I can learn it if I have enough instruction. When it came to creating an Entity Relationship Diagram I felt like I hit a wall of logic what wasn’t kicking in. Maybe it has to do with my hands on approach, but I just had a really hard time rapping my head around relationships. It was almost impossible to figure it out myself so I searched the internet to find an example close to my database idea and work from there.

So my idea is to make an image database that is based on different types of humor. In reality I really just need a digital asset database example and I found one after searching for an hour or so at Database Answers. There I finally found what I was looking for.

Here an asset has a relationship with its creators, events and format types. I’m not sure what the events are for, but the other two made sense. The format type is connected to two additional tables (recording devices and publishing devise), which is a bit too complicated for my database. 

I was able to take this Entity Relationship Diagram and make my own. It’s not perfect by any means, but I’m proud of it because it was hard to wrap my mind around how it would be written.

Other than that, this week’s concepts weren't that bad. I can see how many would have an issue with Normalization, but after watching MySQL Database Normalization on YouTube the concept finally clicked for me.

Unit 8: Is it still true today, yep?

I loved reading ‘Life is what happens to you when you'remaking other plans’, written by Michael Schuyler in 2000. It was a blast from the past to know even back in 2000 people who were making decisions on technology knew little to anything about the technology itself. I will admit that understanding technology has become easier and easier, but I was still surprised that my now fiancé, then girlfriend knew little to nothing about computers. She wanted them just work to and to do what she wanted. She had no interested on how they worked, “That’s what the Best Buy people are for (Geek Squad).”

Again this article was written back in 2000, and I would cringe if a big city library system didn’t have some IT professionals in the room when talking about the future technology plan for a city-wide system, but what about smaller systems or  a one library town.  Some libraries can’t even afford to have an IT person on staff and then need to talk about their future in technology needs. I’d love to dismiss this article and say, it’s a great satire of the past, but in fact it’s probably something that still happens today in the building next door, when we’re not paying attention.

Sure there are words everyone knows now, like, internet and website. Small businesses go out of business because of their lack of web presence. Library need to always staff in front of the crowd and therefore need to keep a loud technology presence in the room at all staff meetings.

I am currently working on a LSTA grant for a program I call ‘The Videogame Blogging Station’. Without going into a lot of specifics I want to get a powerful computer with numerous recording abilities for tweens and teens to play games while recording themselves and for them to make games reviews and video blogs. This will help them build communication skills, video editing skills and self-esteem, plus they get to play video games, everyone wins.  In the grant I will need to talk about in many pages my technology needs, but mostly I will need to talk about outcomes. What’s interesting is the outcome has nothing to do with the actual technology needs.

I brought that all up because technology forecasting can easily get clouded by non-technology based information. We want to maintain a high-speed internet. We want to set up places for staff to save all of their work so they can use it anywhere in the city, etc. These things are great, but you’ll need a tech guy in the room to help you figure out how this is going to happen and the cost. Cost especially is important in future casting.

I really loved Schuyler article, partially for its humor, but even more because these issues still exist at some level all over the place today.

Unit 7: XML is so fancy!

I have to admit to learning a little XML about fifteen years ago. Back when I just graduated with my undergrad, my dad wanted to take a JavaScript course at the community college and asked if I wanted to take it with him. During the class my dad created a slide show webpage with JavaScript that let the user flip through pictures, using html buttons links to the script. The JavaScript used an XML page for the picture information. Back then I was working on getting rid of a bunch of my stuff to move out of living with my parents so I transferred his idea to a website I called Bargain Monkey’s Garage. This was a time period where eBay wasn't that big yet, so just think if I had made the site learn to take money from people and actually took time to finish it I might be a millionaire.

So this week I instantly went to the w3schools website to refresh my memory on XML. I watched part of Professors Fulton’s YouTube video and realized it was a great class for XML information made as a PowerPoint presentation (Beyond MARC: Metadata Standards for Digital Resources). I also watched the suggested video called, “Just Enough XML to Survive”, it was a very brief overview of XML, but the video quality was lacking. I could hard read the screen and when I made it larger I felt like I was just looking at fuzz.

I then moved to making my XML file and we were instructed to make a XML files with a root element with three data elements with sub-elements within. It was supposed to be about images so I figured I would make one for real. I used free picture from Deviant Art with random searches. 

I picked a picture of a turtle, a banana and a double rainbow and saved off the files for potential use in the future. I also got their creation date and artist data and added it to the sub-elements. I really enjoyed making the XML file and hope we use it in the upcoming weeks in class.