jrtrana

I think therefore I blog

To start the year I was a major bloggins skeptic.  I saw some value but initially didn't see any real difference between blogging and a Course Tools discussion board.  I have been converted.  I truly feel that blogging was a major part of my learning experience in BIT 320.  What worked best for me were the search function on the class website and the use of Sage.  The 2 posts a week is very manageable and a good push to get the knowledge out there.  It was extremely helpful to see where others were at in their understanding of the course and having a virtual converstation with the professor involved.  Responses came quickly and helped to solve issues, especially with projects.  Posts about current news articles were also helpful for me to keep the scope of the course in sight.  The best part about the whole experience is that when one student had a question, a response was posted for all to see.  There was very little insider knowledge.  Everything was shared in an open forum for the greater good of the class.

Website

Earlier in the year I said that I was seriously lacking in HTML knowledge.  Bud suggested a site with basic tutorials.  I took it to heart and during spare time in between classes I have created a website of my pictures purely using HTML.  The only program I used was JEdit.  I did all the coding myself so it is a little lacking in creativity.  Check my site out here.  And the tutorials I used can be found here.

Let me know if you have any suggestions for the site or if you find any problems.

Big got Bigger

Link: Oracle finally reaches deal to buy PeopleSoft for $10.3B - Dec. 13, 2004.

Oracle has finally reached an agreement to acquire People Soft. Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison has sorted through all the legal battles and price negotiations to settle on a $10.3B acquisition. Oracle will still trail behind the German Giant SAP, however Ellison has stated that he has no plans of stopping his growth through aquisitions policy. Oracle has stated interest in buying out a smaller group BEA systems for probably about $3.5B. The improved economy has spurred on a lot of talk about big mergers to come soon, but this is definately quite a start.

More Google

We made CNN with our Google merger as well.  Check it out.

Somebody's reading

Link:

Perhaps somebody reall is reading out blogs. In today's Michigan Daily it was announced that U of M will be partnering with Google to digitize all of the current library holdings. The article can be found here.

I mention in an earlier post jrtrana: More on Google that this could be a viable option for UM to update the current MIRLYN system. If the plans work out, I want full credit.

The plans are for Google to scan all 7 million holding in the University into a digital format over the next 6 years. The resources will then be searchable for key words and accessible to the general public worldwide. As the 6th largest library system in the country, this is a huge project with incredible implications. I salute the University and Google for taking on something so big for the greater good.

Say "Thank You" ... Please

Our group has sucessfully implemented all of our tables and they all work to enter new values into the database.  However, when we tried to "pretty" things up by adding an HTML document that tells the user that success has occured we ran into some problems.  Our document is called "complete.html".  If you look at our xsl document for one of the tables here you can see that we have commented out the reference to "complete.html" because it was giving us problems.

Initially, when we clicked to submit data it would go to the "complete.html" document fine, but would not enter into the database. At this point, we had the closing tag </form> at the very end on top of the other </form> tag.
Secondly, we placed the close tag at the end of the open tag to go to "complete.html".  This entered into the database, but did not come up with the thank you page we created. 
Any ideas on why we are having problems and where to put the close tag so that both function?

Status

At this point, all of out insert forms are functional.  All we have to do is clean things up and change the comments and pull out unnecessary lines of code that we were playing around with!  Things are coming along nicely!

Hail to the Victors: Blogonaut: Hail to the Victors: So, I stand corrected...

Link: Hail to the Victors: Blogonaut: Hail to the Victors: So, I stand corrected....

The way I see this kind of program being practical is when a group of people are all working together on separate computers, but in verbal connection (over the phone or in person). They could then all offer suggestions on the same document and still be able to maintain the same master document on each person's respective computer. I think this could be really helpful when people have to communicate over the phone.

Drop Down Problems

We finally got everything to work together and enter into our database from the internet.  This was a huge step, and we have successfully implemented it into 3 different tables.  However, as we tried to make the forms look a little more professional and easier to use we had a lot of trouble with the drop down menu.  We have been successful in getting the drop down to show up, but there are no values in it.  It is completely blank.  Any general advice on getting drop downs to work?  Has anyone else had the same problem?

Google Results

Link: Google Search: justin trana.

Today in BIT301 we had a brief discussion about search engines and there was brief mention of Google page rank. After class I decided to Google myself to see what kind of results came. I was curious as to which one of my 3 blogs would come up first and how they would be displayed. Surprisingly my personal blog came up first even though my class (BIT320) blog is far more up-to-date. My BIT301 blog didn't come up at all.

The second result was a single posting from my BIT320 blog. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason that I can see to how Google ranked the results of my search. While I am sure they are there, I can't see the pattern. Any ideas?