It isn't data entry. Exactly.

Well, we got what I consider our first real snowfall of the year today. As I compose this, the second wave of snow from this storm system is falling; the prognosticators have said that the second is to be greater than the first. So far, that does not seem to be the case, which doesn't bother me in the slightest (on the plus side, the snow that is falling is providing a nice cover over the wet spots, adding a bit of natural traction control). Jennifer and I spent over two hours shoveling patio, sidewalks, driveway and apron earlier in the evening. We stopped for two reasons: 1) we were done, and 2) we were hot. The snow that fell was of the "heart attack" variety- really heavy, and as the ground still isn't all that cold, there was some melting going on underneath as well. We were suited up for the worst, having layered insulating layers and wind/waterproof stuff... all very lightweight, of course. Still, over the course of two hours at just below freezing temperatures, we were drenched in sweat when our task was done.

The library

Looking north from our front door

The snow started during our dash to Office Depot and the library. There were a few things that needed to get taken care of at the library tomorrow, but we surmised the roads would be better today before the snow hit, so we dashed out. We got gas first, and then headed off to Office Depot to pick up a USB hub. Jennifer's computer has decided that the USB ports are going to work intermittently, and as we had confirmed at least one is working properly, we decided to utilize that port and plug up a powered USB hub into it. We found a reasonably-priced Ativa-branded one and went to the checkout. As we were standing there, we were drawn to some flash drives that were on sale. One of the boys had said they needed one, so we grabbed a 32GB drive for just under $15 USD! I remember the first time I purchased RAM for a computer- $78 USD for 2x4MB!!! And that was about $20 USD under the going rate- yep, got'em at Sam's Club. As we paid for our purchase, we saw that the flurries that had been gently wafting from the heavens had transformed into a full-blown snow assault. We packed up, and headed off to the library. There were no parking spots on the main level of the municipal garage, so we headed up to the 3rd level, which is uncovered and has a nice view of downtown. We braved the gusting winds and snapped off a few photos before retreating to the safety of the truck and  heading back  to find a parking spot on the main level. We took care of business at the library and headed home where we enjoyed an impromptu lunch mashup of chicken, cabbage and ramen.

I was able to finally get  what I hope is the last piece of the normalization puzzle in place between last night and tonight. I cheated a bit. I had considered doing a make table query, but wanted to cleanse the data. So, rather than creating the query, I exported the whole table into Excel, and got rid all of the data except for the column which would become the new table. Unfortunately, last night I neglected to dedupe the data before I created the new Access table, so that had to be done manually today. It was not a complete goof-up, though: as I manually purged the data, I found a few dozen records that would not have been caught by Excel's dedupe, and I fixed these as I went along. Fortunately, the table currently holds only 831 records, so the process was relatively painless.

Normalization in progress

Now the table is in place and the dropdowns are functioning normally. I've had to make corrections here and there... I don't know if I've ever mentioned this before, but data entry isn't exactly one of my strong points. Of course, when one selects from a dropdown, it isn't exactly data entry- is it? On the plus side, all of the tables look like they are working as planned- I have updated 120 out of 831 records. When this process is complete,  the existing "Title" field will be deleted from that table, and then I can get back to the bane of my existence- data entry.

Nota bene- I've always loved that phrase, "nota bene" but seldom have cause to use it. The reason for the N.B. today has to do with proofreading. As I write this, I'm on at least my twelfth preview/save cycle. Although I proofread professionally, I still find that proofreading one's own text is much more difficult that proofing the copy of others. And for me, the issues is generally a typographical error more often than not, and almost always (infuriatingly) something that the built-in spellchecker/grammar nanny doesn't catch!

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.

Only Page 3 in a Google Search?

Fresh on the heels of yesterday's (well, this morning's) Ubuntu installation, I gave our son a quick rundown of how to logon, and let him play with the system for a while. This latest release of Linux has come a long way since the last release I tried, Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) was released at the end of 2007. To be honest, I liked that distro, but I did not have at that time the patience or tenacity to stick with it long enough to learn much about it. My first impression of Quantal Quetzal 12.10 is that it is so vastly improved that the two releases hardly seem related. Mind you, I didn't do much "under the hood" with 7.10.

Today, though, our son, having never touched Linux before, successfully downloaded and installed Valve's Steam client without a hitch (Ubuntu had no issues with getting online). After that, I spent about an hour trying to get sound to work, which seems to be an ever-present issue when doing a fresh OS install. This time, though, it was strictly a hardware issue- I has the speakers plugged in to the onboard PC sound, but no sound. I tried several tests, and even looked online... which is where page 3 in a Google search happens. If one just enters quetzal, Google serves up the bird, a Grammy-winning musical group in Los Angeles, another artiste that lives somewhere in Spain (yes, that was the actual listing... somewhere) and a few other things before Linux shows up. I searched something like "Ubuntu sound issues" and got a number of hits.

Left to right, XP, Win7, Ubuntu 

I was happy to see this!

I went back to the PC and tried the last port of possibility, the soundcard. It worked. Wow. I can only guess that the OS detected the card and wanted me to use it rather than the built in sound. The other challenge I was not looking forward to was installing a printer. This, however, was the anticlimactic moment of my evening. I selected printers, the PC found the networked printers, and I picked one. I think I executed maybe five mouse clicks, including the printer test, shown to the right. I am truly impressed, although I think I will get one of those 900-page books because I want to do some actual work on this box. I still do not know how to do much with the external HDD, and this is important as the internal one is fairly small. Well, I was able to create two folders, but unable to "execute permissions" to install the one game- Red Orchestra- that I have that has been ported to Steam. I did locate a Dummies book published in 1997, but it wasn't any help, so I need the big book.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.

More Steam, punk!

It’s time for a rant. Per internet protocol, this rant is hardly serious- it’s merely an expression against some minor perceived frustrations of modern life.

As compensation for a purchase I recently made, a certain manufacturer included in their product an offer for some .mp3 downloads. Being a fairly savvy consumer, I understood that the manufacturer most likely was betting that the average consumer would not redeem all ten .mp3s that were the offer.

Well, I am quite the music aficionado, and I was happy to get ten songs out of the deal. It literally took around three hours, so I’m not sure what my ROI is. I suppose the bottom line is that I was able to fill a few holes in my collection. The downside was I was not able to fill a few holes in my music collection. There were artists that were unavailable that did not surprise me. What surprised me was popular songs that were not available from certain one hit wonders.

Okay- end of rant. I got some good  music- considering that the actual product cost 14 USD, and an .mp3 generally costs something like ninety-nine cents, I only paid four dollars for the actual product.

Back in the real world, I’m listening to a tune from Axe’s first (and best, in my opinion) album as I write. “Jennifer” is a great tune. Behind me, the XW4200 workstation is resting. I finally got up the courage to fight cables, track down power supplies, and bring the workstation back online. It is re-entering service as an Ubuntu box; our son is all excited that Steam is now available on the Ubuntu platform, so he is going to get the opportunity to start working with Linux. I read some of the Canonical blurbs about Quantal Quetzal, and it looks somewhat different from the last Linux I played with, which I think was 8.10 LTS. The install was slightly odd- about a ten minute preload where not much happened onscreen. The rest of the install was typically painless- Canonical have the install process down. One improvement over the last time I did this is the informational screens… all in all I’m pretty jazzed about this latest version of Ubuntu.

The other benefit to the Linux install is the reclaiming of office space- the Secret Underground Lair is unfortunately no stranger to clutter, and this most recent project forced me to do a bit of straightening, and more will follow.

One final note which pretty much pegs the geek-meter at 11 concerns printers. I think I had previously mentioned that we had picked up a used HP printer at our local Goodwill store. Because of the way the office is set up, this printer sits on top of a pair of PCs- until tonight, it had rested on three. The activation of the Linux box required some repositioning of equipment, so now it sits on top of two PCs. What really pegs the meter, though, is this printer is our third HP printer in service (simultaneously); all take the same ink, and all have output trays which face East.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.   

Is it Steamy in here?

Much excitement is occurring in the Secret Underground Lair. On Valentine’s Day, 2013, Valve Software released Steam for Linux. According to the Steampowered website, “Valve- creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the release of its Steam for Linux client”. Our son was virtually beside himself, waxing long and eloquent on the virtues and possibilities for this new iteration of Steam. This, of course, is genius, as an oft heard complaint about Linux is that there are very few high quality mainstream games available. This could be a game-changer.

Oh, and could he install Steam on my workstation.

In actuality, the request was neither unanticipated nor unwelcome. I had been planning to run Linux on that box for some time; in fact, it has had Linux installed on it several times over the past few years as I’d dabble with a new distro every so often, but always felt a need to keep it more permanently configured as a Windows machine because of the need or desire to run certain pieces of software. That excuse is no longer valid as I have a Win7 box sitting right next to an XP box. I guess its Ubuntu or bust now. This is going to be about a one day project, as all three PCs and the monitor need to be rearranged. My son will also need to get a working familiarity with Ubuntu, as has never used it before. He already has the OS on a USB stick, and that’s how he plans to install it. I don’t think he’s aware, however, that he can run Ubuntu without installing it.

Back in database land, I made a decision to fix a few things. First, one of the tables got renamed to more accurately reflect its contents. Second, and much more significantly, I fixed the Time table: I got rid of all of the extraneous characters, and cut it down from 43,200 pieces of data to 3,600! This makes me exceedingly happy. I still have a major fix to do which I had alluded to in an earlier post- I need to create a “titles” table. I think it might even be worthwhile to eliminate the “Songs” table altogether and merge that data into the proposed “titles” table.

As far as speeds and feeds go, only two major changes to report today: the shrinking by over 90% in the Time table, and 170 song titles were added.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.

Normal is a town in Illinois

I'm opening this with a shout-out to Normal, Illinois. Normal has a population of 52,497, according to the 2010 United States census. And what does this have to do with databases? Well, if one were to move to Normal, one would not become Normalized. This deserves a rimshot, but embedding didn't quite work the way I wanted. So just imagine it.

I've waxed eloquently before (well, sort of) about how my database is pristine and pure as driven snow. I'm going to say that's about 95% true: I found a field that I need to change from its current text entry value to a lookup field. This is one of the very original tables of the database, and right now pretty much the primary one, so I must step lightly. In actuality, it doesn't really need to be changed, as any dupes would only be occurring in that one field, and there probably wouldn't be many, but with my luck....

A tangential illustration is needed here to explain how things work in my life.

Its winter where I live, and it gets below freezing quite often. I have a vehicle that is kept outside on most days, so that when I go somewhere during the day, it needs to be warmed up a bit and the windows defrosted. Over the past two to three months, the engine started making a clicking noise and the rpm's would also drop momentarily every time I turned the defroster on. I had a mechanic look at it in conjunction with some other service, and he could not figure out what the problem was. I lived with it for some time, and it was not getting any better. Snookums suggest taking a look under the hood, which was a reasonable suggestion. So, I pulled the hood release, and- yeah, absolutely nothing.

Great- time to visit the bodyshop, so that they can fix the hood release so I can maybe get a mechanic to fix whatever-it-is that's making my truck run strangely. "It's probably frozen," she suggested. Hood releases don't normally freeze. There's that word again. They don't NORMALLY freeze for most normal folks, but us, ... yup. We had a period of relative warmth the past few days, and sure enough, when I pulled on the catch, it popped right up. I propped the hood up, started the truck and turned on the defroster. Click. I looked at the engine. Click. Spotted it- the air conditioner clutch (in the picture its the round thing with the three silver bolts) was engaging approximately every five seconds. I had learned that the defroster uses the air conditioner to remove moisture from the air. However, when the a/c is low on freon (coolant), the compressor cycles madly. So, we went to one of our local auto parts stores, and picked up a very nice all-in-one reusable recharge kit. With snookums' assistance, I got some freon in the system this afternoon, and no more clicking. And probably saved over 100 USD by doing it ourselves.

I told that story so that I can say this: I'm going to fix that table and bring a bit of normalcy into my life.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.

I.T., Old School

I used to format HDDs all of the time. Well, it seemed like it- I could practically do a WinXP install in my sleep (and probably did, at least once). I have a few neat tools I like to use to do this dirty work. One is called Darik's Boot and Nuke and the other is Ubuntu- pretty much any Ubuntu (or, for that matter, any Linux distro) should do the trick. The first is of no use to me, as I think it's pretty much for taking out internal drives. Ubuntu would do the trick, but I honestly have a bit of a mess in the office and those CDs are buried somewhere! So, I did what any old self-respecting geek would do... that's right, Robin, to the DOS prompt! It took me a couple of tries, but I finally got the format going; its been such a long time since I last did this that I had to check the syntax on the internet!

In the last blog, I mentioned I was manually transferring files and deleting as I went along. We've had this drive for a few years- its a 1TB WD Passport, and it had worked fine up until a few months ago. I had suspected for some time that we had some kludged up data on the drive,  but never really tried to hunt it down. Well, when I finished getting all of the data off of the old drive, I had four folders left that had been created by WD's backup software. During scheduled backups, a bad file had been copied and wouldn't let me delete these folders. So tonight, I finished the job.

I opened up My Computer, selected the drive and hit "FORMAT". The PC thought about this momentarily, then said that the drive was in use and close down whatever applications were open, yada, yada, yada. Nothing else was open. So, goto DOS. Command prompt. Check syntax. ALL DATA WILL BE LOST. Yes! Yes! Yes!

No. What?

"Format cannot run because the volume is in use by another process.Format may run if this volume is dismounted first."

I'm not sure I'd ever seen that message before. Wow- you can teach an old dog new tricks.

"Would you like to force a dismount on this volume? <Y/N>"

I'd like to buy a vowel... Y.

So now, we have a bare hard drive, which our son claimed already.

In database news, a little progress has been made from the last time I talked about it. The Songs table is slowly getting populated, and the Music Albums table received a redesign and its first record. There are only a little over 500 new pieces of data that have been added in three months, so there's clearly still a great deal of work ahead on this project.

Hard drives- the bane of one's existence?

*This was written a few days ago.

"Bane"- according to Webster's online dictionary, is the killer, slayer, poison, death or destruction of something.  Bane is one of those good old words. In a sense, I suppose, one's existence is defined by time, so in this context, I am within my rights to proclaim that HDD's are the bane of my existence.

Explanation follows.

Snookums has a new PC. All nice and shiney. Her HDD, however, was part of the problem so we hooked a new one up. The old HDD had lots of data, which I (finally!) finished transferring tonight (Sunday, Feb 3) to another drive. As I write this I am wiping the old drive- yay! There's still a bunch of deduping that needs to happen, but I found a program in our inventory that may do the trick- this remains to be seen. What stinks, though, is that when I look at the old drive, it misreports itself, showing 0 bytes of data and 0 gigabytes of capacity. I think I need to contact Western Digital about this and see if I can get a warranty repair. Hey- it could happen.

Before I get to the database, I wanted to go back and revisit my blog goals. I had said that I wanted to get a hit from every continent this year. I'm not sure if Google can track Antarctica, but if not its still okay. January had visits from North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. So, that means I still need to score some readership in South America and Africa.

I  STILL don't have a front end for the database, and this bothers me, partly because its inconvenient, and partly because I'm not too skilled with building them just yet.

Return to tech

If you've been following this blog, you've probably noticed that I've had a few bad experiences with PC's in the past month or so. I got everything working, which is the good news, and snookums has a dependable PC, but when the existing external HDD is powered up, it does not boot. Well, not entirely true- the PC tries to boot... from the HDD. I went into the setup menu and changed the boot order to HDD, CDROM, USB, and rebooted... to no avail- it kept on trying to read the drive that didn't have an OS.

FOUR. LETTER. WORDS.

Power down the external drive, and it boots normally. Adding  frustration. This is AFTER I've sorted out the boot order. Sheesh. But, the drive works just fine once the system is booted. So, tonight I'm copying files to another drive (I think it is fairly obvious by now that tech runs deep in our home), and in a day or two she'll have a new drive with all of her data.

OTOH (On The Other Hand, for the uninitiated... and, from the For What It's Worth chronicles: I spend some time defining things here, and because I officially have a worldwide audience spread over four continents, I've decided to define all of the "tech" terms at least once, as this blog is for everyone. And while I'm at it, "snookums" is the screenname I use for my wife, and if I have to explain something to her, the term is worth an explanation here.)

The database! I've been pounding on this for a few days, bringing one of the tables up to speed. This particular table, Songs, is vitally important to my previously unstated "normalization out of the gate" quest. I've got around 200 (199 to be exact!) songs right now, representing 16 music albums. If only I typed quicker... then again, I found a small issue in this table: it had never been set to "no duplicates". The good news was that this was an easy fix, and very few dupes showed up (one album was duped). And now, speeds and feeds from the database...

No major changes- I'm simplifying the roundup by saying there are 190 new entries from the last count, and 423 from the first count. The "next big thing" may be adding images to a few of the tables: the Album table, and the as yet to be created Lego table. The album art isn't really necessary, but would be a nice aesthetic touch. Lego illustrations could be very important though, as Lego elements often will be printed with different designs. And, since I have nearly 2800 distinct cataloged part numbers for Minifigs (Lego "people") that are only variants of four basic part numbers (Lego p/n's # 970-973), pictures may be a necessity for that particular table. That won't happen for some time, though, as the Legos are not counted, and there are 26,000+ part numbers which I am getting organized in Excel right now (another project altogether, but another Prime Motivator of the database).

I also just found out that my employer, who had just jumped from Microsoft Office 2003 to Microsoft Office 2010 ~six months ago, will be upgrading to Office 365 this weekend. And, going from Groupwise to Outlook. Major changes like this are always unwelcome in the eyes of endusers (well, me, anyway), but eventually you get over it. However, to do a major software upgrade (Office) AND a groupware/messaging upgrade (Outlook) is very, very gutsy. I mention this because the template I'm using for the very time-crunched project I'm involved with is an Office 2003 document. I've been updating it in Office 2010 for the past few weeks and its been going well, but now... well, I don't even know what the 365 UI (user interface- the way a program looks when opened up) looks like! I'm going to do some quick research over the weekend, and hopefully nothing will have mutated over the weekend.

Did you ever think I.T. could be so dark. And dangerous?

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.