Well, it's been ten days since my last post... which, in the blogosphere, is the half life of an eternity, I think! Today's title is in commemoration (actually anticipation) of 2,000 views of this blog!
This makes me happy.
In addition to looking for a job, building Forty-Two, working nights, blogging, HTML5 and working on the Lego spreadsheet, I've also been doing some stuff on Twitter ( @CJoelHarrison ), and am looking at PHP, MySQL and Apache. I'm not sure as yet where the last three will fit into the general scheme of things, but I'm thinking that adding these last three to my software skills can only be good.
As far as blog data goes, I'm still amazed at some of the locations of my readers. When I first started out, I had a goal of at least one reader per continent by the end of 2013. As a writer, I'm not sure how much control I have over who reads, but I've tried to make it as interesting and universally appealing (within the constraints of being semi-technical at times) as possible. So, with five months nearly gone in 2013, I'm happy to say the last frontiers for readers are South America and Antarctica. Shameless plug: if anyone knows folks in either of these places, I'd appreciate a recommendation!
Finally, the database has grown by .5% since I last took a look at the numbers earlier in the month, and the Lego spreadsheet has not been touched. Most of the database growth has occurred in one table- Songs. As I'm getting deeper into this project, I'm finding that it is quicker and easier to take a single book or piece of music and extract all of the data, rather than working in the main table and going back and forth opening, saving and closing multiple tables many times over the course of an evening's work. That's the theory for today, at least.
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Monday, May 20, 2013
To be, or not Tiobe
I was having a chat with our younger son a few days ago, and as part of his schoolwork this year involves Visual Basic, I decided to show him its relative popularity among programming languages on a site that (among other things) measures the month-to-month changes in programming language popularity called Tiobe.com. It's actually one of my favorite sites for tech stuff, along with Tech Republic, Dream In Code, Major Geeks, and of course Canonical. Tech Republic is a cool site with all things I.T., Dream In Code is a massive coders' forum, Major Geeks is a great source for downloadable software (free, shareware and $$$), and Canonical is home to the Linux Ubuntu distro.
Tiobe, though, is pretty interesting: (Visual) Basic was ranked 7th in worldwide popularity, sandwiched between PHP and Python. "Heck," I said (yup, I really said "Heck"), "there's even languages in the Top 20 that I've never heard of, like #20- Lua." At the mention of Lua, he became rather animated, and said that he knew of Lua, and how it was extensively used in the popular (game) Team Fortress mod, Gary's Mod.
Lua is open source and claims to use the very liberal MIT license rather than the more well-known (well, to me, at least) Gnu General Public License. It is free to download and use. As for learning Lua, the site claims that the language is both a lightweight and robust scripting language; v5.2 is the current distro- there are books available to purchase covering 5.1 and 5.2. However, the Lua 5.0 e-book is available at no cost online.
Back to Tiobe, though- HTML is conspicuously absent from their rankings, and they explain this on the site: HTML- and SQL- are not "Turing Complete", but T-SQL is. I'm fine with Tiobe (and other sites saying this), and as I've never taken a computer science course in my life, I'm going to assume this to be true. As for Turing, well, the fellow has not been with us for some time, but he has a website! Our son had just finished reading a book about Turing, so he had a vague familiarity with the concept.
I think that's pretty much all for now from here. Nothing to report on database progress, but out of necessity I built a really nice investment calculator in Excel- I wish I had a broker's license, because this calculator was instrumental in selling a few hundred shares of a particular equity!
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
Tiobe, though, is pretty interesting: (Visual) Basic was ranked 7th in worldwide popularity, sandwiched between PHP and Python. "Heck," I said (yup, I really said "Heck"), "there's even languages in the Top 20 that I've never heard of, like #20- Lua." At the mention of Lua, he became rather animated, and said that he knew of Lua, and how it was extensively used in the popular (game) Team Fortress mod, Gary's Mod.
Lua is open source and claims to use the very liberal MIT license rather than the more well-known (well, to me, at least) Gnu General Public License. It is free to download and use. As for learning Lua, the site claims that the language is both a lightweight and robust scripting language; v5.2 is the current distro- there are books available to purchase covering 5.1 and 5.2. However, the Lua 5.0 e-book is available at no cost online.
Back to Tiobe, though- HTML is conspicuously absent from their rankings, and they explain this on the site: HTML- and SQL- are not "Turing Complete", but T-SQL is. I'm fine with Tiobe (and other sites saying this), and as I've never taken a computer science course in my life, I'm going to assume this to be true. As for Turing, well, the fellow has not been with us for some time, but he has a website! Our son had just finished reading a book about Turing, so he had a vague familiarity with the concept.
I think that's pretty much all for now from here. Nothing to report on database progress, but out of necessity I built a really nice investment calculator in Excel- I wish I had a broker's license, because this calculator was instrumental in selling a few hundred shares of a particular equity!
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
Monday, May 13, 2013
The alphabet, I.T. style
If you've ever been involved in any sort of industry or scholastic discipline for any amount of time, you've probably come to realize that there is a ton of industry/discipline specific jargon out there, and adding insult to injury, in the world I live in, there are a lot of acronyms. Not are there only acronyms, there are generally-accepted TLA's (three letter acronyms), shorter two letter things and even one-letter language names.
I suppose I should back up a bit here and try to define what I'm personally out to do.
I'm interested in data, plain and simple. Getting to the data, interpreting the data and presenting the data raises additional questions for me. So, ... I think my blog needs to take a few sideways steps; partly to help me keep track of where I'm going, and partly to keep the blog interesting.
So, for starters, I try to keep these posts relatively short (*if too short, please let me know via comment!). I also try to keep them relevant- right now, primarily about my database. I also usually start out with some pretty normal accounts of the day or past few just to keep readers from falling asleep!
I've been thinking, though, about my I.T. journey- where I've been, where I am and where I'd like to be. I've also considered this blog to be a vehicle to disseminate arcane I.T. information to the masses (*I fully realize that "the masses" don't read my blog, but it 's a handy reference for those that do!)
So, without further ado, away we go!
The wonderful world of I.T. is populated by all sorts of people ("peeps"), hardware and software. In my world, spheres collide, and I interact with peeps, hardware, software, hardware gonks and software gonks... and I'm fairly certain this list is incomplete. FWIW, my definition of a gonk is a human that interacts with computer hardware and/or software.
So, I'm going at the data somewhat backwards... in an attempt to see how data is driven... or drives. Which brings me to HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, which is one of the few four letter acronyms that I know. HTML is THE language of the internet, so this is where I am starting my "formal" coding. I'm playing around with HTML and hope to have a test/dummy website running sometime at some point. The challenge is not getting this site running, but rather making it large enough to learn from! I have a few books on HTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and web design, so, to slightly paraphrase Walter Matthau's character in "Hopscotch", "I'm loaded for bear!"
Finally, a few numbers from data: 9508 rows with a primary key assigned (just a bit over 39%), two new tables, and some added data in the database. Change from last count- approximately .05% growth.
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
I suppose I should back up a bit here and try to define what I'm personally out to do.
I'm interested in data, plain and simple. Getting to the data, interpreting the data and presenting the data raises additional questions for me. So, ... I think my blog needs to take a few sideways steps; partly to help me keep track of where I'm going, and partly to keep the blog interesting.
So, for starters, I try to keep these posts relatively short (*if too short, please let me know via comment!). I also try to keep them relevant- right now, primarily about my database. I also usually start out with some pretty normal accounts of the day or past few just to keep readers from falling asleep!
I've been thinking, though, about my I.T. journey- where I've been, where I am and where I'd like to be. I've also considered this blog to be a vehicle to disseminate arcane I.T. information to the masses (*I fully realize that "the masses" don't read my blog, but it 's a handy reference for those that do!)
So, without further ado, away we go!
The wonderful world of I.T. is populated by all sorts of people ("peeps"), hardware and software. In my world, spheres collide, and I interact with peeps, hardware, software, hardware gonks and software gonks... and I'm fairly certain this list is incomplete. FWIW, my definition of a gonk is a human that interacts with computer hardware and/or software.
So, I'm going at the data somewhat backwards... in an attempt to see how data is driven... or drives. Which brings me to HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, which is one of the few four letter acronyms that I know. HTML is THE language of the internet, so this is where I am starting my "formal" coding. I'm playing around with HTML and hope to have a test/dummy website running sometime at some point. The challenge is not getting this site running, but rather making it large enough to learn from! I have a few books on HTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and web design, so, to slightly paraphrase Walter Matthau's character in "Hopscotch", "I'm loaded for bear!"
Finally, a few numbers from data: 9508 rows with a primary key assigned (just a bit over 39%), two new tables, and some added data in the database. Change from last count- approximately .05% growth.
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Panic @1700!
I had a plan yesterday, and it was a good plan. I found out early on that I would not be working that evening, so being the diligent, studious fellow that I am (ha,ha!), I blocked out some time to settle down with the laptop and my HTML book and write some code. It was a good plan, really it was! I got the laptop all set up and deployed the catshield powercable protector, plugged the external HDD in and the 8GB flash drive where my HTML projects live, and I was ready to go! Jennifer and I had planned to watch the cable TV show "Psych" at 2100, so I had a good block of time to get some serious coding and learning in.
I went down to the Secret Underground Lair to get the book I've been using, and it was not where I thought it was. A trait of mine is that I love organization. The problem, as Jennifer has often (and most pointedly) observed is that my flavor of organization closely resembles the leftovers and castoffs of various space programs that orbit the Earth: it doesn't look like organization to the casual observer. Still, I can generally amaze her with my ability to find the things I claim to have organized.
Back to the book. I had taken it downstairs the previous day, and was going to give it a home, whereupon I discovered that no suitable shelf space existed. As a good many of our overflow books are in a similar homeless state, they typically end up in stacks, double-parked on shelves in front of other books, or on any available flat surface. So, I remember doing a bit of reorganizing of just my I.T.-related titles to make space for this one smallish (just over 400 pages) volume, and many books had gotten moved, and the HTML book presumably had found a new home. However, when I went to look for it, it was just not anywhere. And I did look everywhere- several times. At one point, I had the sinking feeling that it might have been mixed in with several library loans we returned earlier in the day. Jennifer was fairly confident that this was not the case, and after a bit of discussion so was I.
After about 30 minutes of frantic searching, I decided to give it a rest. In lieu of coding, I tackled my spreadsheet, which after the evening's work is now up to 9100+ rows that have their new ID, ~36% of the total. I still have a way to go, but it certainly felt good to put a dent in it. I also added a small bit of data to a few of the tables in the database.
Finally, as 2100 approached, I went downstairs to grab a soda to have with dinner. I grabbed a Diet Pepsi and turned to go back up. There was the book- I had walked past it at least a dozen times in my earlier search! I grabbed the book and described my discovery to Jennifer. Then I said, "See, I even got something that won't keep me awake."
She smiled knowingly and said, "That's diet, not caffeine-free."
Well, at least I found my book.
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
I went down to the Secret Underground Lair to get the book I've been using, and it was not where I thought it was. A trait of mine is that I love organization. The problem, as Jennifer has often (and most pointedly) observed is that my flavor of organization closely resembles the leftovers and castoffs of various space programs that orbit the Earth: it doesn't look like organization to the casual observer. Still, I can generally amaze her with my ability to find the things I claim to have organized.
Back to the book. I had taken it downstairs the previous day, and was going to give it a home, whereupon I discovered that no suitable shelf space existed. As a good many of our overflow books are in a similar homeless state, they typically end up in stacks, double-parked on shelves in front of other books, or on any available flat surface. So, I remember doing a bit of reorganizing of just my I.T.-related titles to make space for this one smallish (just over 400 pages) volume, and many books had gotten moved, and the HTML book presumably had found a new home. However, when I went to look for it, it was just not anywhere. And I did look everywhere- several times. At one point, I had the sinking feeling that it might have been mixed in with several library loans we returned earlier in the day. Jennifer was fairly confident that this was not the case, and after a bit of discussion so was I.
After about 30 minutes of frantic searching, I decided to give it a rest. In lieu of coding, I tackled my spreadsheet, which after the evening's work is now up to 9100+ rows that have their new ID, ~36% of the total. I still have a way to go, but it certainly felt good to put a dent in it. I also added a small bit of data to a few of the tables in the database.
Finally, as 2100 approached, I went downstairs to grab a soda to have with dinner. I grabbed a Diet Pepsi and turned to go back up. There was the book- I had walked past it at least a dozen times in my earlier search! I grabbed the book and described my discovery to Jennifer. Then I said, "See, I even got something that won't keep me awake."
She smiled knowingly and said, "That's diet, not caffeine-free."
Well, at least I found my book.
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
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