A cautionary tale of fixed values used in calculating extrapolated fields

Since writing A Tale of Two Databases, I've dusted off my Excel worksheet that I use to keep tabs on blog readership. Yes, deep, deep, way deep down inside of me- somewhere- there's a tiny bit of statistician. And this statistician, who lives somewhere on the Continuum-, er, that is, the Spectrum- likes to keep track of statistics about the blog.

A bit of background is in order at this juncture. I've long been a fan of collecting facts and figures- at least since high school. The year I was a freshman in high school, a new store opened that was on my way to school. The shop was named "The Sutler's Wagon", and Jeff Urquhart (the store has long since closed) was the proprietor. It was a hobby shop. Even back then, I LOVED hobby shops.

Prior to The Sutler's wagon opening, there were three shops I frequented whenever I could get my Dad to take me to them. One was Pilot. I don't remember the whole name of the business, but Pilot was more of a hardware store with a pretty bustling O scale and S scale tinplate selection and HO scale model railroading. Pilot was actually pretty close to Jeff's shop, and was derisively referred to as "the Pirate". Stanton in Chicago was a fairly large store, stocking everything from N to G scale railroading, as well as rockets, RC, plastic models, flying balsa planes... pretty much anything one could ask for in hobbies. The last store was Hill's in Park Ridge, which seemed to have a product range similar to Stanton but smaller selection.

The Sutler's Wagon was different. No trains. A couple of rockets. Some model cars. Everything else was military. Books. Models. Boardgames. Paint. Brushes. Miniatures. Miniatures in 15mm, 25mm, 54mm, 1/35th, 1/72nd, 1/144th, 1/700th, 1/1200th  and 1/2400th scale. The 15's, 25's, 1/144th, and 1/2400th were generally diecast metal; the others were generally plastic. He had rules for the games- these miniatures were not just for looking pretty- they were meant for action!

And this has what to do with anything?

I've mentioned this game before. In a very real way, Fletcher Pratt's Naval Wargame taught me long division. While playing the game is fun. I think I had almost as much fun making the ship (data) cards. In the game, each ship has a point value. The point value is based on a number of data which need to be factored into an equation. That's the easy part. From the total point value, one must then create a damage table which shows how a ship's performance is degraded as she takes damage. So, say a ship has a point value of 10,000  and a max speed of 20 knots. The ship takes 1000 points of damage. 10,000/20= 500, so for every 500 points of damage, the ship would lose 1 knot of maximum speed.  It's not perfect, and is designed to work best with WWI and WWII vessels, but it does work rather well. There are other factors that can make the game quite involved, but overall it is great fun.

From this point, I started looking at music. On the same block as The Sutler's Wagon was a music store called RPM records. Along with Rolling Stone Records in Chicago, I would scour their bargain "cutout" bins. I discovered a lot of great music in these bargain bins, and by the time I got to college, I had a few hundred albums.  My earliest music databases were handwritten on loose leaf paper- I counted an album as being played when I had listened to at least one side.- this worked for both LPs and cassettes. I did have some 8-tracks, but I did not track these.

Flash forward many years. On a normal day I'm on a PC or two at work, and three PCs (simultaneously) at home. In all honesty, a lot of what I do currently is online gaming, but I also write this blog, do a bit of research, maintain a few spreadsheets, and work on my database, Sometimes, I even take a bit of time off to play a game or two on Steam (user= drehenthalerhof).

Here's a lesson for all of you budding data analysts, data scientists, statisticians and anyone else who uses spreadsheets and databases: if the datum doesn't look right, don't assume it is. Check it- even if you are the one that entered it!

So there I was Saturday night, updating the Excel blog readership spreadsheet. This is not a particularly complicated spreadsheet- fifty rows and thirteen columns. As I've repeatedly mentioned, Google's free analytics aren't too deep- they're pretty much stats, and they only show the Top 10. And- because they're real time, if I miss a day or two, I can potentially miss some data. So I've had extrapolate to get a more accurate picture. At some point, though, I accidentally overwrote a formula- and my beautiful table of extrapolated data suddenly was being calculated by a constant instead of a variable! I figured out the error quickly enough, but one can't count on an easy fix every time. When I suspect a problem, or when I need to do a QC on an Excel worksheet, CTRL+~ is my goto.

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

Data in the blogosphere

I had to take a look at my blog dashboard tools to make sure I had introduced my photography blog. It seems like forever, but it was only last week in my Training, Interrupted blog that the new blog was introduced. I've been fairly busy in the intervening week, mounting photographic adventures and then recapping them at hochspeyer.wordpress.com.

While visiting Wordpress this morning, I ran across a featured blog that spoke to me-
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/stats-to-check/

That blog is all about stats. Specifically, stats that Wordpress provides to members of its blogging community. The piece was short and to the point but it brought me back here, because here is where I talk data, and there is where I talk photography.

What I find most interesting about Wordpress analytics is while they are fairly deep, they are free. Now, despite the fact that their analytics rock, I'm not suggesting anyone abandon Google Blogger. If you're reading this, its possible that you, also, have a Google blog. I've got some regular readers all over the globe- I can't see myself moving away from Blogger for that reason alone.

Another interesting concept of the blogosphere is that YOU (or, more specifically, your digital output) is YOUR brand. A long time ago (in internet time), I chose "hochspeyer" to be my internet persona, or brand. Apart from the Steam community, online I am hochspeyer wherever I go. I have created a brand and a presence that far outreaches the village where Jennifer and I lived in Germany. Its been so good to me I have established it as both my Google+ and Wordpress identity.

The picture above is what got me back into photography. The water droplets on top of the grass are actually being secreted by the grass. I took the shot with a cell phone, and remember after taking it thinking, "I can take pictures- I just need a real camera."

That's all for now. As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.

*...and for those who like a good photo or two, please visit my Wordpress boog, hochspeyer.wordpress.com ,,, one f-stop short of a six-pack.

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.

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.