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Blog on Blogging

At first, I really thought blogging would not help at all. I really did not see the benefits of blogging. If I had questions I would have rather emailed professors or went to office hours. But I guess then, I was used to emailing and going to office hours I was skeptical of trying something new. Also, since everybody can view each other blogs, I guess I was more concerned more about how fellow classmates and Bud would react to the blog. I made sure that my blogs weren't asking "dumb" questions and only blogged about IT news that was interesting to me or applicable to what we were learning.

Looking back I think that I was too scared about how people would view my blogs and I didn't want to try something new. But over the semester, I tried to force myself to blog and the quick replies from Bud and fellow classmates was better than emails or going to OH. I kind of understand the "fun" and the usefulness of blogging now and wished I could have been less defensive at the get go.

If I have any suggestions, I would like to see students in the future to blog about anything at first, wether it be sports, problems, life etc and then some how weave in more and more project and class issues and less blogs about "anything."

Online arometherpary service?

This article, I thought, was very interesting. A Japanese communications company called NTT have created an internet site for smell. Yes, smell. All th user has to do is attach a crystal-ball with a nozzle into a laptop or desktop and go to the site. The data from the site is passed through the crystal ball to create up to 36 scents currently. Horoscope readings can be done where a user inputs his/her birthday and the the crystal ball produces the correct scent. Inside the crystal balls are tiny bottles of perfumed oils that are mixed when specific data are received from the site.

XSLT templates

One requirement for the presentation on Dec. 9 includes "A brief discussion of how you are attempting to re-use XSLT templates." Does anybody have a clear understading about this requirement and know exactly what we have to present?      

eHealth

Doctors in Massachusetts will be able to use a database called eHealth to access patients' records from any hospital or clinic within the state, an article from USATODAY said. The insurance company Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts is funding $50 million towards the project. This project although will begin as a pilot program wil save hospitals and doctors and the state a lot of time and money. Currently, all patient records are in paper and takes a long time to sort and update and are very costly. Information technology has been lagging in the medicine industry due to lack of funding but with the funding from the insurance company, Massachusetts may be the first state to have a state-wide database for patients' medical records.

'Blog' - most popular word

An article from USA TODAY said that the word 'blog' is now the most popular search word in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. Last year, the word was 'democracy.' This shows that people are getting more interested into Web logs and want to learn more about blogs and their functions. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a blog as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer."

Microsoft and blogging

Microsoft is coming out with a test version called MSN spaces which is a new tool that lets people create Web journals as mentioned in this article. This service will be free to people with Microsoft Hotmail accounts and/or MSN Messenger accounts. Although Microsoft is a little late in introducing a new tool for blogging (Microsoft's number one rival AOL introduced their blogging tool during mid 2003), Microsoft believes that it is not too late because "blogging is only just catching on with mainstream users."

Microsofts strategy is to closely integrate MSN Spaces with the MSN Messenger and Hotmail programs. The idea is that people can be alerted through their messenger if a friend or a visitor updates their blog or writes a comment in theirs. Bloggers can limit access of their blogs to limited friends by using the Passport sign in to log in to view certain blogs. The MSN Spaces can be updated not only through the web but also through email or even cell phone.

The final version of MSN Spaces is due to be out by next June. Although for now, MSN Spaces are free, Microsoft is not ruling out the idea of creating a "paid, premium blog service" in  the future.

10X10 article

I found an article that better explains about the 10X10 site than I tried to write about in my earlier post. 10X10 was created by Jonathan Harris, the creator of WordCount http://www.wordcount.org/. (I found this site not as fascinating as 10X10, but worth a look. It justs ranks 86,400 words that we use most frequently today.)

The article talks about 10X10 as the real thing to "news at a glance" where 100 stories represented by a picture in a 10X10 grid of images is updated every hour to present the news at that hour. An automated process scans the RSS feeds from Reuters, the BBC, and the New York Times to create key words that is displayed in the grid. The fascinating thing about 10X10 is that no human intervention goes on. In other words, webmasters or editors don't look at the words that are chosen, but rather, is just posted on the site.

10X10

Having nothing to do, I stumbled into a site called 10X10 (www.tenbyten.org). This site shows 100 pictures of 100 news that is going on at that moment. The images are ranked in order (from left to right) of importance for that hour. On the right, there are 100 words that corresponds to the 100 pictures. When one of the 100 pictures or words are selected, the headlines of the news is shown and when the headlines are selected, the full article can be read about the news.

10X10 currently scans the RSS feeds from several international news sources. Then 10X10 uses an elaborate process where the news articles in RSS feeds are scanned then the most important words of the articles are drawned out. The 100 most importants words and their pictures are selected and is displayed in a grid of 100 images.

This I thought was a very creative way to use RSS feeds that are used in most sites nowadays. This site differentiated itself by using the picture grid although it basically does the same thing as any other news site that uses RSS feeds. This site made me realize that opportunities in the tech industry is never ending, and the powerful effects of RSS in the world today. Without RSS, there would be no site like 10X10 today.

ERROR at line 3:

Hey Bud,
I just input all the information about the menu (menu id, menu name, price, menu description) and when I ran it on oracle I got an error saying

ERROR at line 3:
ORA-01401: inserted value too large for column

Does this mean that what ever I inserted is too big to be displayed on a table? Cause I've been changing the maximum number of characters for the menu description attribute, but keep getting the same error.

JOIN, IN, EXISTS

Dear Bud,
When Querying multiple tables, using the JOIN (ex. ol.part_num = p.part_num) the IN operator and the EXISTS operator gives you the exact same results. In the test are we responsible for all three (ie are you going to ask specifically) or can we use any of the three when ask to join multiple tables?