A Pilgrim's Progress: Looking Back on the IRLS 672 Journey

My journey through this course has often been beset by the Giant Despair and I’ve spent much time in Doubting Castle. Not to belabour the reference to Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, I feel like indeed I have gone through many valleys and my progress has been slow. Nevertheless, I have come a long way.

I started out with very little knowledge of open source software. I’d heard about open source of course – Linux, Apache, MySQL, PhP, etc. but that’s about it. I was also aware of different commercial operating systems – mainly MicroSoft and Mac. (I'm a "lifelong" PC user.) I've lived through most of the history of modern computing and the WWW (at least from the 1980’s forward) but not really been aware of the changes, except at a very superficial level.

This course has opened my eyes to so much and has given me an enhanced appreciation for "white hat" hackers, for open source software, for the intricacies of database design and implementation.

I have greater confidence in my ability to do things with the hardware and software of my primary workstation and the demo machine. I’ve definitely developed my trouble-shooting skills when those attempts to “do things” have run into barriers.

Nevertheless, I don’t have any illusions about my amateur status in all of this. I am still very much a beginner – not fluent in the language; not very far in the pilgrim's journey. Still, I’m looking forward to continuing to learn!

Unit 11 - Assignment 13

My experience with Unit 11 was somewhat frustrating. I continue to have problems accessing the UA CBT / VCT online tutorials from home and I ran into problems getting Webmin up and running. Nevertheless, these issues again helped me develop "character": persistence, patience(?!) and faith that things will/can work out if you don't give up! My trouble-shooting / problem-solving skills are getting a work-out with this course.

Regarding the stated objectives for the Unit (compare and contrast CLI and GUI approaches to creating databases, tables and users; learn more SQL including join commands), once I got into Webmin, I felt like I was moving through easily enough.

The CLI gives me a sense of control, knowing what is actually happening when I'm creating a table, etc. I had fun(!) working with the different commands and seeing something happen when I executed a command. Nevertheless, it can be quite tedious and if you make a "tiny" little typo, it can take awhile to figure out where you went wrong and get it fixed / typed in correctly.

The GUI approach is convenient and fairly intuitive.

Regarding particular SQL commands, the join commands aren't intuitive for me. I have to look at examples and/or draw out the tables to see how the different join commands work. In general however, I don't think SQL is too difficult although I have to keep a reference of some sort handy (like the W3Schools SQL tutorial's Quick Ref table) to remind myself of the commands. It would take a lot of frequent use before would feel like I could be fluent in that language.

Difficult Concepts in Unit 10

The specific concepts that I found most difficult in Unit 10 were normalization, null values and extended regular expressions.

The issues I have with normalization at this point are that it still seems very theoretical and I'm having trouble conceptualizing it. I think as I actually work with a database design it should make more sense. It helps to see lots of examples.

Null values may work out in the same way - with experience. I found it confusing to try and follow the "Working with Null Values" explanations in the MySQL.com tutorial.

My question about the extended regular expressions ("regexp") is Why? What's the point? The regular SQL pattern matching queries seem to do the same thing and for the most part seem simpler to enter. The only example given where there was an advantage to using the regexp approach was with "SELECT * FROM pet WHERE name REGEXP 'w';" where as the tutorial points out "it is not necessary ...to put a wildcard on either side of the pattern to get it to match the entire value like it would be if you used an SQL pattern." Otherwise, I don't understand why you would use the regexp commands rather than the SQL commands. Perhaps I should look for a Wikipedia article on extended regular expressions or go through Section 11.4.2 (Regular Expressions) in the MySQL tutorial to get a better understanding of this.

Overall, the whole database design exercise (Assignment 4) was difficult for me when I actually had to come up with the ERD for my proposed database. I don't know if I got it right - having the appropriate entities and/or attributes.

As a side note, I really had fun playing with MySQL - creating the menagerie database and tables, using the different commands and actually being able to make things happen!

Thank You Internet Gods! (actually Blogger programmers!)

I just learned the hard way a lesson that we are always trying to get across to students using the workstations in the Libraries' Info Commons - "save early & save often"! I had spent a considerable amount of time writing my "Reflections on Unit 9 Readings" blog post and was almost ready to publish it when the power went out! Poof! All my profound thoughts - gone! But to my great joy, when the power came back on, I discovered that everything was there as an "unpublished draft" because of the very nice "autosave" feature! Thank you, thank you, thank you Blogger people!

Reflections on Unit 9 Readings

No, I haven't dropped off the face of the earth! Things at work have been "heating up" what with transitioning to a new position, team-building, conducting an online needs assessment survey for a digital project (see below), etc. etc. So, as always I'm way behind on coursework.

That's not to say that I'm not learning anything or not enjoying the class. I'm going to hang in on this course even if I barely get a passing grade. I'm learning a lot. The readings this week have been very relevant to a number of projects I am involved with and/or observed in my workplace.

As mentioned above, I am the lead on an online survey for the Rangelands West portal / Western Rangelands Partnership (WRP) initiative that I've been involved with for over 10 years. The results from this survey and other follow-on assessment efforts (possibly focus groups or interviews) will inform the development of both a business plan for the Partnership and technical requirements for a planned "overhaul" of the portal. We have hired a consultant who is advising on the needs assessment and are seeking a separate consultant (or consulting team - possibly UA Eller College MBA students) to advise on the business plan. It's interesting that the instigation of these current efforts resulted from a funding proposal that the local Arizona Rangelands team submitted for the WRP which was not funded as requested but came back from the funder saying they wanted first to provide funding for a needs assessment, defined technical requirements and a business plan before they would consider funding the request for the portal overhaul.

Among other things, the readings have made me ponder the differences and/or overlap between strategic plans, business plans, project plans, and technology plans. Since the assignment says this blog post is supposed to be "brief", I won't follow that track of thought here/now.

In general, I really enjoyed the readings. I was amazed at the dollar figures associated with the federal government's failed IT projects (in "State of the Union" by Eric Chabrow). I could relate to some of the points made by Brenda Whittaker in the paper "What went wrong? Unsuccessful information technology projects". Some of the frustrations and failures of digital projects that I've been involved with are a result of inadequately defined or shifting/changing requirements. I had experience at least once with vendor inability to meet commitments.

I enjoyed the humor in Michael Schuyler's article "Life is What Happens...", especially comments such as "If we don't understand something, we analyze it to death. Process it through a dozen committees and maybe it will go away." I thought his idea about peer review for technology plans makes a lot of sense. As he writes "The expertise for this stuff is in the trenches."

I could go on and on in detail but the point is that I think almost all of the readings are useful, practical and I plan to keep them and go back to (and in some cases for the very long reports, finish reading) to them in the future. The TechSoup and WebJunction sites and resources are amazing - again, very practical and helpful.

The only readings that I didn't find particularly helpful were the USAC instructions on E-rate eligible technology plans. The three different pages were redundant and obtuse. No wonder Michael Schuyler had a few things to say about the hassles of applying for E-rate discounts!

Update on Installation of Demo System (Unit 8)

I'm happy to say that I've finished without any problems the required Unit 8 Demo System Installation assignments:

• Assignment 3 - Connect Remotely to Your Demo System (Connecting both from Windows and also my VM Ubuntu Desktop)
• Assignment 5 - Setting Up Your Web Site (including Setting Permissions and Creating Web Space for Your User)

See http://tumamoc/ and http://tumamoc/~jeanne

I tried working through Assignment 4 - Headless Mode, but got confused and am waiting for clarification on what to do with the KVM switch, etc.

Aside from that (Assignment 4), I think I'm ready to move on to Unit 9 (just as we are supposed to be starting on Unit 10 - oh well - I'm getting closer!). ;-)

Changing the CMOS battery on the motherboard

I'm learning more troubleshooting skills. The problem is that the troubles are hardware problems and aren't directly related to things I'm supposed to be doing for the Unit assignments. Nevertheless, I've identified some online help for how to replace the CMOS battery:

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000239.htm
and
http://www.ehow.com/how_8159_change-battery-computer.html

I also got out the Dell Dimension 8300 Series Owner's Manual and it gave similar step by step instructions.

Now I'm going to go buy a replacement battery.

...The battery replacement was successfully completed and my workstation is working as it should be (so far, so good). For whatever reason, it is much quieter than it had been! (We blew out a lot of dust from inside the machine. Maybe that has something to do with the noise - or lack thereof now.)