Summing it up

This semester has been a whirlwind tour of various open source Content Management Systems and similar software packages that can be used as digital repositories. It's obvious that there is no obvious choice when it comes to selecting the best package for a repository - and even more problematic at large institutions where there are so many differing communities and needs.

My takeaway this semester is that there will be lots more to learn and that collaboration will be one of the keys to success in the digital information management field. I think it is a promising area and I'm really grateful to have started down this path.

I want to keep working on some form of digital repository, just to keep my irons in the fire. I think I'm going to try installing Omeka on a server and see how far I can get with it.

Of Virtual Machines and Real Learning Experiences

I've been working with Virtual Machines a lot during the past semester and I think I've gained a lot of valuable experience in the process of repeatedly building and configuring an Ubuntu / Linux server. I'm not sure how many more times I really would want to do that (I'm up to five or six now, I think), but I certainly think that, for this kind of class, it is valuable to learn about some of the nuts and bolts of working with these kinds of systems. I'd even like to learn how to take the platforms online, but realize that time may prohibit that opportunity.

The possibility of a prefigured VM might offer more time to work on other things, such as collection development, and that would be a good thing. I doubt that I'm going to have to serve as a system administrator anytime soon, and perhaps my time would be better spent on things that relate more to the collection and less on technical stuff. Still for me, I'm a bit of a computer geek and I really enjoyed learning the command line stuff and I'm sure there will be times when that experience will give me the confidence and knowledge to boldly go where I might never have gone before.

Impressions of sites for digital repositories and related platforms

The Omeka home site is very nicely designed and implemented. It features both video and text instructions as well as easy access to forums and other support areas. I found it inviting and easy to use.

Eprints presents me with an overwhelming amount of information on the home page and as I go deeper in any given direction, I have the sense that I'm getting lost and that all these layers are just glommed on to each other. It is a much more confusing site than Omeka, perhaps reflective of the age and complexity of the Eprints platform itself. It's pretty utilitarian in a way, but not in a really good way, to my taste. It does give me a sense that this is a very BIG platform with a lot going on, which is a good thing. I think Eprints is due for a major overhaul of it's website.

DSpace.org has a much more spacious and inviting atmosphere. The left column menu bar gives an early indication of the DSpace platform interface and the News and Upcoming events column at right give a sense of an active user community. The placement of the New User features front and center engenders a sense of welcome for prospective newcomers. The weakest point in the DSpace platform seems to be support. The User Forum has been down for at least weeks and the DSpace wiki has been in the process of cleanup after migration for as long. I personally feel lost in the DSpace support area and this single fact may mean the difference between using DSpace for my repository and using it.

Drupal shows its strong points right from the home page. The design is clean, but contains lots of information. It offers good reasons to use Drupal with all the Modules, Themes, Active Developers, etc. etc. It also welcomes new users with a get started button and gives a feel for the active community of Drupal users with the various News, Updates, Forum Posts and Commits (sp?). The slogan is very persuasive: "Drupal: Come for the software, stay for the community" - wow. Indeed, there is a huge Drupal Community and it is easy to access and very active. Hmmm, maybe I need to reconsider Drupal as an option, now that I think about it!

JHOVE is pretty bare-bones and technical-looking. Which is probably a valid reflection of JHOVE in general. You have to be a geek to hang with JHOVE. PKP Harvester has a much friendlier design, interface and implementation. There are a couple support options, through manuals or discussion forms and although the information is dense, the organization of the site really helps navigate through so much information.

I think the various aspects of the home site for each of these platforms or applications gives me important information about whether or not it might be the right platform for my digital collection. The key areas are support, support, support and community. After that, I would say the functionality of the site, including design, navigation and indications of vibrant ongoing deployment and development.

Exploring Open Archives and Service Providers for OAI

This week, after installing the PKP Open Archives Harvester application (in the same VM as my ePrints repository) I explored various service providers using links from The University of Illinois OAI-PMH Data Provider Registry with the following impressions:

colLib: which then linked to http://libriotech.no/ which is a Norwegian company that provides installation and management for library software systems.

digitAlexandra: which took me to a dead page at http://www.digitalexandria.com/

DL-Harvest: which took me to a page with a CSRF security error and Error: Document Not Found notice, so I tried another link from the page for DList which linked to http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/arizona/ and was able to access the University of Arizona Campus Repository. From there, since I was familiar with the DSpace format, I recognized that I could browse by Communities and collections and was able to make sense of what kinds of resources were there and how many. It is apparent that DList is the deepest area of the archive with 1477 resources. There was also a smattering of other data from the Tree Ring Lab, School of Music (Vern Yocum Collection, which actually got me hooked for a while) and Arizona Anthropologist.

Sydney College of the Arts Archive: which initially took me to http://gita.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/details.asp?id=3537&sets=all#ListSets, where I could then find the link to the actual repository at http://va.library.usyd.edu.au/oai. It's not a very big repository, even smaller than DList, so again, the Browse feature came in handy. Now I'm looking for something larger scale that allows me to really search for something.

OAIster: taking my cue from the assignment, I figured I would take a look at this monster of library indexes at http://oaister.worldcat.org/. A search for Edward Weston gave a result of 2853 resources available, and took a whopping 19.51 seconds to deliver. Obviously, this kind of search would bring up a lot of records, but my attempts to utilize the OAIster faceted search to narrow the result were fruitless. My first attempt came up with an error message and the second attempt gave me a dialog window with a green spinning circle of death. I went back to the home page and tried again and got a message that the database I was trying to search was not responding. Try again. So, I tried the advanced search and didn't have much better luck.

My takeaway from the OAI section is that I have a better understanding of how resources are shared between institutions, especially libraries. I also get the feeling that it's not a smooth process and needs time and resources in order to make searching various collections easier and more reliable for the end user. The importance of metadata becomes more and more clear as I see the various pieces of the digital library/repository come together. There is much to do!

I've been spending a LOT of time with ePrints this past week. More than I expected, even after I had my items entered in the database. This is because, after all that work, my host machine crashed (actually, it was being very slow and I got impatient and initiated a hard reboot) and the VM with ePrints on it got corrupted. Luckily, I had a snapshot not too old - but still had to reconfigure ePrints, redo the subjects file (good practice with my Linux CLI, I suppose), and then re-enter my items. It went faster the second time through, and I did a better job, I think. Experience does make a difference, after all!

The other thing that really makes a difference is that ePrints allows me to make templates from records. Once I have a certain type of item, say image or video, most of the settings will stay the same. I can make a template and just change the link to the item, upload it, and then update the title, abstract and keywords. That usually takes care of it. I like that about ePrints!

One problem with ePrints, though, is that the results are returned alphabetically by author. I would prefer that the results be returned by subject, but since ePrints is really sort of library-centric, the results by author will have to do. I think this could be a real problem if I had a lot of records, but since I don't, it really doesn't slow down my searches.

I am still looking for the "killer app" that is really made for images and video, though. I see Omeka looming out there, but I have to do some harvesting first, I guess.

Getting started with EPrints - not the easiest install, but good CLI practice

This week has been spent installing and configuring EPrints. I found the EPrints installation to be slightly trickier than DSpace or Drupal. There were some things I had to wrap my head around in terms of setting up EPrints with the LAMP and SSH. One thing that tripped me up was that I had already set up the mySQL server with a username and password and needed to relay that through EPrints. Once I figured out what was happening there, things got easier. It does remind me that I need to be very careful about keeping track of passwords and I've been generally going along with what the installation instructions from Bruce recommend. It just makes it easier. The other thing about having problems is that I "get" to repeat the procedures multiple times, which actually helps me learn them a lot better. I genuinely try to make sure that when I'm typing in commands, I understand what I'm doing. My CLI skills are getting better, but I sure do get tired of typing in long strings of folders to get back and forth in Linux. I'm assuming that if I got better, I would find workarounds for this such as creating symbolic links for frequently used directories.

I customized or "branded" the EPrints front page with the name of my collection and a logo. This all had to be done using the CLI interface and moving things between my user home folder in Linux and then using CLI to copy it over to EPrints. I found this a little time-consuming and wished that there were more administrative features in EPrints that would allow better customization of it. The same goes for changing the taxonomy in EPrints. One has to go into the CLI interface and move things back and forth (or work in nano) in order to customize the taxonomy, which defaults to LCSH. I guess they assume that most people won't need a custom taxonomy, but I wonder about that. As more and more types and varieties of collections get digitized, it seems likely that custom taxonomies, folksonomies and tagging will be expected from users.

At any rate, I am looking forward to adding my collection to EPrints and seeing it in action. I've been impressed with some of the photo and video collections that I've seen in EPrints, which is a bit unexpected, but a pleasant surprise to be sure.

Deeper into DSpace

This past week I've been working more with DSpace and getting deeper into configuring thumbnails and previews. Whereas Drupal had modules such as imagemagick, DSpace has the native ability to display thumbnails and previews, it just needs to be turned on in the configs. In the process of trying to accomplish this (I never did get thumbs and previews to work in DSpace), I spent a considerable amount of time trying to find support forums or other communities such as those available in Drupal, but with no luck. DSpace apparently has either very little community support or everyone who uses it is way smarter than I am and they just figure it out on their own. I am pretty sure I could eventually figure this out on my own, but what's the point, really? Why shouldn't we take advantage of the human impulse to share problems and solutions and thereby build relationships and support communities so that, someday, when someone has a problem that I know the answer to, I can reciprocate and tacitly ask them to "pay it forward."

One positive thing about having these "problems" with DSpace is that I am learning a lot more about how the application is structured and where various folders and files are located. I am also coming to love the Virtual Machine's ability to take snapshots at various stages of implementation. If I'm not sure about something that I'm doing, I readily take a quick snapshot and make notes about where I am in the installation process and what's next, so that I can backtrack to a spot before problems start showing up and re-install or configure as needed to problem solve until I understand what needs to be done to get things working properly.

I've enjoyed working with DSpace more than working with Drupal. I appreciate both programs, but the fundamental approach of DSpace appeals to me as I contemplate ways to preserve multiple files from the same master file. That and the ability to run checksums on the files to check for possible corruption seem like really critical functions in a digital archive.

Spent a lot more time with drupal - and I would need even more!

It seems like it has taken me forever to complete the assignments for Week 5. Not only did I attend the Biodiversity Informatics Workshop in Nairobi right as Week 5 was starting, but I also got sick on the way back from Nairobi and had a very unproductive week getting checked out. I'm almost back to full speed, but this week's installations and learning curve for all the settings that go with the installations has left me somewhat dazed, confused and stressed about trying to take it all in.

My overall impression is that drupal is very useful, but takes quite a bit of time and expertise to run well. It does not seem like a completely natural fit for a digital collection of photos, video and various text formats. It can be made to work for that, but since I haven't spent a lot of time working with it, my intuition would be to continue to search for other solutions that might be a more natural fit. On the other, hand, I would also want to do some research into the popularity of drupal compared to other solutions and also see how big and active the user communities are for an assortment of content management systems out there right now.

One example of where I'm at with drupal involves the installation of the lightbox2 module. It was certainly easy to install. I had no problem just basically downloading it and moving it to the modules folder in drupal. On the other hand, even though lightbox2 is installed and apparently running quite nicely, in order to actually use it, I need to modify some html for the links to images. I did a quick search in the drupal.org site and could not find any examples of how to do this. There are so many moving parts to drupal that I can't seem to determine where I would start looking for a way to add snippets of html to image links. So, I'm stuck for the time being. It would be nice to have better documentation for this kind of thing, but since the lightbox2 module is basically free, with the developer requesting some financial support to keep developing it, I don't expect to get support that way. Perhaps if I were better integrated into the drupal community, I would know where to turn.

So, I'm glad that I have spent so much time with drupal the past few weeks, but I'm also going to be interested in seeing what else is out there - I saw something about DSpace, I think. It should be interesting!

First evaluation of Drupal

The question this week is about how well drupal might meets my needs in producing an online digital collection. From this week's exercises, I am far from expert in this area - just a novice, really, so take it all with a grain of salt, just as I do right now. Still there are general impressions and it can be good to have fresh eyes looking at a situation or proposed solution for a problem such as this one.

Drupal is not hard to install at all. Once you have the basics figured out, one can get drupal running. I have not configured it to run connected to the internet, but I'm hoping that would not be too difficult. On the other hand, I find the interface to be pretty clunky compared to what I am used to using in terms of software. You have to know where you are going and what you are doing or you may not get there or get it done. It would be nice to have something like an inspector window that allows easier navigation through the drupal features and interfaces. It isn't really that hard to do things, but I don't like having to click back and forth - in and out to do things that are within the context of the window I'm currently in.

As far as displaying digital images, drupal surprised me by not choking on some of the file formats I threw at it. It handled my DNG RAW format fairly well. It didn't know to rotate the preview, which is actually an embedded JPEG, but that's no big deal, really. I think that imageMagic or some other plugin could take care of that problem. It did get to be a hassle to have to add various common image formats to the list of importable items, but I suppose once you got the hang of that, you could always anticipate it ahead of time.

It does seem that there are so many easy ways to display galleries of images out there though. I wonder if there might be better Content Management Systems that have taken a cue from such gallery software available from Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, et al. If not, I think there should be. I've brought up the topic of being able to leverage the embedded metadata in images for use in these galleries before and I'll beat the drum again. The model of having to move metadata around separately from the image files themselves just strikes me as primitive and inefficient. Something I'm going to have to look into a lot more, I suppose.

More from the Biodiversity Informatics Workshop

There are some amazing databases and digital collections available in the biodiversity realm. I wanted to share some of the more impressive sites that I've learned about in the past 10 days, so here goes:

http://atrium.andesamazon.org/ - this technology platform is sponsored by Gordon and Betty Moore. If you've ever heard of Moore's Law - this is the guy who came up with it. He's also a big believer in maintaining biodiversity on planet Earth. It's nice to have smart friends who also have money and are willing to put it to good use. Check out the amazing work that is being done in the Amazon basin at http://www.andesamazon.org/. The field researchers are actually uploading data on a real time basis via satellite feed, allowing the data to be ingested and shared with scientists all over the world who can collaborate with the people on the ground. It's truly an amazing technological feat.

Another cool site which contains a lot of digital resources is from the American Museum Congo Expedition 1909-1915 at http://diglib1.amnh.org/. Just for fun, go to Advanced Search and enter monkey in the description field and search. Just to the right of the Red colobus monkey look for the View Related Field Notes link and click that. Now click on View Field Note and you can see the original hand-written notebooks of these scientists. Okay, a little too many clicks to get to what you want, but it still is a fascinating site. There's lots to explore and some of the content is organized into pre-set Galleries to get you started. I found it really interesting stuff.

Another interesting development is in the area of specialized Content Management Systems for sharing biodiversity information. We had a presentation from a Dutch company that is developing these for use worldwide. These "Bioportals" are based on simplenews CMS, which is called a lightweight CMS. See an example of it at http://www.nlbif.nl/. There is another site, which is down at this time for Tanzania at http://www.tanbif.or.tz/. The site is frequently unavailable, at least from my sporadic and slow connection in Nairobi of late. The promise of sharing information over the internet is real, but for much of the developing world, there is also a pressing need for basic infrastructure to support such exchange. It's going to be a while before the whole world can even access the internet reliably, which will make these kinds of sites dependable resources for research.

Since we have been discussing digital repositories, take a look at what's happening at data basin http://www.databasin.org/. It's a repository of spacial information that also has tools for the use of the data and facilitates a network of scientists and practitioners. There are dataset areas on the site that have been focused on Climate, Boreal Forests, Aquatic and Protected Areas. It seems to be based on some kind of CMS, but I'm not sure which. It does have a lot of interesting content and I found it quite engaging even as a non-biologist.

This week we spent a lot of time with Geographic Information Systems. It's a fascinating area and we had the good fortune to have a U of A PhD candidate named John Donoghue to walk us through the basics of GIS. Today, he even had us working with climate change data for the year 2080 and seeing how it would affect certain species. I did mine on pan troglodytes, the chimpanzee. I could see how the chimp's habitat was projected to change in the next 70 years by using graphics in the Q GIS program and MaxEnt. I feel pretty enthused to have even a rudimentary command of the tools needed to do this. I hope the Workshop will help move us toward a more sustainable environment for the chimp, as our nearest relative. Maybe I should do a projection on the species homo sapiens next time.

Photos from the Biodiversity Informatics Workshop in Nairobi, Kenya

Photos from the Biodiversity Informatics Workshop in Nairobi, Kenya. I can't seem to figure out how to put captions under the photos, so I'm just going to leave a bit of information here. Baboons and warthogs roam the grounds of the Multimedia University College of Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya. You see them most mornings and evenings around campus. You can also see a group photo of workshop participants and some classroom photos.

Jambo from Nairobi!

Between some pretty severe jet lag (10 time zone changes) and the sporadic internet access at the facility where we are staying, it has been a challenge to do anything more than the approx 8 hours per day workshops here at the Biodiversity Informatics workshop, plus getting around, eating, etc.. We are staying at the Multimedia University College of Kenya on the outskirts of Nairobi, which was built in the early 1960's on the other side of the road from the Nairobi National Park, which has lions, rhino, antelope, etc. We can see baboons, monkeys and warthogs wandering the campus in the mornings and evenings.

The workshops are covering a vast, and I do mean vast amount of material about Biodiversity Informatics. This past week, we have covered the following Biodiversity Informatics topics:

Fundamental Principals

Standards

Biodiversity Databases (one of my favorites so far)

Example from Congo Expedition exporting Darwin Core

Brahms database (botany)

Specify (species ID)

Plotting GIS coordinates using Google Maps and Google Earth

Catlogue of Life (e-infrastructure for dynamic harvesting of data)

Biodiversity Mapping / Bioportal toolkit

Fusion tables

Web access tools

Content Management systems (a great presentation about Drupal)

Yesterday, we went on a field trip to the National Museums of Kenya, which is in downtown Nairobi. We passed by one of the worst slums of the world on the way - Kiberia slum is notorious and we are advised to stay well clear of it. Once we got to the museum, we saw how plant specimens are processed for intake into the collections there. The plants and insect collections are both well into the millions. The National Museum is hard at work migrating data from hard copy to electronic, or soft copies. We also got to take a look at the bird, mammal and fish and reptile collections. I was amazed to see a huge tank in the back of the fish and reptile area with an actual specimen of a coelacanth, which has been called a living fossil or Lazarus taxon, because they seemingly came back to life. They were thought to have been extinct for something like 65 million years, but one was caught and identified in 1938 and several more have been caught since then.

At any rate, the real-life examples of how the Museum of Kenya staff are using Bioinformatics to increase the value of their collections is really exciting. I'm going to try to figure out how to post some photographs from the workshop thus far. It looks like I just have to click a few buttons - but for now I'm off to the next workshop - I think it is on Geographic Imaging Systems, and then we will go to the African Conservation Centre to see their GIS labs in action. They are tracking elephants and studying the ecology in elephant habitat.

A lot on my plate

The combination of the technical and management sections of 675 definitely add a level of complexity to my already scattered life these days. I also think that the design of the d2l site adds to the confusion when it could be part of the solution. So many different things one has to click on and maneuver around to get to where one want to go. I would love to be on a redesign team for d2l!

The subject matter is very interesting in both areas, but I definitely feel that I am approaching maximum data input limits these days. I'm sure it is a combination of all the various commitments I have with family, work, school. There is very little down time to just contemplate what I am reading - which makes it harder to write. I also miss the face-to-face interactions of the old days - asynchronous conversations are very convenient for a busy schedule, but there are so many things missing from the conversation. I feel like I am missing the chance to really know the other people in my class and I know it would really be interesting to do so.

The technical stuff is not as difficult as 672. I do have to brush up on things and go back and double-check on a command or such, but generally that part is feeling more comfortable - the complexities of the readings and concepts there are getting tougher at the same time. It's going to be interesting to keep up with it all when I travel to Kenya for the Biodiversity Informatics workshop with a group from SIRLS including Director Dr. Bryan Heidorn. I hope I can find good internet in Nairobi!

Deciding on a digital collection

One of the first assignments in IRLS 675 is to gather a digital collection and to discuss what it consists of, what it is about, who might access it and some terms that might be used to provide access to the collection, in case someone is actually looking for such a grouping of digital stuff.

I'm going to go with the first thing that comes to my mind: I have a lot of photos of Mission San Xavier del Bac from a book project but also from other work that I have done there over time. I also have some video I have taken there and a DVD that was done by KUAT-TV about the work I did there. I also have some links to websites that are about San Xavier and some text files (depending on how public this will be, I might need to get permission to use some of the textual information, which I don't have rights to distribute myself). Which brings up the question of copyright and how it might affect this project. Depending on how we will distribute or provide access to the collections, do we have the right to use digital objects that we have not authored ourselves? Well, I know the legal answer is that we don't, but as a practical matter I suspect it will happen and happen a lot. But I digress.

This collection would be of interest to people who are interested in art, religion, architecture, history, culture, the southwest, photography, painting, sculpture, and all of these as they relate to Arizona and Tucson, in particular. Those might be some of the terms that would be used to access it, as well as the details involved in what is being captured in the images and text.

I'm a bit behind on things this week due to the amount of time I have spent preparing to travel to Nairobi Kenya to assist with a Biodiversity Informatics workshop there as a representative of the United States. I applied for a "scholarship" and am honored to have been one of the four chosen to go, but there was a lot of work to do to apply for a visa and get vaccinations just to start to get ready. Still, I think it will be a great learning experience both academically and culturally.

Project Management - Thinking It Through

This week's readings were all about project management. I've actually participated in a number of fairly complicated projects and none of them were professionally managed. It would be interesting to talk with a professional project manager to see what they would have to say about how we did. I do know that we did a good job and even won some awards. Still, there were problems and I wonder how much smoother it might have gone if we had the benefit of professional project management.

To my surprise, I was really interested in the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) Process Model v. 3.1 White Paper (see www.microsoft.com/msf). I guess the reason I found it interesting is that it uses Milestones in a sort of spiral or iterative process. Microsoft compares it to combining the traditional Waterfall management technique with the Spiral model. This is pretty much the way we managed the CD-ROM project I worked on "Photography Workshop Sponsored by Canon." Of course the Microsoft Process is much more detailed and has to address projects of leviathan scale compared to the $400K or so we spent on developing Photography Workshop (a really good budget and we spent it wisely - the product still receives good reviews even though it is not being distributed commercially these days).

Microsoft's Project Tradeoff Matrix is also a useful way to adjust everyone's expectations about how to make decisions about the balance between Resources, Schedule and Features. It reminds me of the sign I have seen behind the counter at a number of auto shops: Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any Two. At least in the photography business, it has been difficult to get clients to buy into that paradigm; they want it all.

I didn't mean to only talk about the Microsoft Process, but I also found the concepts of Bug Convergence (the point at which bugs start to go down instead of up) and Zero Bug Bounce (when development catches up with testing and there are no bugs - perhaps this is more of a concept than reality???) to be interesting aspects of managing software and not something I had encountered thus far.

I should probably also mention a series of great articles that relate to digital library project management by H Frank Cervone for OCLC. He has a lot of great information presented in digestible form. I will definitely want to hang on to those PDFs for future reference in this area

On the home stretch of IRLS 672

As we approach the home stretch of IRLS 672, I'm asked to reflect on where I was when I started and where I am now, and not just from a technical standpoint. Of course, the technical stuff is the obvious stuff at this point, but once this knowledge either gets used and becomes integrated - or heavens forbid - isn't used and is forgotten, what will remain of my 672 experience?

At this point, my guess is that one of the main things I have gained is confidence and comfort level in working with lower-level (read advanced) computer applications such as Command Line Interface (CLI) in a Linux environment and also with Apache, mySQL and PHP. I have a much better "feel" for how well-integrated the LAMP environment is for setting up a useful web server and feel more empowered to get under the hood if I need to make a change or to fix something that isn't working the way I would like. I certainly know that I am only making a beginning at understanding how all these programs work and there are a lot of situations where I won't have a clue about how or what to do, but still, I'll have some concept of what's going on behind the curtain.

I have certainly gained a lot of perspective from reading from the rest of the section. There are people from all over the country working in this area and lots of interesting projects that they have experience with. It's been great to hear their stories and to gain from their experiences in the realm of digital collections and with libraries in the digital age. This course has been a fantastic way to begin my DigIn program and I'm very much looking forward to the challenges and rewards in the semesters ahead.

mySQL - more about databases

This week was more about databases. I enjoyed actually working with mySQL, although it is challenging to remember the commands. I'm sure that if I had enough practice, it would come in time.

I had to re-install, or perhaps install for the first time webmin on the practice machine. It was no big deal, but I did have to dig through many of the past assignments to find the procedure for adding it. I do notice that it went easier this time than ever before, so I must be learning something here.

I also installed phpMyAdmin this week and found it really helpful when working with mySQL. Who would have guessed. There is some duplication between webmin and phpMyAdmin, but I like the interface on phpMyAdmin better for working with mySQL. If I got really versed in the command line for mySQL, I might use it for more stuff, but for now, I would tend to use phpMyAdmin for most database stuff. It has the nice feature of showing you the mySQL commands that you entered, which I make sure to study each time I do something, so it is reinforcing my understanding of the language.

We are now heading into the last leg of the LAMP journey. I can hardly believe that July is about over and that August will soon be here. I just have to keep up the juggling act for a few more weeks and then a small break before jumping right back into the Fall semester and more juggling.

Databases - ERDs for nerds!

This week was pretty heavy-duty. There was a lot of information to take in about databases. There was the whole planning thing, meaning we had a bunch of Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) information. Some of the tutorial information seems to conflict at times, maybe just the way the drawings were done. At any rate, I need to continue to review that information and at the same time I need to practice working with the commands for mysql, which doesn't look too bad, but the command line style interface information is now getting a bit muddled with the CLI stuff I learned in working with Linux already. It's a lot of information to digest at such a rapid clip. I'm confident I can learn it, I'll just need to practice it over time and it will begin to gel in a while. That's my experience with these kinds of things.

Still, I'm excited about databases. They really intrigue me because they seem so useful and powerful. It is just amazing to me how much can be done with information by using databases. I especially like working with media databases. My Discussion this week included one of my favorite archive websites: Dimitri Tiomkin collection: http://www.dimitritiomkin.com/index.cfm. I highly recommend taking a look - and listen to it.

Technology - plan the work, work the plan

This week we've been doing a lot of reading on technology planning - or the lack of it, mostly. The reading that I most enjoyed, if that is the word for it, was called the Chaos Report by the Standish Group, from way back in 1995 (along with the follow up study called "What Went Wrong" by KPMG in Canada. I'm guessing that things have not improved significantly since then, based on my experiences in the technology world thus far. The high rate of failure for software projects across the board is a bit scary, given that our modern world is so dependent on technology to keep us safe and productive. Without question, there is a strong case to be made for improving the way technology is planned and implemented.

This weeks readings also had me thinking about a psychology study I read some years ago that discovered that the people who are least competent think they are way more competent than they are and the more competent people tend to rate themselves as less competent than they really are. Obviously, this is at work in many areas, but when I think about technology and how difficult it is to really know what is going on at a micro and macro level, it seems like this principle may account for a good many of the failures in technology projects.

One guy that seems to know his stuff, Robert E. Dugan wrote a great article on Information Technology Plans in the Journal of Academic Leadership. I appreciated the very practical approach and recommendations he presented. For example, knowing how things work in any organization is important, so he suggests that if the Technology Plan is following in the footsteps of another plan, use the same approach to organizing of the previous plan. If it worked the first time, probably best not to mess around too much and just work with what you already have in place. Dugan also presents a lot of information quickly and concisely and I'm sure to keep his report highlighted for future reference.

I also had the chance to review several state library technology plans this week. Although there is a lot of information presented, it also seems to me that there is a fairly pervasive lack of clarity about how technology can and should be used in state libraries at this point. It's good to know that people are thinking about this important area, but it does seem that we need to work even harder to develop and deploy the most helpful technology so that precious budget dollars aren't squandered for the sake of technolust.

Moving from HTML to XML and beyond!

This week I spent some time learning XML (Extensible Markup Language). It's very handy for containing or describing data, instead of describing how things should look, which is the job of HTML and other flavors of HTML. Of the various learning modules that I looked at, I still like the w3schools.com website, at least for XML and HTML. I like the format and I am able to try things out and see how they work right away, instead of being more passive in learning. The YouTube and UA Computer-Based Training videos were useful, but not quite as effective for my learning style, I think. I do think that the UACBT videos were very helpful and gave me a good chance to review material after reading about it. The pace of the UACBT videos were quite good - no so much on the YouTube "Just Enough XML to Survive" video.

I also spent a good deal of time working on the setup for the practice server. The Dell is doing fine now, and I use it and the VMware both these days. I figure that I can practice on the VMware, since I can take "snapshots" and go back if I make a mistake. I can't do that on the dell machine, so I want to be prepared when I work there. The biggest problem this week came with the introduction of some new FTP software on my Mac. I upgraded Transmit and figured I could just plug and play. I kept getting refused from my own servers when I tried to connect. I eventually exhausted all other possibilities and then took a second look at the new software interface and I had missed a new menu bar that allows for selection of FTP, sFTP, etc. Once I found the sFTP option, I was good to go and got my files all uploaded and downloaded without further incident.

HTML review and setting up the practice machine

This week I found myself reviewing HTML once again. It's a case of use it or lose it, I suppose. I don't use HTML very much at present, and even when I built an HTML website last time (back in the early 2000's), I used Adobe GoLive, which at the time was pretty good, although I wish I had worked with DreamWeaver instead, since it is now the de facto standard for web creation software, or so I gather.

HTML isn't that hard, and once I get back into it, a lot of it comes back. I would like to spend time learning more about cascading style sheets or CSS, but just haven't had the time to really get into it. I also am interested in how to use some of the other technology that allows for better placement of graphics on pages. The w3schools. com site is fabulous for learning just about anything on the web, including HTML. I also used it last semester for learning about XML and DTD's. It really works well for me. I love being able to try things out right then and there and apply the lesson quickly so I can remember it better.

I finally got out and purchased a used Windoze machine this week. There's a great place for deals on used equipment called Arizona Liquidation Station, and it's located near Cox Communication, just south of the intersection of Broadway and Kino. I picked up a Dell Dimension 4600C for $84, including a monitor and keyboard. An LCD monitor would cost about $60 more, but I decided to just use a KVM switch to allow me to use one monitor for an old Mac and the Dell.

I had some trouble setting up the installer disk for Ubuntu. It had something to do with the format of the .iso disk image that I downloaded and burned to a CD. The Apple Disk Utilities disk burner did it right after I tried unsuccessfully to use Toast to burn the .iso disk for installing Ubuntu. Once that got going, it was pretty easy. I shut down the computer for the night to save energy and all was well - or so I thought. This morning when I got back to the computer and tried to boot, all I got was a black screen. Nothing on the monitor at all. Apparently no video signal coming from the Dell! I decided to re-install the Ubuntu system and all went well again. I haven't had time to shut down and try to restart again, but I guess I'll have to do it one of these days. I would feel a bit wasteful leaving the machine on all the time.

I look forward to getting that settled and installing Webmin and some other software packages on the Ubuntu server machine. It will be exciting to dig a little deeper into the world of Linux servers in the coming week.

Some observations about learning about learning

This is week five of the IRLS 672 summer 2010 course and the learning curve continues to be fairly steep. There was a lot of dense material to cover, and in addition to looking at the material on the "The Networked Environment," we were asked to take a look at our own learning style to see how we might be leverage the resources available. It's really a valuable question, given that we all have limited time and energy to expend on trying to learn. Learning take a lot of time and effort, so becoming more adept at finding better ways to learn material obviously offers important benefits.

The suggested reading "Learning Styles and Strategies" had some very familiar concepts to me. A lot of it seems to be based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), much of which is based on the work of Carl Jung, one of the 20th Century's great minds, in my opinion. Taking the MBTI has been a great help to me and countless others. It's well worth the time and minimal cost to take it.

It comes as no surprise to me that I am drawn to the video and other visual resources offered. Unfortunately, there weren't all that many, but compared to just a few years ago there is an explosion of audio-visual resources thanks to the topic we are studying - the NET! I especially appreciated the video about The Warriors of the Net. It is also interesting that the site is so clearly trying to find a way to pay for the much greater amount of time and energy required to produce even a relatively primitive computer generated animation such as this one. There will have to be a way to provide incentives to producing content like this. For me, it helps me understand TCP/IP much more easily. I'd be willing to participate in some sort of micropayment system to help keep this kind of thing going, but based on my experience, I may be in the minority when it comes to actually paying creative people for their work online.

I also want to check out the audio podcasts from Harvard University Extension. I briefly looked at the lecture series on Computing 101 and it sounded pretty good. I want to add some of those podcasts to my iPhone and see how well I do just listening to the information and not actually reading it or watching a video.

One thing I do like about Wikipedia is that it allows for non-linear access to information. I can skip around and move faster or slower when accessing content. There are many times when this is by far the most effecient way for me to learn. Video tends to lock one into a linear stream and since I have limited study time, I tend to be pretty choosy about which videos I'm going to watch. On the other had, if I'm really tired, I can watch a video at the end of the day a bit easier than trying to read about LANs, WANs or ARPANET!

Adding Users and Groups using CLI, Gnome and Webmin

This week was an exercise in comparing some different ways one could add Users and Groups in Ubuntu. As I worked through using the Command Line Interface to add Users and Groups, I appreciated getting the "feel of the road" from using CLI. I was right there doing the work and could rapidly check to see if I had added the user or group by checking the appropriate directories.

Installing Webmin was not overly challenging, but I did find myself stuck a couple of times and unsure whether or not the packages I needed had downloaded or if they had been installed. The CLI sometimes rolls by so quickly that it makes it difficult to check one's work to see what has actually happened - or not. At first, I neglected to enter the port number after the URL, which was an ssl address. Once I figured out the addressing problem, I was able to successfully log into Webmin and use it. Of the three interfaces, I liked Webmin the best. It even has a batch file capability, which I'm sure comes in handy for the hardy administrators out there who have a lot of users with which to deal.

Fun with vi vim nano and CLI

This week has been fairly challenging. I'm enjoying learning more about command-line interfaces and about the history of open source software such as Linux. "In the Beginning was the Command Line" is a sort of stream of consciousness rant combined with serious experiences with both Graphic User Interfaces (GUI) from both Apple and Microsoft. The CLI information is pretty useful and some of the perspective about American society and it's love of metaphors and media is quite interesting. Eric S Raymond wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" about two of the main methods of software development. The Cathedral stands for the method of using a centralized person or core team to create software code for an application. This was the de facto standard for many years. The Bazaar stands for open source software development exemplified by how the kernal for Linux was developed - using all kinds of volunteers from anywhere an everywhere. One key concept for open source can be expressed with the truism that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." The idea of opening up software development to as many eyeballs as possible and then basically being a referee to determine when the best solution has been found is pretty revolutionary. Raymond things it is "subversive" and I think he likes that a lot!

As far as actual use of the CLI, I've had a few problems this week. I found out the hard way that you have to be careful when placing an exclamation point in the command. I needed it in there as part of the format of the command from vi to the shell, but when I placed it where the name was supposed to go, I had all kinds of weird behaviors coming out of my system. I got some expert help to solve the problem and I'm sure getting more careful about what I type after those prompts in Ubuntu! I look forward to more practice with using the various commands and tools in Linux. I'm sure that with some practice, things will be easier than they are now and I won't get stuck not knowing where I am or how to escape for hours at a time.

Accessing the remote desktop

This past week, as a part of my IRLS 672 class, I've been doing a lot of downloading and installing of the Linux-based Ubuntu software that we will use to build a LAMP server. In addition, as a way to start learning how to interface with Linux, I was assigned a remote desktop on a Linux machine, presumably physically located somewhere on the University of Arizona campus, but it could be anywhere in cyberspace, I suppose. As I've learned, I'm not actually interfacing directly with the operating system, I'm actually working on a program that sits a layer above Linux and allows me to type in commands that get interpreted correctly so that Linux knows what I want it to do. This layer of interface is called a shell and used the command line interface modality and is pretty common in the Unix world.

There were a number of tutorials available to help me learn the commands for the command line interface. There are some online tutorials from Arthur Griffith's "Introduction to Linux," which are quite helpful, but I find that I have to keep backing them up and replaying them to catch what he is saying while I attempt to take notes. I might not need to do this so much for some subject matter, but when the topic is as complicated and detailed as this one, I think the written page may be a more efficient way for me to learn. Everybody has their own best way to learn - some are more oriented to listening, some to seeing, some to touching, etc. So, the resources at http://www.linuxcommand.org/learning_the_shell.php have been somewhat easier resources for me to process.

The other thing that is problematic for me in working with the remote desktop, is that I quickly run out of screen real estate. I'm used to working with big monitors and being able to see long pages of text in many windows at the same time. With the remote desktop, I get a fairly small window and when I'm trying to process information, I find it a bit difficult to navigate with the limited interface - it can be done, but I'm just spoiled from being able to use large monitors, I suppose. It takes me back to the days of the 9-inch screen on my Mac SE!

Pocket Guide to ubuntu

In browsing through the Absolute Beginner Talk section of the Ubuntu forums, I have been exposed to even more of our brave new world as a result of a decision to dig into the wonderful world of LAMP servers.

No wonder everyone expects everything to be free online. In addition to the Ubuntu (a flavor of UNIX) operating system being available just for basically the cost of bandwidth, an ambitious fellow named Keir Thomas has written a nifty pocket guide to the OS, available for free, of course. In glancing through the PDF version, I do see that he has placed it in the copyright realm (the book, not the OS) and has a plug in there to encourage donations or to buy the physical book. It would be interesting to see how many people actually do pay at least something to the author for what was undoubtedly a lot of hard work based on even more hard work and experience. The URL to download the pocket guide is: http://www.ubuntupocketguide.com/.

First Post

As part of my IRLS 672 coursework, I am creating this blog to document some of the work that I'll be doing in this class. Essentially, I will be learning to create a web server in the particular format of LAMP, the acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Sounds like fun to me!