Mark's Musings

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2010-03-05T20:15:00.001-05:00

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Every Garage or Computer--an Industrial Player

2010-02-14T22:04:00.002-05:00

This month's Wired magazine has an interesting article, In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits. In this piece the magazine's editor Chris Anderson discusses how with the availability of free or affordable software tools and outsourcing, a home garage or wannabe inventor has the potential to be a viable industrial manufacturer. Good stuff!

Dynamic Java String Array

2010-02-03T18:25:00.003-05:00

A business needed to split data elements in the display to it's customers via a report. Since the data was returned from the Java Data Access Object layer as a String array, the quickest way was to detect an existing data item and then insert what the business wanted to display in the report for that data item.

Here is an example of what I did to dynamically insert items into a Java String array:


public class DynamicStringArray {
public static void main(String[] args){
 String[] originalArray = {"a","b","d"};

 System.out.println("----- Original String Array ----"); 
 for(int i = 0; originalArray.length > i; i++){
   System.out.println(originalArray[i]);
 }

 //create a fixed-size ArrayList from the String array.
 ArrayList oldList = new ArrayList(Arrays.asList(originalArray));
 //create an ArrayList to hold the inserted items.
 ArrayList newList = new ArrayList();

 //assume no "b" in the array
 boolean hasB = false;

 //check if the array has a "b"
 for(int i = 0; originalArray.length > i; i++){
   if(originalArray[i].equalsIgnoreCase("b")){
     hasB = true;//we have a "b" Houston
   }
 }  

 if(hasB){//the array has a "b"
   for(int i = 0; oldList.size() > i; i++){
     if(oldList.get(i) == "b"){//found "b"
      newList.add(i,"newB");//replace "b" with "NewB"
      newList.add(i + 1,"c");//add "c"
     }else{//not "b"
      newList.add(oldList.get(i));
     }
   }
 }

 //create new String array
 String[] newArray = new String[newList.size()];
 newList.toArray(newArray);
 //pass new String array to old String array
 originalArray = newArray;

 System.out.println("----- Updated String Array -----"); 
 for(int i = 0; originalArray.length > i; i++){
   System.out.println(originalArray[i]);
 }

}
}

The above code results in the following:

Security Management - Better to be loved or feared?

2010-01-03T18:46:00.003-05:00

Recently I created a fictional case study that discussed management styles when dealing with internal security threats.

Click here to read and then let me know your thoughts.

5 exabytes in the last 2 days. We better get busy!

2009-09-25T21:14:00.005-04:00

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, at a talk given at a forum jointly hosted by Google and the Pittsburgh Technology Council, stated that the amount of data generated from the birth of humanity to the year 2003 was 5 exabytes (point 8:30 of the talk). The date of the presentation was September 23, 2009. Schmidt, then stated that given the connectivity we now have the amount of data generated the last 2 days was equal to these 5 exabytes. What!!!???!??!?! An exabyte is one quintillion bytes. Just within the last year could you buy a 1 to 4 terabyte hard drive. An exabyte is 1,048,576 terabytes or 1,073,741,824 gigabytes, i.e a lot of data!

OK. We may have generated that amount of data the last few days. And do not misunderstand me. I realize there is intelligence in that data. And yes, let it instruct and assist us. But my thinking is that the 5 exabytes in the last several thousand years is of much better quality and substance that the 5 exabytes in the last 2 days, right? If not, then the quality and substance is hidden therein and let us get busy and mine it out!

Digital Utopia--Free?

2009-08-19T13:29:00.002-04:00

Was considering purchasing the Kindle version of the new book by Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price and looked for reviews (An ironic note is that I fully understood that I would have to pay for the digital version of the book). In my search of reviews, I did find the "free" review by Malcolm Gladwell at The New Yorker.

Gladwell discusses that Lewis Strauss, the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, famously predicted in the mid-nineteen-fifties, due to the advent of nuclear energy, that “our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.” Gladwell then states, "It is pointless to wonder what would have happened if Strauss’s prediction had come true while rushing past the reasons that it could not have come true."

Strauss appeared not to consider the cost of the infrastructure of energy distribution. In a similar way, with the phenomenum of YouTube, "A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars."

Time will tell but the Achilles' heel, at least for now, that I see for a Digital Utopia of "Free" is the "cost" of distribution. Bandwidth, batteries, e-readers all cost money.

@Erlanger911 offers a nice twitter service for Erlanger, KY residents

2009-08-03T12:50:00.001-04:00

@Erlanger911 offers a nice twitter service for Erlanger, KY residents in that it provides traffic and emergency service based tweets.

Posted via email from m2web's posterous

Look mom I sent this from Posterous.com!

2009-06-18T00:51:00.002-04:00

Here is a sweet service. Posterous.com. Send to Facebook, Twitter, and your Blogger blog from e-mail.

I uploaded the Sisyphus the Software Developer image via an attachment!

Posted via email from m2web's posterous

IBM's Many Eyes Data Visualization Project

2009-05-02T00:20:00.001-04:00

Per a previous post where I show my Facebook friend social graph, I mention that the social graph displays "more" information than a grid of your Facebook friends' pictures. In short, data visualization can help us analyze data and more easily notice patterns. IBM's Center for Social Software is doing this with their Many Eyes Project. Here is a blurb:

It is that magical moment we live for: an unwieldy, unyielding data set is transformed into an image on the screen, and suddenly the user can perceive an unexpected pattern. As visualization designers we have witnessed and experienced many of those wondrous sparks. But in recent years, we have become acutely aware that the visualizations and the sparks they generate, take on new value in a social setting. Visualization is a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about data.

Check it out

Twitter - knowledge or data?

2009-04-27T17:14:00.002-04:00

In a blog post entitled, Dull Networks? How microblogging might turn the wisdom pyramid upside down, Miguel Encarnação presents concerns that the brevity of microblog messages such as Twitter may circumvent the way we process data into more useful forms of knowledge. He provides examples:

Data represents a fact or statement of event without relation to other things.
Ex: It is raining.
Information embodies the understanding of a relationship of some sort, possibly cause and effect.
Ex: The temperature dropped 15 degrees and then it started raining.
Knowledge represents a pattern that connects and generally provides a high level of predictability as to what is described or what will happen next.
Ex: If the humidity is very high and the temperature drops substantially the atmosphere is often unlikely to be able to hold the moisture so it rains.
Wisdom embodies more of an understanding of fundamental principles embodied within the knowledge and is essentially systemic.

In my view, even with the 140 character limit, tweets can be and often are more than bits of data. In my view, they are bytes of knowledge. The example of knowledge in Miguel's post is: "If the humidity is very high and the temperature drops substantially the atmosphere is often unlikely to be able to hold the moisture so it rains" This is 146 characters. This can easily be shortened to: "If the humidity is very high and the temp drops substantially the atmosphere is often unable to hold the moisture so it rains" which is 130 characters and can be tweeted. Moreover, tweets can and often do contain links to other websites that contain full explanations on the topics referenced.

In fairness, Miguel is correct that information received on microblogs such as Twitter, as all information sources, need to be closely examined and verified.

In summary, tweets, if used properly can augment both knowledge and wisdom.

Facebook GreaseMonkey Scripts for a better view in Firefox

2009-04-05T23:40:00.002-04:00

Was scoping out my Twitter feed when I noted a tweet that I follow from Atul Arora. The link went to a Jeff Smith’s blog that discussed Facebook tweaks with GreaseMonkey. GreaseMonkey allows you to customize the way a web page displays using JavaScript. Via the highlighted scripts I was able to get a more desirable viewing experience on Facebook.

Click here for the full article with screen shots and links.

Fittest CMOs and Business Intelligence from Social Media

2009-04-02T20:39:00.003-04:00

Recently, in my Marketing Management class for the Master's in Business Informatics program at NKU I had to write two short research papers that were part of the course's two initial exams. In each of the papers, we were given three to five days to research and complete. Here is an excerpt from the first paper entitled Survival of the Fittest CMOs:

Given the rapidly "evolving" role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), one paradigm to consider when surveying the swiftly changing CMO phenomenon is to look at natural ecosystems and how ever changing environment pressures facilitate the change or evolution of the organisms in those ecosystems. In this paper, we examine the characteristics of the "primitive" CMO, the new environmental pressures challenging the CMO, and finally the fitness factors that are involved in the survival of the fittest CMOs.

Here is Survival of the Fittest CMOs.

Here is a section of the second paper, Business Intelligence from Social Media:

Given the need for understanding the trends and patterns exhibited in data, utilizing the data in a way that can provide a competitive edge is vital. Three particular products or opportunities for this need are systems to store the data, systems to warehouse the data, and systems to mine the data for analysis and decision making. Data storage is a well understood concept of the use of computer systems to store customer information and transactions as well as other business related data. However, data in a data warehouse is different that the data stored by point-of-sale systems.

Here is Business Intelligence from Social Media.

Favorite Software Dev April Fools Joke

2009-04-01T17:03:00.003-04:00

Here is my favorite April Fools software developer related joke: The "Phails" Web Framework at http://phails.com/ . Released on April 1st of course!

Visual Facebook Social Graph

2009-03-21T23:57:00.006-04:00

Was reading about social networks in the NKU project management course textbook that I am currently taking and thought to myself there has got to be an application that you can use to login to Facebook and have it gather your social graph or "Friend" data and produce a visual social graph. A few minutes on Google and what I found was the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform from Curl along with a sample application called CurlGraph.

Long story short, after downloading their Run Time Environment (RTE) and pasting a URL into the address field of my browser, I installed the CurlGraph application on my system. Then after logging into Facebook with the app, it collected my Friends network info and then produced the following social graph visualization.

Click on the pic to get the larger image.

The neat thing about the app is that I could select anyone represented on the graph and they would then move to the center of the display. You could drag your friends around on the display and sort your social graph by alphabet or by popularity. Note that your Facebook friends are represented as circles. Also the popularity, or size of the circle, is based on the intersection set of friends that you have in common with each friend not on their total set of friends. That is why my wife's circle is large as we have nearly the same set of Facebook friends. Also note that while the bold lines connect my friends to me, the web of relationships that exist from all the friends is visible. This changes when you select a friend with your mouse as the connecting lines from them to your other friends then become bold.

In summary, I find it interesting when finding different ways to visualize data. This certainly tells you more about your Facebook Friend network than a grid of pictures.

Here is Curl's press:

Using Curl, developers can implement a new class of complex, business-critical, Web-based applications that cannot easily be developed with Ajax or other smart client technologies.

Curl allows organizations with legacy client-server applications to move to Web-based delivery, increasing reach, improving processes, accelerating productivity and reducing cost.

Customer driven #marketing? Now that's an #idea! for #social products.

2009-03-21T15:43:00.001-04:00

Social computing as an interface between the business and their customers as a mechanism for product ideas and input? Go to http://ping.fm/f3ujg.

From Bill Taylor's Practically Radical Blog at HarvardBusiness.org. In lean times, there's nothing more valuable than a great new product idea. Why not invite your customers to share their creativity with your company -- and turn the best ideas into actual products! That's what legendary shoe designer John Fluevog has done, with a project he calls open-source footwear.

Status Last 10 List for Facebook

2009-02-25T21:11:00.003-05:00

Just finished the final touches on a new Facebook application I entitled, "Status Last 10."

In a nutshell, the app displays a list of your last ten status messages that you entered into Facebook. You can display the list on your Wall or Boxes Tab. Much of the blogoshpere speculates that Facebook opened their status API to compete with Twitter.

In any event, the app is coded in PHP. The next step will be to show the code once I get the refactorings completed and share the discoveries. More to come once I get the time.

People are not shapes on a diagram....they're people

2009-02-12T20:45:00.003-05:00

Was listening to the Manager Tools Podcast in which they were discussing the fact that while we may plan and plan we must, the aspect of managing a project is really about the people involved. Moreover, the various diagrams that we create during the project inception and elaboration may be neat and pretty, the reality of working the steps are anything but that.

During the discussion they cited a poem from Stephen Vincent Benét entitled John Brown's Body dealing with the U.S. Civil War. Here is the relevant section:

If you take a flat map
And move wooden blocks upon it strategically,
The thing looks well, the blocks behave as they should.
The science of war is moving live men like blocks.
And getting the blocks into place at a fixed moment.
But it takes time to mold your men into blocks
And flat maps turn into country where creeks and gullies
Hamper your wooden squares.  They stick in the brush,
They are tired and rest, they straggle after ripe blackberries,
And you cannot lift them up in your hand and move them.
--A string of blocks curling smoothly around the left
Of another string of blocks and crunching it up--
It is all so clear in the maps, so clear in the mind,
But the orders are slow, the men in the blocks are slow
To move, when they start they take too long on the way--
The General loses his stars and the block-men die
In unstrategic defiance of martial law
Because still used to just being men, not block-parts.

Stifling Technological Innovation?

2009-01-19T12:21:00.002-05:00

A straight forward post from Dave Hatter on the effects of corporate taxation on small business.

It would appear given the present political fervor of a new administration coupled with the current financial crisis that a perfect storm of over-regulation is on the horizon.

Value of Shorter Iterations in Project Management

2009-01-17T15:56:00.003-05:00

Now with the start of the Spring 2009 term in the Business Informatics Graduate Program at Northern Kentucky University, I am taking Marketing Management and Project Management classes.

In the initial readings in the Project Management course deal with Work Breakdown Schedules, Organizations Breakdown Schedules, and Work Packages and how to best organize, monitor, and measure each step. As I read I am thinking of the value of shorter iterations within the cycles of a project.

Here is a discussion on the value of shorter iterations within software development that are in my view applicable to project management. Aspects such as more frequent feedback and a better understanding of the work package status makes shorter iterations attractive. With that said, I am sure that as the term progresses I will learn both the advantages and disadvantages to shorter iterations in project life cycles.

Simple Facebook Application

2009-01-01T16:57:00.002-05:00

While I was off on vacation through the holidays I took an afternoon to put together a simple Facebook application in which Facebook users can display on their profile wall or box tab an English Standard Version (ESV) Bible Verse of the Day.

The application utilizes the ESV API.

Resizing an image on mouseover with Flex 2

2008-12-23T18:05:00.003-05:00

I was updating my personal site created from Flex 2 MXML and ActionScript and needed to create hyperlinks from thumbnail images. The html markup for the image is created from content from an XML file. In the past, one had to escape html markup contained in XML elements and create a link to a larger size of the same image. In short, I was hoping to avoid that unpleasantness.

Enter the mx.effects.Resize class. Using this object you can control the resizing of an image when the user passes their mouse over the image. For example, you have a thumbnail image that you are displaying that is 150 by 150 pixels in your MXML file:

<mx:Image source="yourImgPath/imgName.jpg"
height="150"
width="150"
/>

You want to enlarge the image to a size of 450 by 450 pixels based on the action of a user. Instead of a link to a larger image, we will enlarge the image when the user passes their mouse over the image. To do this you can utilize the mx.effects.Resize class. Enter the following into your MXML file:

<mx:Resize id="resizeBig"
widthFrom="150" widthTo="450"
heightFrom="150" heightTo="450"
/>
<mx:Resize id="resizeSmall"
widthFrom="450" widthTo="150"
heightFrom="450" heightTo="150"
/>

Then, within the Image instance, modify it with the following:

<mx:Image source="yourImgPath/imgName.jpg"
height="150"
width="150"
rollOverEffect="{resizeBig}"
rollOutEffect="{resizeSmall}"
/>

Finally, recompile and you will see that when the user passes their mouse over the image it enlarges without the use of links to the larger image.

Genetic Algorithm for Network Intrusion Detection Rule Sets

2008-11-20T20:56:00.003-05:00

This term (Fall 2008) at Northern Kentucky University (NKU), in the Data Communications & Networking class, I conducted some research for a project dealing with the use of machine learning applications for network security. Specifically, I created a genetic algorithm (GA), with the JGAP Framework, which can be used to produce Network Intrusion Detection Rule Sets.

Special thanks to Dr. Frank Braun, class professor, Dr. Richard Fox, Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Computer Science at NKU, and Mr. Klaus Meffert (soon to be Dr. Klaus Meffert) the primary author of the JGAP framework, for their assistance.

Here are the paper, presentation, and related files:
Paper
Presentation
GA Output
XML Output

Graffiti CMS C# Extended Link List

2008-11-06T22:07:00.002-05:00

I have setup a site for a customer that utilizes the free version of Graffiti Content Management System (CMS ). The framework is great and runs pretty much out of the box on Microsoft's ASP.NET 2.0 framework software and runs on Windows Server with Internet Information Services (IIS). In fact, Intelligent, the creators of Graffiti state that their goal was to create an environment where users would not have to understand programming, design, and or system administration. I think they have come pretty close to achieving it.

What it meant for this client was that the setup and intial labor of the site was greatly reduced, thereby saving them money. In any event, I setup an account for the client and placed then in a manager role (which were setup and ready to go), that allows them to publish content via a handy WYSIWYG editor. One thing that the role is not able to do is to use the many widgets that are available for the site.

I posted a question on the Graffiti forum that asked is there a way to allow users in the manager role access to the Link widget where they could create links in a special area of the site where the widget is placed. I found that to date you can not. While looking I did find a widget that extends Graffiti's Widget class called an Extended Link List, that was developed in VB.Net. To better learn how to create extended widgets I ported the project to C# and posted it on CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting web site.

If interested, here it is.

IT's About Business Objectives Stupid

2008-08-22T21:23:00.004-04:00

Last term I was contacted by a professor, Dr. Kevin Gallagher, as he was questioned by a reporter who was working on a story about IT (Information Technology) programs, their variations, and how and why students pick their chosen degree program. Upon his request, I provided a short list of answers and that was that. Dr. Gallagher recently notified me about the article.

In short, the article is spot on concerning IT programs and the need of those enrolling in them to consider broader aspects of business objectives and not just technical knowledge.

Check it out.

Please skim this.

2008-08-02T11:23:00.002-04:00

In a recent IT Conversations Interviews with Innovators podcast, the discussion centered on removing clutter from the visual field of students when training. That same morning I also listened to Scott Hanselmans’s podcast which dealt with micro-blogging. Here, the discussion utilized the metaphor of information as a river and how one deals with the torrent of news and data, specifically how one organizes it to be useful with tools such as twitter and RSS Feeds.

In both podcasts the talk touched on the issue of how possibly this instant information has made us less tolerant to large amounts of text in mediums such as books. There was also a mention of an excellent article in Atlantic Monthly by Nicholas Carr that asked the question, "Is Google making us stupid?" The question in my mind, along the same thought, is, "Does micro-blogging technologies such as twitter, IM clients, or text messaging foster a culture that lacks the ability to maintain a sustained period of attention to the formation of ideas and thoughts?"

Ironically, I used Google to find more information on the topic searching with the words, "google learning sustained thought." What I found an interesting article from the New York Times by Motoko Rich entitled, "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?"

For those with diminishing attention spans I will get to the crux: some purport that digital text is read by those who otherwise would turn to the television or electronic gaming, and is therefore a gateway to more sustained reading. While that may be true, my concern is along the lines of Rich’s article:

Critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. "What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading," said Mr. Gioia of the N.E.A. "I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests."

Then, Rich’s article refers to Carr’s Atlantic Monthly piece:

Nicholas Carr sounded a similar note in "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" in the current issue of the Atlantic magazine. Warning that the Web was changing the way he — and others — think, he suggested that the effects of Internet reading extended beyond the falling test scores of adolescence. "What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation," he wrote, confessing that he now found it difficult to read long books.

In summary, I think that any technology that helps present, streamline, and make information accessible is good. However, what are the side effects? Good question, but now my attention is distracted and I must move on to something else.