Hail to the Victors

Google improves itself yet again...

On Friday, Google attempted to make their search engine even better with the launch of Google Suggest. Now when you begin to type in your search query, Google gives you a drop down menu that matches the words you use with similar queries that were previously used by others.  Therefore, if I typed the word “Merry,” it would give me a drop down list of suggestions such as “Merry Chirstmas”, “Merry Maids”, “Merry go round”, etc.  Within this drop down list, it also shows the number of results that will display with each option so as to save time in typing in a query that will produce zero results. Ironically, I actually read about this on Google’s company blog, which goes to show that blogs are indeed becoming a great place to get the most up to date news.

Blogging on blogging…

This is a rather long post, so bear with me...

How it helped me learn:
Blogging helped me to learn in three ways. First, blogging really forced me to stay on top of what was going on in class. It’s easy to let a class slide at certain times of the year when other classes get hectic, but having to blog twice a week meant that you couldn’t neglect this class for too long. Secondly, when I would start off writing a question post, I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea of what the answer was. Then, about half way through trying to phrase the question, the answer would end up clicking in my head. Finally, having to articulate really complex concepts in ways that other people would understand really reinforced what I had learned. 

Promoting class interaction:
In terms of promoting class interaction, I felt that blogging was at its best when people engaged in the same conversations via trackbacks and linking to other blog posts.  It is always exciting to see how other people agree with or challenge the thinking behind your posts.  Furthermore, many people asked questions that a lot of other people had, but never blogged about. Therefore, blogging was valuable in the sense that it really promoted knowledge sharing in real time. It was also great the Professor Gibson always replied back so quickly.

 
Suggestions:
I thought that the two posts of week were a fair request. My only suggestion would be to add another section to the blog where people could write about whatever was of interest to them outside of Information Business for maybe 5 of the total required semester posts. I think that we might learn some interesting things about people in the class this way, such as their hobbies, interests, and activities.

 
Course Website:
In terms of the course website, it was set up in a way that made me feel that I was always up to date on what was going on in class.  The links to the articles and handouts for the day made everything very intuitively organized. I definitely can’t say this for my other classes, where it would take a ridiculous amount of time to find lecture slides and project requirements that were intermingled in CourseTools and CTools.

FeedReaders:
I really, really, really liked Sage. It made keeping up with other blogs in the class so much more bearable.  Before Sage, reading everyone’s individual pages and trying to decipher between new and old content was very cumbersome.  Sage was a blessing.

 
Future Application:
For future application, I think that blogging would be really effective in an English or Art History class where you have to give interpretations of really abstract ideas.  Blogs would give students a window into seeing the different perspectives of how their peers viewed a poem or painting.

I also ran across this website, which I found to be kind of interesting as related to blogging in an academic setting.

Blogonaut: Hail to the Victors: So, I stand corrected...

Link: Blogonaut: Hail to the Victors: So, I stand corrected....

A previous firm that I worked for used a method similar to what you described in terms of multiple people being able to check out copies of the of the same master document, make revisions, and then replicate with the master in the end. So long as everyone didn't try to replicate at the very same time, this method worked well, provided that they verbally collaborated ahead of time about which section they were going to edit. Is this what you're referring to with CVS and subversion? In commenting on Justin's idea, I was under the assumption that he was talking about a program that would allow multiple people to edit the same document in real time. So, if the person sitting next to you deleted a sentence in the same document that you had open on you screen, the change would happen on your screen in real time, right before your eyes. Is there any type of program that currently does this and furthermore, is this even practical?

So, I stand corrected...

So, I stand corrected… there is a controlled, central data sharing repository after all. Per Mike’s post and Scott Moore’s email that was sent out this week, IFS and CTools are two possible alternatives to the R-drive. I like the notion of the CTools option, but I have to argue that using our public FTP spaces for file sharing is pretty much the same as using the R-drive, except the whole university can view your files vs. just the business school. In checking out the capabilities of CTools, I found that loading files is actually pretty easy, and the best part is that you can control who can read, revise, delete, and post files on your space by hitting the ‘permissions’ button on the ‘resources’ tab.  In further exploring CTools, I also found that the ‘news’ tab has RSS capabilities and you can customize this section to have any RSS feed that you want appearing on the page.  It’s amazing that all this was in front of me all semester long, and I had no idea.

 In response to Justin’s post about real time revision collaboration, I agree that the notion is appealing, although it may cause more trouble than its worth. If two people were working off of the same file and were in disagreement about something, one of them could go and delete parts of the file without the other person having any record of the original version. However, I’ll give you that it would be really efficient.

Oracle Question

Does anyone know if there is a master reset for our Oracle spaces to completely claer out EVERYTHING that we added in?  The drop tables command doesn't seem to be cutting it and our database hates us.

DocuShare

After experiencing a nightmarish week with multiple classes culminating in final projects being due, I am convinced that the way we work is completely and utterly inefficient. All of our classes require group work to complete some sort of deliverable, whether it be a paper or PowerPoint presentation, and the easiest way of tackling this is usually splitting up the work. This, however, yields the problem of document version control. 

If six people write 6 different sections of a paper, that means that in the end, six different versions of the paper exist until they all get aggregated. However, as soon as this aggregation takes place, we’re now left with the problem of six people gathered in front of one computer screen to make all further edits. Of course, no one wants to do this so we end up e-mailing out the preliminary aggregated version to everyone in the group, at which point we’re now back to having six different versions of the same paper.  Everyone then makes changes on their own personal version, and in the end, we’re left with no way of tying it all back together.

From this past week alone, I probably have at least 10 versions of my paper in my email box, an additional 5 versions on my memory stick, and 4 more on my hard drive. Multiply this by the 6 other people in my group, and it is a version headache. The R drive used to combat this problem by keeping group files in one central location for all to access, but there were no controls surrounding who could view the files on the drive and this led to a “free-for-all” opportunity for cheaters. Bub-bye R drive.

In talking about this with my Dad this weekend, he showed me one of the products that he uses at work to eliminate this problem.  It is called DocuShare, and like the R-drive, it allows documents to be stored in one central location. The difference is that it contains the proper controls so that the entire free world can’t view your work. Instead, you can choose who is able to view and edit your files. It also has a version control built in so that it prevents two people from duplicating efforts by editing the same file at the same time. If a file is in use by another person, the second person attempting to access it can only open a “read-only” version and cannot make any edits to the master until it is checked back into the system by the first user. This eliminates all sorts of problems such as group members forgetting to send out the most recent version of their work while others are wasting time making edits to old versions that have become obsolete.

If the Business School expects to continue facilitating a group-work friendly environment, there needs to be one central, controlled data sharing repository, and something like DocuShare may be the solution.

Don’t read XSLT before putting up the Christmas tree...

Well, I’ve done some quality bonding with my XSLT book over the past few days, and I think that it may have scarred me for life. As we were putting up the Christmas tree today, I couldn’t help but see it as a great, big, XSLT metaphor… trunk = document element, roots = root element, branches = nodes with more branches and leaves, needles = nodes without children. Needless to say, my family now officially thinks that I’m nuts…not that they hadn’t already figured that out.

In any event, while I was in the process attempting to play catch-up and working through the book, a few things came up that I have questions about…

1) My first question is probably very basic, but nevertheless I continue to struggle with grasping the notion. Repeatedly, the book refers to the current node, but, I am confused as to what determines it? Is it just whatever element that you’re telling the template to match on? It also seems that there is a second current node when dealing with XPath expressions. On page 74, the book comments “the current node of these select patterns is not the same as the current node of the template rule’s match pattern.” Is the main idea that the current node, in whatever context it is being used, is just a starting point for the processor to begin reading the tree?

2) My second question has to do with XPath.  I understand that the general formula for a location step is axis::nodetest[predicate]. Is it a correct assumption to make that you must understand what the entire tree looks like in order to know what axis to list in the formula? Or, should I be thinking of this in terms of the axis relative to the current node, in which case the only thing I would need to know is the relationship of the selected nodes relative to the current node?

3) Thirdly, as I was reading the section about template rules, I started wondering what purpose the xsl:copy template serves in real life. I understand that its primary function is to carry over the element tags, but what practical use does this ever serve in a business sense? Can someone supply me with an example when you would not want the content information and just the tags?

Comply or else...

This post is a bit outside the scope of this class, but it is definitely relevant to the information technology world and anyone who is currently investing in or plans to invest in the market.

As of yesterday, Sarbanes Oxley 404 compliance went into effect for all public companies with a market cap over $75M.  For those of you not familiar with Sarb-Ox, in many ways it is a corporation’s worst nightmare and an auditor’s dream come true. Instead of focusing an audit solely on numbers and the resulting financial statements, Sarb-Ox forces companies to pay attention to the systems and the processes that their numbers are flowing from. You can audit numbers backwards, sideways, and upside down, but its not going to matter if the processes and systems that generate the numbers do not have integrity in themselves. As a result, companies must now pay careful attention to the effectiveness of their internal controls on an ongoing basis. To provide some perspective, this means that the design and operating effectiveness of the key controls embedded within hundreds of business process that could affect financial statement assertions must be documented and tested. Not only is this incredibly time consuming, but it is also incredibly costly from a labor and accounting fee standpoint. According to this article posted on CFO.com, companies will spend an average of $5.1M on compliance efforts. Worst of all, this must be completed before every corporation’s next fiscal year end, and as of now, many are lagging severely behind in process. Since two additional audit opinions in relation to Sarb-Ox are to be issued along with the traditional opinion, companies who fail to comply or correct material control weaknesses in a timely manner could receive a bad opinion. This in turn could negatively impact the markets if stock prices begin to fall as a result of weakening confidence in the transparency of accounting practices.

From an IT standpoint, this is relevant because the audit of these internal controls is wrapped around computer information systems. All processes taking place in the data center and pertaining to either logical access/security, program development, or program changes must be thoroughly documented and tested. Essentially, this means gaining comfort over everything IT: disaster recovery plans, back-up procedures, batch processing, password maintenance, operating system security parameters, database settings, etc.  In addition, companies are also spending large amounts of money on technology to aid them in their compliance efforts. This article gives a decent breakdown of what this entails.

Who ever thought that misclassifying expenses as capital expenditures and manipulating special purpose entities could lead to all of this legislation? WorldCom and Enron sure weren’t betting on it.

Additional source

Blogs as the catalyst for promoting bottom-up change

I am currently working on a very large project for another class that involves analyzing a factory. One component of the project involves analyzing the information flows through the factory and assessing whether or not to invest in a computer information system. As I have been turning this over in my mind for the past couple of days, I started thinking… if blogs are an effective means of letting professors know what students are thinking and help them to gage whether or not students understand a particular topic, wouldn’t they also be effective in the business world as a means of direct communication between front line workers and top management? Many companies have suggestion boxes in either the physical sense or in the email sense. But, the downfall to suggestion boxes is the fact that only one or two people get to read and evaluate them. If employees were to utilize an internal blog, it accomplishes two things: 1) many people get to see the suggestions, including co-workers who may add additional value to preliminary thoughts in development 2) higher end management can gain a better understanding of what is happening at all levels of the organization. Additionally, blogs could help companies better institute bottom-up change by giving front-line workers a larger voice in identifying and remedying common problems they encounter on a daily basis. These employees have a great deal of knowledge about product development, scrap, customer preferences, etc.

In doing some research… companies seem to be slowly getting on board with the idea of using blogs to better connect with their employees from an internal standpoint, and to better connect with their customers from an external standpoint. This website talks about using blogs in a business context as a method of inter-company communication.

Making connections

I know that everyone has been attempting to draw connections between xml, xsql, html, and XSLT, but until I read the webpage that Maulin suggested, I didn’t really get it. I think that I do now, and here is my attempt to justify it to myself. Please correct me if I am wrong at any point:

- XML is a simplified form of SGML. SGML is a universal standard for defining electronic documents, but it is very complex and cumbersome to use, therefore, we use XML instead.

- XML is and isn’t a mark-up language

o it is a mark-up language in the sense that if describes, organizes, and stores data but doesn’t process it.

o It is not a mark-up language in the sense that it’s a meta-language, which is flexible so that you can customize it to fit differing needs.

- XML is useful in the sense that data stored in XML format can be easily queried via XSQL. XML can also be transferred between information systems.

- HTML is a form of XML.

- HTML is very fixed and does not allow much flexibility. The structure and naming conventions are very rigid, which has a lot to do with why XML is replacing it.

- HTML tells browsers how to display a page where as XML does not. You need a style sheet such as CSS to complement XML in order to tell the browser how to display a page.

- Another alternative is to utilize XSLT to turn XML into html, either in the server or the client side. This is effective since all web browsers know how to display HTML.