It’s a useful skill in life to remember the people you’ve already met, if only to avoid the ‘Hey, it’s … YOU!’ conversation. A personal rule of thumb when I don’t remember someone’s name is to say with confidence some other name, and, even if corrected, to continually refer to that person by the wrong [...]
I have been working incessantly on adding more functionality to the calendar program. Requests from staff and public alike are filtering through and so I have a larger to do list for the calendar. Early on I had in mind to provide keyword searching of events within the calendar framework itself. I devised a simple [...]
We’ve described the basic shape of the relational database schema which we use to represent structural and descriptive metadata in a previous post.
When the schema was first designed, we knew that in the future we would need to record the values of new attributes, currently unknown and unguessable. The usual way to meet [...]
Apparently not. Or at least, not without a lot of therapy.
The third-party installation of our (simple?) web application dedicated to tracking digitization projects is a thing of the past. Once again, I am developing in Ruby on Rails, which for the most part makes me a happy coder. Unfortunately, there are a few key things [...]
Before any data can be loaded into our database system, we need to determine a “schema”, i.e. a set of tables such that all of the data we need to retain has its proper place
The important questions to ask are
What “things” (nouns) are we interested in. These are the “entities” of the ER model
What [...]
Recently, we decided to test out a third-party software tool — in one sense to see if it could work as a quick and easy way of implementing a Digital Work Request System (which had been being built in Ruby on Rails, which is waiting for a new server to call home), and in another [...]
We have been working on our web publishing work flow to reduce the time gap between releasing items in the database and publishing the items on the web. In 2005 we switched from live database calls to a batch process which extracts data from our RDMS to a flat xml directory structure and then [...]
As we move toward thoughts of developing Web 2.0 applications, the question of which tool to use has opened up again. We have been using PL/SQL and Oracle. If we are going to throw something like AJAX into more of our interfaces, we need to find a toolset that would make this as painless as [...]
