Unit 15: Final Thoughts

While I just took the final exam and wrote something similar, I am going to use this last blog assignment to post more of a final reflection.

I have really enjoyed this course. I imagine it is a difficult course to teach since people are coming from different technological proficiencies, using different computers and networks, and have varying levels of receptiveness to change and new ideas.

I am really glad that we worked a bit with using an API to help get data to put into a database. I am really interested in APIs and trying to build interesting things with freely available resources from digital collections. I think that the ability to access and “remix” information from digital collections is integral to the digital preservation movement. If people aren’t using digital collections, arguments can be made that they are a waste of resources, which could result in less funding or other backlash. If an archive is being explored and used to create cool applications and research, the value of digital collections and open online archives is more salient.

Like many of my classmates have mentioned on the forums, I too am planning on starting the CodeAcademy PHP course (http://www.codecademy.com/en/tracks/php). The experiences in this class with the workflow of programming, the thought and planning that underlies it, and the lines of code themselves have all been positive for me. I feel like I know enough to start exploring topics that interest me.

I wish that I were better with databases and MySQL. I understand the database planning process, and I don’t have any issues with using MySQL to make databases, but I have a hard time without a visual aid. I am hoping that one’s facility with databases improves the more one makes them.

This class has been extremely valuable to my future career prospects and to my personal development. I’m really glad that I decided to take it.

Unit 14 Blog: Some thoughts on Interoperability and Text Editors

While this is not a great “summing up the course experience” theme for a blog, I’d like to discuss why Microsoft Excel 2011 for the Mac does not have an “Import XML Data” option. That seems like such a huge exclusion to me. It doesn’t seem right that a program can be called the same thing but have different functionality depending on the operating system that is running it. According to some users on the Mr. Excel.com forum, XML importing is not a “super in-demand” function of excel, which might be one of the reasons it is not in the Mac version (http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/excel-questions/520375-excel-2011-mac-import-xml.html). It’s a bit ironic that XML is becoming more and more prominent as one of the markup languages of interoperability, yet it isn’t a function of the “interoperable” Microsoft office suite.

I ended up going to the Science and Engineering Library and creating the XML-based spreadsheets on a Windows computer there. One thing that was interesting was that the “date” columns from my CSV spreadsheets were displaying the dates as a series of “#” signs on the Windows computer. When I added the new XML spreadsheets and reopened the document on my mac, the dates were back. It looks like displaying dates and other elements could be another interoperability issue between the Windows and Mac versions of excel. 

Second, I’d like to talk about the differences between Bluefish and my beloved TextWrangler. I had to download an older version of Bluefish (2.2.3) because I am running Mac OS X 10.6.8, which was too old for Bluefish 2.2.5. One thing that I like about Bluefish is that it shows a tag’s starting and ending points. TextWrangler will notify you if you forget to close a tag, but it doesn’t have the same cool highlighting feature. Both programs allow you to collapse information that is contained between two tags. Both have almost the same functionality, although Bluefish’s toolbar approach looks way busier.

TextWrangler is on the left, Bluefish is on the right.

I think my main reason for liking TextWrangler is that I used it first. It got me through some tough times in this class, so it has sentimental value. I understand that we are using Bluefish because both Macs and Windows PC’s can download it. I do think that TextWrangler is a bit prettier than Bluefish.

Unit 13: A Future in Coding?

I would like to learn a computer language. I mentioned on D2L that I took a MOOC from Udacity on the Python language (https://www.udacity.com/course/cs101). I found it interesting and definitely experienced that wonderful high of solving a problem via coding, but a lot of the examples weren’t very interesting to me.

I have heard of people using Code Academy (http://www.codecademy.com/) to learn about coding. I am planning on looking into it over the winter break. I’d like to learn Javascript (and Java) because it seems really useful for creating web applications, which is something I’m interested in doing.

I read somewhere that Ruby (specifically Ruby on Rails) was really in-demand and could lead to a salary increase, but I can’t find the article. I think it was something posted on ALA Think Tank’s Facebook page.  I don’t know much about that language or its applications.

My brother was a computer science major and works at a biotech company programming robots and writing tools for data analysis. He uses Fortran, Perl, Ruby, and C (or maybe C++) in his job. I can’t imagine what its like to know so many different languages. Do you get them mixed up? Is it obvious which language is better suited to solving a certain problem? I would like to have some of the same facility with using programming to solve a problem as my brother has, but I’m not looking to learn so many languages!

I’m not really interested in learning coding in order to get a better job at this point. It’s more that I want to learn how to make things that I would like to use. I am taking a course in the Digital Humanities this semester and have become inspired by the researchers who are designing tools to help them with their research. I would love to work in a digital humanities lab and help out these scholars in the future.

Unit 11 Blog—My Changing Perspective

I feel like I have been drinking LAMP/Command Line the Kool-Aid. When I first started this class, I knew the command line was powerful, and I knew the tools encompassed by LAMP were useful, but I didn’t think that they were things that I would really use or work with. At this point, I feel like I could have a future working with digital collections in a more hands-on way than I originally imagined. It’s a rush, getting scripts and queries to work.

I am a self-taught knitter and crocheter, and teaching myself how to use LAMP with these tutorials felt very similar to teaching myself how to knit. At first, the methods seem unwieldy and feel like you’ll never get the hang of them. After working for a few weeks, I feel like I can create simple things, but I know it’s going to take a lot more practice before I produce something elaborate.

A few reflections about this week’s assignments:

I experienced a setback when I misread page 12 of the lecture, which made me think that imputing the code correctly caused a failure that I was supposed to identify for myself before moving on. In actuality, the failure image was right after the page break. I spent a frantic 10 minutes messing with the MySQL monitor on my server, rereading guides, and flipping back through stuff from as early as Unit 9 before I realized I didn’t have a failure in my code.

Other than that, this week was pretty smooth sailing. I got 100% on the quiz on my first try, which was awesome!

I also wanted to mention I tool that I have been using that has been helpful. It’s called Text Wrangler (http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/).  My brother was a Computer Science minor and I inherited his old MacBook Pro when he upgraded his laptop. The computer came to me with Text Wrangler on it. I have been using Text Wrangler to write my code and have found it really helpful because it catches when you don’t match parenthesis and quotes, and it recognizes different tags and turns them a different color (example below). For a visual person like myself, the color coding has been immensely helpful. According to its website, Text Wrangler can be used to do more powerful and complex things, but I found the tag color-coding to be immensely helpful.

(part of the Unit 11 exercises done in Text Wrangler)

Unit 9--My SQL and Databases

I enjoyed learning more about MySQL this week. I know that many databases are created in some variation of MySQL, so it was really cool to work firsthand with this complex program. I couldn’t help comparing this weeks exercises with the database project I did in IRLS 515. In that project, we had to make a relatively complex relational database in Microsoft Access.

There is definitely a difference between working in MySQL and working with a GUI-based database program like Microsoft Access. At this point, I prefer Access because all of the different options are visible for me to select, I don’t have to worry about remembering how to name or access something using the command line. Access will remind users the difference between an integer column and a blob column, with MySQL the user is responsible for knowing the difference. Inserting data and moving data around in Access is so easy… I can imagine that MySQL has the opportunity to be more powerful and elegant to manage, but right now its just intimidating because I keep worrying I'll forget something.

I thought that the Joshua Mostafa MySQL videos from the UA CBT site were good tutorials. Sometimes I felt like they dragged, but usually he provided just the right amount of information to have the tutorial make sense without being overwhelming. At other times I felt like he was needlessly withholding information, like why not just say that “char” means “character”? Then he could have explained why specifying character length is important without having users go through the exercise of entering a multi-character piece of data and having it not work.

As a visual learner, I had difficulty remembering that the parenthesis looks like a “<” in the CBT videos. I kept getting syntax errors because I was using < and > instead of ( and ). I found a good MySQL cheat sheet (http://cse.unl.edu/~sscott/ShowFiles/SQL/CheatSheet/SQLCheatSheet.html) so that helped me remember the parentheses. 

I think I will review the CBT videos again and look over the W3 Schools advanced tutorials before moving on for next week. The great thing about MySQL is that it is used so ubiquitously, there are loads of tutorials about it and its various flavors.