Smiling_Chen

Question about final report

One requirement of the final report is a write-up describing the company, stating the value the company could derive from your project, and justifying the choice of functionality you implement.  The forms we created so far only enable the company to insert new data but not to update the existing data.  And we decide to generate more sample reports.   For the write-up, shall I just descibe some most important reports to show exactly how the company can use and benefit from them. Is that what you are looking for?

Additionally, could you please just clarify what does "justifying the choice of functionality you implement" mean? Thanks!

Blogging (2)

Something more about potential improvements of blogging experiences:

1)Sometimes, I am busy and not able to check my weblogs that often.  It will be great if I can receive an e-mail  when other people respond to my recent posts.

2)We should also invite people other than BIT 320 students to join the blogging activity, so that we can learn different people's prespectives especially when there are some people who have expertise in the stuff we learned from class.

3)Professor may give credit to people who respond to other people's problems occured. This will encourage them to be more concerned about other people's questions  and try to help out each other.

Blogging about blogging (1)

The title of this entry is very self-explanatory already.  Throughout the semester,  we are blogging about everything come up in this class, such as project issues, code issues, business information, even some personal issues.  Our questions raised here got solved by other people's comments.  Our new ideas generated here from reading other people's blogs.  It has been a pretty fun experience.  And we can get credit simply by fun-blogging.

I began to know blogging by reading my friends' blogs online.  Later, I realized that the business world is making use of this concept too.  People advertise their new products, exchange information of different expertise and make the information flow up and down the whole organizations.  Pretty cool!

One possible change I can think of right now is to have a public blogging site rather than have one blogs for each individual.  Everytime, when I tried to read other people's blogs, it took a very very long time since I need to click on each person's site. Moreover, not everyone is using the extactly right category when they are blogging, so I often read the blog entries that I am not very interested in that particular day.  By creating a public blog,  I can either choose to read all the blog entries of a date specified by me or choose to view all the entries of a particular category that I am interested in.  I know Bud has a Recent Post link in the course website, but personally I think it's more efficient to do it the way I suggested.

More thoughts will come up! To be continued --->

The last class...

Just finished the last class of BIT 320.  It's quite interesting to look at other people's projects.  A lot of them are pretty cool!  Some of the groups came up with nice and simple looking but very informative homepages.  Some of them can actually be implemented later by the organizations, clubs or companies which can help solve their current problems.

Our group will continue to add more forms and views, make the Thank You page work, try the RSS and compile the final report.  We decide to concentrate on the report first and then take care of the other stuff.  A question for Professor Bud, during the presentations, you said we don't need to worry about HTML any more right?  Since some of the group's interfaces are nicer and more complicated than others.  Will you grade or give extra credit based on that?

Wish you all the best of luck during final week and have a wonderful X'mas break!!!

More to say...

Blogdog have pretty much fixed all the problems we had so far.  Forms are working; views are working.  We will have the presentation tomorrow, our last BIT class.  Can't believe it's almost the end of the semester. 

So we don't need to get everything done before the presentation tomorrow, right? We will basically show the overall picture of our project and what we have done to date.  In other words, we can still improve our project until the final due date.

The TypePad changed the page a little bit the first time we log in.  It added a section called 5 recent pings,  so it's much easier to view what other people's responses to our recent blog entries.  Quite good improvement!

Still puzzled about repeating problem

Last time, I asked about how to solve the repeating problems in the view which links mutiple tables together.  As Bud suggested, I used Distinct operator, but it didn't work out.  What confused me is that when I run the same queries in Oracle, it doesn't display any repeating enties. But it doesn't work in our views,  how can I solve the problem?

Question about "Comments"

For our project, we re-used some xslt stylesheets given by Professor Bud and tailored it to our specific case.  My question is when we turn in our stylesheets and other documents, do we need to delete the comments Bud inserted?  I kind of remember that during  last class, Bud mentioned we could either delete it or change the comments based on our specific case.  Which one is better?

In the project description,  it emphasizes on how well other people can re-use our created .xml, .xsl.  So I think it will be better if we have the comments there so other people can have a better understanding and change the codes accordingly.

Any opinion about my question?

Urgent question

We have three tables which incurred the same repeating problems, such as the same id number and donor name will apear more than twice.  I checked the corresponding queries and thought that we might use the Distinct operator to solve the problem.  By reading the queries themselve, they all seem right to me. I remember at the end of the last last class, you mentioned something about forms joining more than two tables might not work well based on our limited knowledge.  What is our prolem here? If the queries are not right, we can still look into it, but if no, shall we just leave it like that?

Progress of our project

This thursday before class, our group got together and worked hard on our project.  We made a lot of progress and the whole picture became clearer and clearer to us.  Actually it didn't take long to put up the forms and tables online as long as we put hands on it and our group members got really into the project.  Hope we will do a good job!

I have a question about one of our tables. One of the attributes of a table is deadline. When we inserted the data in the first project, it automatically came up with a date format, like dec-12-2004. When we display the table, it has 0:0:0 after the date which represent hour, minute and second. Any ideads how can we get rid of this 0:0:0?

Today's class

At the end of today's class, we talked a lot about how to approach the 2nd group project. It's a big relief to know that actually we don't have to write the sxlt stylesheet from scratch by ourselves. All we need to do is to look at what we have been given from Professor Bud, understand them and tailor them to our database. We are only required to creat 4 tables out of the 5 views from the last project. Hopefully we will get more to work in order to get some extra credits. It will be good to start from relatively simple tables and add on more later on. We decide to make some progress before the meeting with Bud on Thursday after class and make sure that we are on the right track. I am sure we will have more questions coming up!

BTW, how long is each presentation going to be on Dec 9th?