Insight to the Industry by www.rm-mi.net

 

10/9/2012

more than one best practice

Filed under: — Justin Mead @ 7:14 am

When you google search for a map route especially if you are far away you get more than one route quite likely. Industry best practices are the same way. Suggestions to the endpoint.

Recently working on a project where the functional design analyst followed _best practices_  for WSDL data typing and directed the developers to tightly bind the data transformations to the existing data model. Problem with this best practice is that the data model is not optimal and at the architect level it is known to be in need of re-engineering to get close to an industry standard model for interoperability with other tool sets and solutions in the industry.

The problem on the ground and in the trench is that the speed to deliver has slowed down because while the translations are tightly coupled to the model their are undiscovered issues in data from system A, B and getting to C from size to data type errors.

To solve any problem in IT one needs to consider from a high level through to a low level what the best mix of pro and con will drive the project to a solution with the best path to endpoint.

There is a good article at IBM Developerworks site that talks about weighing the options on a granularity continuum.

So the endpoint and the best practice to follow… keep in mind to look at all the options before you jump on the highway and get stuck in traffic, to get to the endpoint sometimes the longest distance is the shortest time to get there.


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2/23/2006

How to enable Microsoft Access 2003 custom popup menu \’group by\’ properties to actually work

Filed under: — Justin Mead @ 7:56 am

The problem is I keep loosing the Popup Toolbar (shortcut menu) ‘start group property’ when I create a custom popup menu. Even after reading a google search files…

[http://www.google.com/search?q=access+popup+menu+group&hl=en]

on search string (access popup menu group) … I had to read and reread the only one valid result I found multiple times to ‘get it’ so here is what I got…

 

First: To add the bars to custom popup menus and keep the group by property you create a custom shortcut toolbar.

There are a couple of ways ‘in’ to the control you need to get to. One way is by clicking into :TOOLS:CUSTOMIZE:> to get this window


 
Click on [New] and call it something, this case I used Custom 2
Then you will see this little popup show on your screen, you need to select items you want on the popup menu by going to the Commands tab and click and drag what you want into the popup window. Once you have the items you want, click [Properties] to get the following window.


 
You will see I added a few odd things, sort, open favorites, home, output to notepad, analyze , and analysis with excel. Now, on the [Type] properties, change that to POPUP and then [Close] and you will get a box telling you this thing will disappear and here comes the tricky part.
Notice on Image01 that item [Shortcut Menus] is selected, make sure you also have this selected now on your customize screen. This will bring a menu up on your monitor.
Now, go to the [Commands] tab and click the [Rearrange Commands] button and looking at this next image for guidance…


 
You see the Customize screen, showing the Commands view and the Rearrange Commands button.. that you just clicked to get the stuff on the right… click the Toolbar radio button and scroll down to your menu you created, in this case it is [Custom 2] and note that the controls you will see are the ones you added.
Now you may have gotten this far but by the MSDN describes this ‘creating a custom shortcut menu for access differently… the same way I self stumbled into and found. What I wanted to do was to group my controls and every time I tweaked the property to show this, it would not stick… So here is what you do, come into the process as I have described above and then…
Like in the image03 view above, click on where you want to add a group line, like to show it above [open hyperlink] and above [output to notepad] select the control and click the [Modify Selection] button.

 

See here, I have a line now above the [Open Hyperlink] and I am about to add one above the [Output to Notepad] by selecting the ‘modify selection’ and selecting the [begin a Group] property.
Now to make it show up on your form… in Design mode select Properties for the form and  as you see in the image05 below, on the Other tab, select the drop down of your custom menu you just made, in this case, Custom 2, on the Property ‘Shortcut Menu Bar’ and of course your ‘Shortcut Menu’ must be enabled.

What you will see now when you right click in form view mode of your form is your popup menu with the pesky group by lines showing.
 

 tada!

Justin Mead
Rocky Mountain Managed Information
©2006 RM-Mi all rights reserved
http://www.rm-mi.net/whitepapers/HowtoEnableCustomPopUpMenuGroups.htm


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2/22/2006

How to enable custom popup menu group by properties to actually work, no thanks to MSDN how to searches.

Filed under: — Justin Mead @ 8:07 pm

I keep loosing the Popup Toolbar (shortcut menu) ‘start group property’ when I create a custom popup menu. Even after reading a google search files…

[http://www.google.com/search?q=access+popup+menu+group&hl=en]

on search string (access popup menu group) … I had to read and reread the only one valid result I found multiple times to ‘get it’ so here is what I got…

 [this paper available at
[http://www.rm-mi.net/whitepapers/HowtoEnableCustomPopUpMenuGroups.htm]
with pictures that spell out and show how to]

First: To add the bars to custom popup menus and keep the group by property you create a custom shortcut toolbar.

There are a couple of ways ‘in’ to the control you need to get to. One way is by clicking into :TOOLS:CUSTOMIZE:> to get this window

 
Click on [New] and call it something, this case I used Custom 2
Then you will see this little popup show on your screen, you need to select items you want on the popup menu by going to the Commands tab and click and drag what you want into the popup window. Once you have the items you want, click [Properties] to get the following window.

 
You will see I added a few odd things, sort, open favorites, home, output to notepad, analyze , and analysis with excel. Now, on the [Type] properties, change that to POPUP and then [Close] and you will get a box telling you this thing will disappear and here comes the tricky part.
Notice on Image01 that item [Shortcut Menus] is selected, make sure you also have this selected now on your customize screen. This will bring a menu up on your monitor.
Now, go to the [Commands] tab and click the [Rearrange Commands] button and looking at this next image for guidance…

 
You see the Customize screen, showing the Commands view and the Rearrange Commands button.. that you just clicked to get the stuff on the right… click the Toolbar radio button and scroll down to your menu you created, in this case it is [Custom 2] and note that the controls you will see are the ones you added.
Now you may have gotten this far but by the MSDN describes this ‘creating a custom shortcut menu for access differently… the same way I self stumbled into and found. What I wanted to do was to group my controls and every time I tweaked the property to show this, it would not stick… So here is what you do, come into the process as I have described above and then…
Like in the image03 view above, click on where you want to add a group line, like to show it above [open hyperlink] and above [output to notepad] select the control and click the [Modify Selection] button.

 
See here, I have a line now above the [Open Hyperlink] and I am about to add one above the [Output to Notepad] by selecting the ‘modify selection’ and selecting the [begin a Group] property.
Now to make it show up on your form… in Design mode select Properties for the form and  as you see in the image05 below, on the Other tab, select the drop down of your custom menu you just made, in this case, Custom 2, on the Property ‘Shortcut Menu Bar’ and of course your ‘Shortcut Menu’ must be enabled.

What you will see now when you right click in form view mode of your form is your popup menu with the pesky group by lines showing.
 

 tada!

Justin Mead
Rocky Mountain Managed Information
©2006 RM-Mi all rights reserved


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2/19/2006

Code source described in WIRED piece

Filed under: — Justin Mead @ 12:42 pm

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70219-0.html

By Dylan Tweney | Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Feb, 17, 2006

For most people, open source is a synonym for free software. But for programmers, open source is about sharing code, building on the work of others and not having to reinvent the wheel — at least, that’s the ideal. In practice, code reuse remains very low, because it’s often too hard for programmers to find relevant bits of code for their applications.

A new search engine for programmers promises to alleviate that problem by making it easier to find and share code. That in turn could increase programmers’ productivity and give a fresh boost to the open-source movement.

Krugle, which launches officially next month, indexes programming code and documentation from open-source repositories like SourceForge and includes corporate sites for programmers like the Sun Developer Network. The index will cover around 100 million pages of what company founder Ken Krugler terms the "technical web" — high-quality technical pages for professional programmers. (By contrast, Google’s index covers about 11 billion pages.)

"This winds up being a window on all the open-source code in the world," said Krugler, who estimates the Krugle index will contain between 3 and 5 terabytes of code by the time the engine launches in March.

The new service joins other source-code search engines like Koders and Codefetch, but Krugle intends to differentiate itself by allowing developers to annotate code and documentation, create bookmarks and save collections of search results in a tabbed workspace. Saved workspaces have unique URLs, so developers can send an entire collection of annotated code to a co-worker just by e-mailing a link.

Krugle also contains intelligence to help it parse code and to differentiate programming languages, so a PHP developer could search for a website-registration system written in PHP simply by typing "PHP registration system."

Greg Olson, a co-founder of early open-source success story Sendmail and a consultant with the Olliance Group said Krugle will make it easier to reuse program components — something that the open-source movement has long promised, but never effectively delivered on. (Olson advised Krugle on the startup’s open-source usage.)

"It’s so cumbersome now to use tools like Google to search for code that the majority of programmers just write their own code," said Olson — even if they know that an open-source component is probably available that would meet their needs. "If you can’t find the pieces, it’s too frustrating to try to reuse components. But if you can reuse components, you can get a factor-of-10 improvement in productivity."

Simon Phipps, the chief open-source officer for Sun Microsystems, said Krugle could be useful as a learning tool, but the many different licenses that apply to open-source code are a potential stumbling block. In addition to the widely used Gnu Public License, Mozilla Foundation projects have their own licensing terms — and copyright holders may retain some rights even in otherwise publicly available open-source code, said Phipps.

"Let’s say you turn up a bit of code that’s licensed under the GPL … if you use it, that means your whole project needs to be licensed under the GPL. I hope that people are aware of these issues, because the licensing situation could get pretty hairy."

Krugle will make money from advertising on its free, public search engine. The company is also planning to create an enterprise edition, due in 2007, to facilitate code-sharing within companies.


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3/3/2005

Microsoft Access Performance issues

Filed under: — Justin Mead @ 12:22 pm

How-to articles - Performance
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/ph/2509?sid=49
___________________________________________________

dy>
Information about query performance in an Access database
Describes the tips and the techniques that you can use to improve the performance of your queries in Access 2000 databases, in Access 2002 databases, and in Access 2003 databases.
How to keep a Jet 4.0 database in top working condition
By default, Microsoft Jet is the database engine that is used in Microsoft Access. This article describes best practices that you can use to help keep your Jet database in top working condition. This article describes databases that are running in…
Defragment and compact database to improve performance
Explains that you can defragment your hard disk and compact your database to imporve the performance of Microsoft Access

___________________________________________________

These are an example of searching for ways to optimize an Access Application for a client. The location to goto and search Microsoft for information? That place is known as the Microsoft Knowledge Base (http://support.microsoft.com/search/?adv=1) and can be very helpful. It also can be very confusing. The reason is partially due to asking the right questions sysndrome. I have seen people spend most of a day trying to find answers at the big M and not find really what they needed.

One trick is to GOOGLE a little first. (http://www.google.com/) By doing this you are actually looking for hints on how to phrase your question. Put in all the words you think may work, see what you get. Put in two words, see what you get. Put in three words, try that. Keep in mind that your goal is to find out how to ‘ask the question.’

Now, you may find your answer on Google, and or you may find links back to Microsoft’s Knowledge Base. The key here is to try different angles to the same problem.

You will get the best results that way.

LUCK!


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3/1/2005

About Data

Filed under: — Justin Mead @ 11:34 am

Database

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database

A database is an information set with a regular structure.

Any set of information may be called a database. Nevertheless, the term was invented to refer to computerised data, and is used almost exclusively in computing. Sometimes it is used to refer to not yet computerised data, but usually in the process of planning its possible computerisation.

Software created to manage generalised databases is usually called a database management system or DBMS. Several software architectures are possible: For smaller single user databases often all functions are managed by one program. In larger and multiple user databases usually a number of programs are involved and most commonly a client-server architecture is adopted.

The DBMS front-end (i.e., the clients) is concerned mainly with data entry, enquiry and reporting. The back-end (i.e. the server) is the set of programs that actually control data storage, responding to requests from the frontend. Searching and sorting is usually performed by the server. There are a wide variety of database implementations, from simple tables stored in a single file each to very large databases with many millions of records, stored in rooms full of disk drives or other peripheral electronic storage devices.

Databases resembling modern versions were first developed in the 1960s. A pioneer in the field was Charles Bachman. Two key data models arose at this time: the network model (developed by CODASYL) followed by the hierarchical model (as implemented in IMS). These were later usurped by the relational model, which was contemporary with the so-called flat model designed for very small tasks. Another contemporary of the relational model is the object-oriented database (OODB).

While the relational model is based on set theory, one proposed modification suggests fuzzy set theory (based on fuzzy logic) as an alternative.

More information at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database


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