bskool bloggin

basic.p63-2.xsl

In Bud's file basic.p63-2.xsl you need to add a closing tag </xsl:template> after the line that says "The Template People." to get the stylesheet to run on miniscore.xml

Blogonaut: Hail to the Victors: Blogs as the catalyst for promoting bottom-up change

My thoughts on the discussion between Krysta, Bud and RissRoss Link: Blogonaut: Hail to the Victors: Blogs as the catalyst for promoting bottom-up change are that perhaps, instead of using blogs to communicate up and down in an organization between management and the front line, the communication technique should be used laterally as a way to share IC. Many times people will come up against problems that aren't neccessarily suggestions, but are more so questions that others in the organization may be able to answer from experience. Instead of an email out to a large group asking for help, blogs could be a good exchange where employees could seek guidance.

icemountain: To parse or not to parse...

I might be wrong, but I think to answer Icemountain's question in his post icemountain: To parse or not to parse... that parser is a general term used in computer science to talk about something that dissects source code and turns it into object code. In the case of XML it will be out web browser that acts as the parser. However, with programming languages it is generally some type of code complier.

Bud, obviously correct me if this is wrong.

Big Blog in the Sky: Political jihads and the blogospheret

Tom's blog post Big Blog in the Sky: Political jihads and the blogospheret was the subject of the marketplace section's main article in today's Wall Street Journal. The author said that in fact bloggers did disrupt things a bit by posting exit poll information which was flawed in the end. Most exit polls pointed to a Kerry win. The networks did not use that information this year in the projections because of mistakes made in 2000. They didn't end up being correct this time, but bloggers are always quite quick to try to scoop the big story.

tranquilidad: laptop shopping

To tranquilidad's question in her post tranquilidad: laptop shopping I actually have purchased a laptop at the showcase and it is a great deal. They set you up with everything you need for the UM computing environment and at a huge discount from the retail price. I bought an IBM X40, which was $1500 in the back to school sale, but I know they have laptops in the 1000-1200 price range. Make sure you get office XP when you buy it though also, because it will only come with the basic word processor etc. if you don't buy that additional program.

Just wondering

Just wondering, as I ponder XML in my post below, if there is a way, once we have an xml file to easily convert it back into data in the form that we put it on to the Oracle server in (like comma delimited raw data minus all of the tags)?

Project Grades

I'm just wondering when the projects are expected to be graded.

Making More Sense

While XML has proven to be a complex and somewhat theoretical experience over the last week and a half, I had somewhat of an epiphany today when we ran query 1 and multiple rows were in the resulting row set. I said to myself 'self, wala!, that looks like HTML almost with all of those lines with little tags and varying indents.' This made me realize what Bud meant by saying that XML can be used to take data and turn in into a lot of useful things. We have very raw data on the Oracle server which we can easily (relatively, at least) now query and display in useful ways like HTML pages. Wow. Sorry if everyone else realized this when we talked in class the first day, but today was the click. I couldn't write it all the code or define every term, but the concept and use is now much clearer.

Can't Escape

So I realize that everyone probably missed me in class yesterday (or more likely not, but I missed being there). However, I was not able to escape BIT, even with my absence, as I ran smack into at the magazine stand at the airport and read about it from DTW all the way to Chicago. This month's Business 2.0 (a magazine I had never read, which is apparently for the 'new generation of business leaders') featured articles that seemed right out of the BIT 320 syllabus. One, entitled "Firefox: IE's worst nightmare" described 19 year-old Stanford student Blake Ross's work on Firefox and how it is the first real threat to IE since Netscape (where he incidentally interned at age 14, gotta hate on geeks that are SO much smarter that you). The article went on to describe many of the free addons in Firefox (including Sage and a new music player that works in the browser called Foxytunes). I'll try to scan in the article and post the pdf if I get time (you have to subscribe to read it online).

The other article was about a blogger named Jon Gales that is pulling in more than $55,000 a year (at $300 an hour based on how much time he spends) reviewing cell phones and getting click throughs on Google. Pretty interesting and lucrative it seems. He is also only 19.

Hoping that the XML class and the talk were exciting. People can feel free to blog so that I get a sense of what happend (please!).

Adding onto the XML Conversation

I found Jrtrana\'s blog post about XML to be inspiration to check out a bit of XML.com myself, but I found it to be quite confusing. I never made myself learn HTML, but I do understand that HTML has various tags which define what a particular part of the page is. The idea of having no defined tags seems strange and I will be interested to see how you define them and if that is a lot more work than having defined tags already in place.

The author of the "What is XML" article on that website also points out that the documents that XML is used for would simply not be appropriate for HTML. Again, I'll be interested to see what types of documents we're talking about. Should be an interesting topic, but I find myself currently quite in the dark.