Big Blog in the Sky

A Picture Share!

You're fired.

A Picture Share!

With my final post, I wish everyone a Merry Christmas through this picture of my dog Boo.

Bud's availability

Bud, last week you said you'd be out of town for the greater part of this week.  I was wondering what your office hours-type availability is going to be like for the week.  Thanks.

Slashdot | Is RSS Doomed by Popularity?

Are you so sure you still want to try and implement that RSS feed? ;) This Slashdot post provides some commentary that will make Dave Winer (and maybe Bud Gibson) squirm.

These chicks don't even know the name of my blog

By design, blogging has been a huge part of this course.  The range of complexity and applicability of class concepts could not be addressed by the instructor or other students through class discussion, office hours, and email.  As others have noted, the blogosphere enabled our class to share information at angles previously unexperienced.  Teacher to student, student to teacher, student to student...it didn't matter, we just helped each other out and presented interesting readings to one another.  Not only did conversations continue back and forth through blogs, but they spilled over into the classroom.  I will probably address several of my classmates by their blog names in the future (Tranquilidad and RissRoss beware).  More seriously, student participation in the blogosphere affected the way the professor presented material in class.  Since middle school teachers have always been trying to integrate computers into learning, and a PowerPoint slide show doesn't help me learn that much better than a blackboard and a film strip.  Blogs, however, do.

Blogging catches my eye in terms of learning, individuality, and knowledge management.  This has done a wonder for our class, and we've talked about its effects on the enterprise.  I'm interested to see how it takes off there, and who knows, maybe I'll look into it in the near future.  Thanks, Bud, for making the blogosphere a novel approach to this course.

Autonumber difficulties?

We have successfully implemented an autonumber for a form but are experiencing difficulty inserting the record into the database. On this page we insert a new contact person, but we run into the following error and no data posted to our database:

"ORA-06550: line 2, column 16:PL/SQL: ORA-00947: not enough values
ORA-06550: line 2, column 4: PL/SQL: SQL Statement ignored"

The "not enough values" part makes me think there's a problem with passing the parameter, but I'm not sure where or how. I've checked the ordering in the SQL statement and it appears fine. I'm guessing the problem is somewhere on the XML side. Has anyone else experienced something similar to this? What steps did you have to take in order for your parameters to pass through properly as queries?

Blogonaut: Big Blog in the Sky: Filling a dropdown list

Link: Blogonaut: Big Blog in the Sky: Filling a dropdown list.

Correct, there is no mission id, just mission.

Filling a dropdown list

To most this data entry page probably looks like a piece of cake, but for our group it was a headache.  We couldn't figure out why the dropdown list wouldn't populate: our SQL statement looked fine; the source showed the XML results; and all other page elements appeared correctly.  Why wouldn't the field populate?  Mind you that this specific dropdown list is not dependent on the sequencing concept demonstrated using "customerid" in the example code. 

The SQL statement to fill the dropdown list only involved getting data from one field (select mission "mission" from org_missions) so I thought, "what if I repeated the mission part?"  Sure enough, select mission "mission", mission "mission from org_missions did the trick.  Why is this?  I tried this based on trial and error/dumb luck.  I imagine it has something to do with dropDown.xsl and relative locations/XPath therein, but I'm not completely sure.  The answer to this question isn't pressing but just a bit of a wonder.

club306: eHealth

Hosup posted a link about a large-scale electronic medical records implementation intended to streamline patient information sharing between hospitals in Massachusetts. Broadly speaking, the USAToday article touches on what I intend to in the foreseeable future and perhaps the rest of my life. Replacing paper processes in health care is a good idea for a multitude of reasons, and there is a huge federal initiative to get the job done. But the best technology isn't necessarily the answer. 50%-75% of information systems projects fail--and not because of bad technology, but because of people issues and the way they are managed.

The article I just referenced was written by Nancy Lorenzi, PhD., who I worked for the last two summers and plan to study under in a graduate program at Vanderbilt University. This class's emphasis has been on creating sound technology, which is a must, but it's also been on understanding concepts for use as a manager. If I may be so bold, I want to suggest to my classmates that an information system is only as good as the users in an organization who adopt it. Understanding organizational implications of information systems implementations is absolutely necessary, although it is often overlooked.

I will now get off of my soapbox. Is this an example of bloggerhea?

IBM out of PC's, into Macs?

The news has been rife with coverage of IBM's sale of its PC unit to Chiense computer maker Lenovo, but what next of its business moves? Sure, IBM will dedicate a lot of its resources to its lucrative information services/consulting segment, but this article from the Register speculates that IBM might be looking to tap Apple's hardware prowess. If IBM is getting out of PC sales because it's a low-growth field, then it kind of makes sense for them to try to capitalize on Apple's niche market--those who "switch" from PC's to Macs. Catering to graphic artists and those who want a chic desktop or laptop, Apple goes after a different, less price-conscious demographic. Apple is known for being cool, but I don't know if IBM could emulate Apple's coolness.