Category: All

Developer Operations and Empowering Users My Opinion

Recently I was listening to a Channel 9 Microsoft podcast talking about how their products could be used in developer operator environments. Interestingly the podcast talked about Developer Operations being a subdivision of the central IT department and how once an application was up and running the developer would never hand over support to a separate team to maintain the code. Regards this definition I would go further and suggest that organisations should encourage super users aka citizen programmers to develop processes and applications themselves. A mid-way strategy might be to station professional developers with the applications within the sections for whom they do the work and responsible to the divisional head and NOT the IT section. I suggest the benefits of this approach are as follows;

Geographical location – Not all users work in offices where you have access to 47 inch screens with instant Skype, team viewer access and 24/7 high bandwidth internet access. Those supporting an application sometimes end up talking to Betty the cleaner who is on a landline 20 metres from the computer with the issues, the only reason you are speaking to her is because she just happened to pick up the phone, on further questioning she does have an e-mail account but hasn’t used it for a couple of weeks, she politely tells you everyone else has gone home but is sure if you phone back on Monday someone will help out. You think damn if I could just sit at the machine and see what’s actually going on. Also describing what can be UI graphical issues in text or speech is incredibly inefficient 95% of the useful information is often lost in translation. It can be impossible to articulate or describe UI problems except by demonstration. A Developer operator that is local doesn’t have to rely on understanding the problem second hand their first experience of the problem is often first hand even if it’s not they often immediately familiarise themselves with it first hand. What’s better than having an excellent logging system for tracking problems? Yes you bet, not needing one in the first instance.

Aligning your staff with Corporate Objectives – there is a reason rental houses tend to be more run down than privately owned properties. If something goes wrong it its not going to be the occupiers cost to fix it – its not my job to make it work well. This is rarely the case with people who build and operate their own systems their motivation quickly aligns with the organisations objectives – if they can make it work better by predicting problems and fixing them before they arise, their life is made easier so, they tend to get in gear.

Motivation – if they can make it work better by predicting problems and fixing them before they arise their life is made easier, that is a powerful motivator to get things right and to predict problems before they arise. The people who fight for systems are usually the users. I’ve come across a lot of IT support where they get it to an “acceptable” level which usually means it gets a completion tick often the minimum is done to get the thing working. I was once on a project and was trying to get an icon working for the web application. I got the icon from the central team but wasn’t very happy with the look of it as I thought it looked bad. I asked the project manager he agreed it looked crap but his closing comment was “who cares it was authorised”

Education – Hey guess what you learn things about your work if you know how your tools work. You start making connections that feed back to improved practices. There’s an actual name for this Constructionism proposed by among others Seymour Papert – actually the ideas been around for about as long as people have been able to think.

A quote attributed to Aristotle ;

“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them”

I believe people to be naturally intelligent with the ability to pick things up – especially if they are immersed in the problem – case in point learning a language. Everyone learns it by immersion and because they have to. I don’t like the implication that because most people aren’t going to be the next Einstein they can’t be taught things I have yet to come across a colleague, myself included who hasn’t been more useful because they know more rather than less.

Reaction Time – for insurance purposes people are duty bound to mitigate damage. Now they do better job at this if they are actually on site when things happen. Central developers often have very little visibility on some of their projects and it may be days before they hear about something. Often the time to reaction can be critical in reducing damage. A water leak spotted in five minutes is fixable – left for a day and its a disaster. Granted the majority of applications aren’t that important however the same principle still applies.

An on hand developer operator doesn’t preclude additional support whereas central support requires it – they do the easy stuff they call for help for the difficult stuff. Additionally they are reliable contact for accurate description and dissemination of important information. This can be very useful. It is easy to get outside help in when things are needed it is not easy to suddenly train up local staff to accurately describe a difficult problem.

Good pedigree – hang on here’s some famous developer operators – Mark Zuckerberg programmer entrepreneur / Jeff Bezos entrepreneur and computer scientist / Bill Gates entrepreneur and programmer / David Braben entrepreneur and programmer / Sergey Brin computer scientist and entrepreneur. You might know what companies they founded. Do they promote dev-ops at their companies – I think they do. Oh and I even left out Elon Musk

Prioritisation of Work Load – Local users are far better at judging importance. The importance of a job may not relate to its difficulty or complexity. This makes it a requirement to understand the domain when deciding on what problems need to be solved first. Here’s an example – a company is going to close on a deal if they can print out and deliver a tender document. The users were a bit rushed and left it to the last minute. IT support know roughly what is going on but aren’t completely ear to the ground on tendering so the main printer support guy is off on holiday. Besides he thinks in the normal course of events a dropped printer is not an emergency. Extreme example but this kind of reward / problem ranking happens all the time. Ok computer support systems allow you to rank problems – that kind of fuzzy logic is exactly the kind of things that never really works out well and usually doesn’t allow for altering of priorities after submission. This can lead to businesses adopting the everything is important or nothing is important default setting. The first has people shouting at each other for totally unimportant tasks while the latter leads to speed of a sloth.

Security is a phony excuse – you have no defense other than vigilance against a sustained attack from an internal person who is talented. Setting ridiculous security levels on everything to protect against a few valuable parts is totally counter productive. The de-motivation of staff and subsequent inefficiency of process is a far greater danger to the viability of your business than fraud is likely to be. Resulting reduced levels of visibility which ironically can increase the opportunity for fraud and likelihood of major errors.

Trusting Your Gut or When Not to Use Computers.

wargamesAs good as computers are at calculating numbers they are really really bad at doing somethings that humans are just great at like making decisions based on fuzzy logic or translating things between languages. In such situations always go for the human at least until C3P0 comes along. Watson cost $3 million to build, good if you want to play trivial pursuit but ask it to choose between competing software vendors and well you will be nowhere.

That’s you numerical based ranking systems for software purchase!!!

Graphics vs Text

khmerconSo today it is a bit slow for me so I answered a question from a lad in Phnom Phen in Stack Overflow. He was looking for support for Khmer in MS Access 2013, the official language of Cambodia. He has a database but unfortunately he can’t get records to sort alphabetically for Khmer text. I’m not sure I found a solution I made some suggestions. I’m always really interested in questions like that because a solution for him would be the kind of thing that would be useful to anyone able to write Khmer which is presumably millions. I had a look at the alphabet – wow – computer fonts seem to do a terrible job of displaying it reducing it to the point where at a similar scale to other fonts I need a magnifying glass to distinguish differing letters. I guess you just have to choose larger font sizes but it was tiny at the scales I was seeing examples. It made me wonder how much cultures with difficult or tricky languages are disadvantaged in day to day commerce. Obviously to me their alphabet is only pictures.

But then in reality that is only what all alphabets are.

I always think on this when people say we need more pictures and icons in the UI

Caspol.exe

Never heard of it?

I hadn’t either – it is however a small exe that stands for Code Access Security Policy Tool which enables users and administrators to modify security policy for the client machine to .NET framework.

This tool is automatically installed with .NET frameork.
The following alters privileges of websites to allow them access to the .net framework on the client machine.

The following is the full parameters associated with a .bat file that passes parameters to caspol.exe

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\caspol -m -ag 1 -url http://servername/* FullTrust
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\caspol -m -ag 1 -url http://servername/* FullTrust
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\caspol -m -ag 1 -url http://servername/* FullTrust
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\caspol -m -ag 1 -url http://servername/* FullTrust

OBJECT NAMING CONVENTIONS – My UI Design Patterns

I like to do several things.

Name my tables T001TextVariableInCamelCase incrementing the number
Name my queries Q001TextVariableInCamelCase incrementing the number
Name my forms F001TextVariableInCamelCase incrementing the number

This works well for me – some of my first applications only had 2 numeral positions. I now give new projects 3 digits as the more successful applications generally have more than 100 forms and queries and I like to have everything in order. I have yet to come close to more than 200 forms in an application so I feel confident that 999 is satisfactory. Of course its not a major problem if I go over 999 forms it just doesn’t order so nicely in the database window which tweaks my OCD.

All names have no spaces and are in camel case.

I like to have the forms tagged with this incremental Form Prefix – eg F001 or in the picture below F103. When you have lots of forms it is a lot easier to refer to forms by this unique key. Additionally if you are speaking to a user over the phone you can immediately identify the form that they are on that they may wish additional features on or on which they have found bugs.

These pre-fix conventions are only an implementation of the principles of database design. They are effectively primary keys for differing objects. If I was in the access team I would probably hard wire this feature into the IDE so that code referred to the primary key and text descriptions could be changed retrospectively without breaking links and if possible forms would start with the PKID placed on them. (maybe with the feature available to switch this off)

HIDE MENUS – My UI Design Patterns

Really simple – create a new module and create the following simple functions.

I usually name them TurnMenuOn and TurnMenuOff.

Public Function TurnMenuOn()

   Application.CommandBars("Menu Bar").Enabled = True

End Function

Public Function TurnMenuOff()

   Application.CommandBars("Menu Bar").Enabled = False

End Function

Then you can run at start up by creating a macro that is titled autoexec
And using the Runcode action call the TurnMenuOn() function alternatively you can call it from the form opening.

It is often useful to create a couple of straight Macros that run these functions as well so that when you are in design mode you can quickly run the functions.

SEARCHING RECORDS – My UI Design Patterns

Well if it is good enough for Google

One single variable field with filtering only occurring after return has been hit. Search is across complete range of fields and searches for a string within all of the fields. Search string is maintained after search and results shown below. Don’t make the search case sensitive unless there is a good reason for doing so.

Enabling Geospatial integration in applications.

Despite the fact that spatially enabled databases have been around pretty much everywhere for quite sometime there’s still a heck a lot of enterprise applications out there that are not using the feature even though their backends support it.

SQL server has had the facility since 2008 , Oracle has it as well although it is with the expensive Oracle 11g Enterprise edition.

So if its available why are so many applications not using it?

Well one of the reasons is that many of the applications which would benefit from introduction are central to organisations and were in existence long before the feature was available in backend databases. So why not introduce it as an update? Well the problem is a geospatial attribute is a form of primary key more accurate than the often completely arbitrary primary keys that most tables will take as their reference. Adding it is likely to require not just the addition of a geospatial attribute which will be a defacto primary but potentially adding a full table not as a child but as a parent to the previous parent records – the former parent records requiring the addition of foreign keys that relate to their parents.

As most of you know altering primary keys in tables is pretty much equivalent to transplant surgery for a database.
Totally wiping a primary key and starting with a different primary key that needs to then be captured for itself and related back to its children is if anything several orders of magnitude worse than that..

Doesn’t sound good does it.

This is another case where if you have paying clients or you have a purchased product that isn’t going to happen until there is an outside force from a competitor. But the benefits are legion. As it stands most information in geographical systems is flat files that has to be updated directly within either the web gis or a gis desktop. These programs are really terrible making an application fully geospatial by design allows the UI you to display the geographical information in the GIS – web or desktop and related information in forms which often have vastly improved searching / linking to other systems drop down boxes well pretty much everything.

Leave plenty of time for it but would be proper automation. Too many GIS systems are mirrored copies of a database that periodically have to be updated. This is not the long term optimum.

A detailed explanation of the Algebraic modeling using SQL for a Race Timing System

Running-a-Race
I know I’ve given an overview of what I did to create the timing system but here is the kernel explanation of the algebra modeled in SQL that does the real heavy lifting in my system and probably most other timing systems as well.

A review of the problem firstly;
The data works on the principle of a chip passing a matt. As the chip passes the matt times are recorded in a timing box which will then be passed through to a database.

Problem is that the timing matt will give multiple readings every time a runner runs across the matt and he or she may be running across multiple times the results only need the first of those passes and not any of the other reads as they are duplicates of a single pass.

If we take a simple example.
Imagine a race with two runners Runner 1 and Runner 2.

Runner 1 and Runner 2 start at the same time 01:00:00 by both passing a matt

Runner 1 finishes across the matt first at 01:30:00
Runner 2 finishes second at 01:35:00

The timing box picks up all following times
ID RFIDtag Time
1 Runner1 01:00:00
2 Runner1 01:00:07
10 Runner2 01:00:00
11 Runner2 01:00:05
15 Runner1 01:30:00
16 Runner1 01:30:10
17 Runner2 01:35:00
18 Runner2 01:35:01
19 Runner2 01:35:02

The first step would be to sort these by the Runner

So that we get
MyTable (sorted first by RFIDtag then by time.
RFIDtag Time
Runner1 01:00:00
Runner1 01:00:07
Runner1 01:30:00
Runner1 01:30:10
Runner2 01:00:00
Runner2 01:00:05
Runner2 01:35:00
Runner2 01:35:01
Runner2 01:35:0

We then need to somehow programmatically or via a query identify times that are relevant against times that are not relevant. So how is this done? Well the trick here is to algebraically model this in SQL using alias tables. You compare the table above against itself and only select for those times where the runner is the same. Here we use a 20 second window or gate and ID field is added back into MyTable (ID field MUST be automatically incremented and unique ie a primary key)

SELECT T1.*
FROM MyTable T1
WHERE EXISTS
(SELECT T2.*
 FROM MyTable T2
 WHERE T2.RFIDtag = T1.RFIDtag
 AND T2.ID   <  T1.ID
 AND T2.Time <= T1.Time
 AND T2.Time >= T1.Time - TimeSerial(0, 0, 20));

In my database application I create a variable for the 20 number which in this example equates to 20 seconds and I have made it easy to alter this period through a simple user interface. I call this period the GATE and it means that for a given race an appropriate gate can be set. In this way the application easily copes with lapped races.

A really beautiful and simple pattern which must be used very widely.

The devil is always in the detail – Setting constants to Russian cyrillics in VB

With programming the devil is always in the detail. Just out of curiosity I was thinking about the code that I have posted that randomises information in a database and I was thinking why don’t I try to randomise the names using the Cyrillic alphabet?

Totally unnecessary I know but what I did discover is that Visual Basic for applications does not support Russian Cyrillics in the coding window and therefore constants cannot be statically set to Russian Cyrillic values.

As ever people have figured out how to get around this omission.

Here’s some code from the net that may help… (haven’t tried it yet)

strString = ChrW(decimal value) & ChrW(decimal value) & ChrW(decimal value) & ChrW(decimal value) & ChrW(decimal value) etc.

http://unicode-table.com/en/

Search for the characters you want then hover over the symbol to see the decimal number.

It of course raises lots of questions- what alphabet do coders in Russia use as a general standard? – I’m sure other IDEs will support non western alphabets but I suspect many programming languages are Latin alphabet centric. Come to think of it that must present quite a challenge for any individuals with a language not based on the latin alphabet wanting to be programmers. Full respect I guess they first need to learn English to really get to grips with programming.

Security the double edged sword.

TribesandTechnology

I had a dream about wildlife parks and tribes this week and I realised in the morning that sometimes when we are all crowded around a computer we don’t all know as much about the systems in place that we should.

What’s the best way of remedying this? – giving everyone access to break down barriers or setting up security cordons and only allowing access to the privileged few?

40 Useful Facts to Know about a System

40

A list of points I should remember to ask when doing ongoing system development, total re-design or external purchase.

For alternative systems rank both existing and new and compare.
Collection of facts is as objective as I could make it – interpretations and consideration as ever is subjective.

I have my own self built project software that records most of these points. The users and user roles is particularly useful my home baked pm software is integrated into my contacts which means if individuals titles and contact details change then the details below are automatically updated.

1. Name of system
2. Version number
3. General Description of the system (written)
4. Date of Creation
5. Name of Creator along with contact details
6. Name of Administrator along with contact details (If different from Creator)
7. Name of the person responsible for backing up the system
8. Backup description
9.Names of existing users – should include administrators and creator
(Name – Organisation Position – e-mail – contact no – approx time used per day – Method of access – Role in system – Description of tasks carried out – Machine tag numbers if required)
10.Names of potential future users
(Name – Organisation Position – e-mail – contact no – approx time used per day – Method of access – Role in system – Description of tasks carried out – Machine tag numbers if required)
11. Operating system runs on (Windows / Linux / Mac / Wine) If Linux please indicate distro
12. Backend Database type (SQL Server, Oracle, MS Access, Filemaker Pro, Omnis, Fox Pro, DB2, MySQL, PostGres, PostGIS, VoltDB, MongoDB, NoSQL)
13. – unc name of database server(s)
14. – unc name of web server(s)
15. – Important directories on particular servers
16. – name of backend database
17. Has the application been designed specifically to allow for geo referencing ( This is not a question as to whether the back end is spatially enabled ) – (Yes / No)
18. Front End technologies – list
19. Main programming languages
20. Is this a client facing system (Yes / No)
21. Could it be a client facing system (Yes / No)
22. Do individuals presently access this from mobile phones (Yes / No)
23. Do individuals presently access this from tablet devices (Yes / No)
24. Is the information available to the general public if they make a freedom of information request. ( Yes / No )
25. Please indicate the information in the system that would not be distributed even if someone requested it. [Description]
26. Is there a statutory requirement to keep this information ( Yes / No)
27. Was the system originally internally or externally created (Internal / External)
28. Capital cost of original construction (if relevant)
29. Estimated annual revenue cost of system ( not interested in wages of individuals only interested in actual costs paid to outside bodies )
30. Can we get a table structure of the system complete with all field names and field types. (Yes / No) – Please attach if yes
31. Is the process unique to the organisation( Yes / No )
32. How often is the design of the system altered ( As and when required, Changes are batched and pushed through periodically, Only in exceptional circumstances, Never)
33. Who can request changes to the system ( Anyone , only management , there is a working group of disparate users who request changes to an outside company , pretty much no one)
34. If that is an outside company makes the changes how often is that done (monthly, yearly, very rarely, never)
35. Are users presently happy with the system ( Yes / No )
36. Are management presently happy with the system ( Yes / No )
37. Any obvious other systems it could be combined with (No – Yes please list)
38. How is performance (Very good, Good, Adequate, Poor, Very Poor)
39. Can you list other organisations that use the same software (No, list of organisations)
40. Lastly where do you consider the application to be strong and where weak and do you have any specific proposals that could significantly improve your interaction with the system. [description]

VBA access code – Passing a selection of e-mail addresses to Outlook

This is similar to the previous post except uses the inbuilt SendObject object to pass the string sBcc directly to Outlook. Outlook picks up the variables and so there is no need to set up public variables.

Private Sub CommandGroupEmail_Click()
On Error GoTo Err_CommandGroupEmail_Click

DoCmd.DoMenuItem acFormBar, acRecordsMenu, acSaveRecord, , acMenuVer70

Dim MyDB As DAO.Database
Dim rsEmail As DAO.Recordset
Dim sBcc As String
Dim sSubject As String
Dim sMessageBody As String

Set MyDB = OpenDatabase("\\SERVERNAME\DIRECTORYPATH\" & "TARGET.MDB")
Set rsEmail = MyDB.OpenRecordset("SELECT ... STATEMENT", dbOpenSnapshot)

With rsEmail
.MoveFirst
Do Until rsEmail.EOF
If IsNull(![E-mail]) = False Then
sBcc = sBcc & rsEmail![E-mail] & ";"
sSubject = ""
sMessageBody = ""
End If
.MoveNext
Loop
End With

DoCmd.SendObject , , , , , sBcc , sSubject, sMessageBody, True

Set MyDB = Nothing
Set rsEmail = Nothing

 
Exit_CommandGroupEmail_Click:
    Exit Sub

Err_CommandGroupEmail_Click:
    If (Err = 2467) Or (Err = 91) Or (Err = 2483) Then
      Resume Next
    End If
    Resume Exit_CommandGroupEmail_Click
    
End Sub

VBA access code for pulling together a list of e-mails and passing to a form

Below some standard code that I use to loop through a selection of records and create a string from the individual [Email] s in the below case the e-mails are passed to a form (FORMTOOPEN) – if you are using this then all text in capitals will need to be replaced by application specific information. You want to set up a global variable that is made public which you can pass the combined rsemail (in this case SendBCC) string to between opening up forms.

I tend to have a module called modGlobalVariables and I would put this in

Public SendBcc as string

Remember to be careful with your variable definitions – If you have the same variable dimensioned locally within a command and publically over the whole project values may not appear as expected when you get them.

Private Sub CommandGroupEmail_Click()
On Error GoTo Err_CommandGroupEmail_Click

    DoCmd.DoMenuItem acFormBar, acRecordsMenu, acSaveRecord, , acMenuVer70
    MsgBox "Please note all available e-mails are placed in BCC section of a new form in alphabetical person name order. If a person doesn't have a listed e-mail address he/she will be omitted", , "APPLICATIONNAME"

    Dim MyDB As DAO.Database
    Dim rsEmail as DAO.Database

    Set MyDB = OpenDatabase("\\SERVERNAME\DIRECTORYPATH\" & "TARGET.MDB")
    Set rsEmail = MyDB.OpenRecordset("SELECT STATEMENT HERE"
   
    With rsEmail
    .MoveFirst
    Do Until rsEmail.EOF
    If IsNull(![Email]) = False Then
    SendBcc = SendBcc & rsEmail![Email] & ";"
    MessageSubject = ""
    End If
    .MoveNext
    Loop
    End With
    
    stDocName = "FORMTOOPEN"
    DoCmd.OpenForm stDocName, , , stLinkCriteria
    
    Set MyDB = Nothing
    Set rsEmail = Nothing
    SendBcc = ""

     
Exit_CommandGroupEmail_Click:
    Exit Sub

Err_CommandGroupEmail_Click:

    If Err.Number = 2501 Then
    MsgBox "The e-mail was cancelled without sending", , "APPLICATIONNAME"
    Exit Sub
    
    If Err.Number = 3734 Then
    MsgBox "There are no Records Cancelling", , "APPLICATIONNAME"
    Exit Sub
        
    Else
    
    MsgBox Err.Number
     
    End If
    
    End If
    
    Resume Exit_CommandGroupEmail_Click
    
End Sub

Note on loading of the new form you will need to pass SendBCC into whatever text box you wish to see it in where Me.Bcc is the name of the field receiving the SendBCC string.

Private Sub Form_Load()

 Me.Bcc = SendBcc

End Sub

Connecting to SQL Server – authentication and QGIS

Within QGIS when you set up a connection to a MS SQL Server instance you are presented with two options. Here’s a bit of clarification on what the two options entail.

* Trusted connection – this is the same thing as using Windows Authentication and authentication is managed by the domain and authorization is handled by SQL Server – This could be handled by an Active Directory Security Group.

* Login – SQL Server can also use its own logins such as a user. These are both authenticated and authorized by SQL Server. They are only viable if SQL Server is configured to run in Mixed Authentication mode.

image001

The Importance of a Booking Confirmation and Careful Communication

rsvp

With booking systems there are a lot of important things that will make a system successful – good operational speed – a well designed table structure – great UI and good stability but without really really great communication and confirmation with the customer you’re missing a golden opportunity.

I would argue that wedding invites represent the absolute gold standard in organising communication between parties in what is essentially a booking contract.

* Firstly you give the responsibility of organisation to a responsible and motivated party who is familiar with the whole process and why they are doing what they are doing.
* Then great care is taken in the timing of when items should be sent out (not too long before not too short)
* Addresses of all parties are carefully and thoroughly checked
* Extreme care is taken in the wording and importantly formating of communications (and often flexible and personal messages included for specific parties)
* Extreme clarity is taken to ensure party’s know who to contact if their circumstances change and RSVPs come back to the persons that sent them out.
* Direct contact is encouraged in situations lacking clarity
The RSVP process is formalised to reduce confusion ensuring that the original party can identify who communications come back from and simplified to require the minimum amount of effort on the part of the guest.
* All the while the process is constantly overseen by senior management who have complete visibilty and problems are tackled when they arise.

A good booking confirmation will act not only as a great piece of promotion for the organisation (you have the attention of the individual concerned they are listening to every word you write) but superb quality and clarity reduces confusion, reduces the requirement for clarifying further work resulting in less errors, increases the likelihood that the individuals will return to do business, probably will encourage them to book more courses and give confidence that the contract will be actually carried out.

To my mind this kind of detail should be born in mind for all system communications.

An important consideration when designing new systems.

The Gunslinger and the Indian

There’s a fight on your computer over a girl called Planned Obsolecence

the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-600x254
I get that you need to update software periodically and I definitely want to see software developers paid an appropriate amount but what happens when no one can think of anymore functions to add? With my older applications I definitely change them less and less as time goes on. What then? Can we keep our ten year old software packages which still have the distilled mathematical knowledge from 2 millenia of scientific knowledge 95% of which we have never used?

How will software houses make their money? Temptation is to either by accident or design discourage or deny companies the ability to buy and maintain software outright for local installations rather requiring them to rent from proprietary servers to steady their reducing income streams? (cough splutter splutter Adobe)

I’m sure it will act as a tempting vacancy for the Open Source community, especially on the desktop.

What does the user do?

Go with the native Indian who is less familiar and sometimes rough around the edges but has a far more sustainable and economical way of life or the mercenary gun slinger who you always kind of half suspect has his own agenda and may leave town quickly.

To the horses boys there’s a fight coming.

MS Access SQL for randomising the results from a query

bullish_fractal

I was wanting to randomize the source of a form so that I could test myself on some Russian within a table. Turns out its very simple. Basing a Query on the following SQL will achieve it.

SELECT TableName.PKID, TableName.Field1, TableName.Field2
FROM TableName
ORDER BY rnd(INT(NOW*PKID)-NOW*PKID);

The nice thing about basing a form on this is that every time you open the query it will run a query and give you a complete random list but importantly if you want to navigate through the records in the form it will remember the random order and you can go back and forth in the list and it will be in the order as originally opened.

The interesting thing about this code is that it takes its seed from the time (the function NOW) the next thing I am thinking about doing is making that a definable variable that can be set automatically by the user. As I said I have used the above code to test myself on Russian Vocabulary. I have a dictionary of all the words that I have come across at present. I am given a phrase or word in English and I must type it out in Russian. This was good except when I opened the form it would test me on the table in the same order everytime. Great except I new the first part of the table well and steadily got worse as I went through the table. The table is now so big that I would never sit down and work through the whole table. Randomising the table prior to opening the form solved this but introduced a new problem. Having the same list was useful for building up knowledge of the words it effectively broke the table into a small subset. By having a variable that the user could define they or myself will be able to only move to a random list once I am confident of those words. My thinking is that this will break down what is now quite a large list into smaller parts to learn but I can still use repetition to improve my competency and rate of learning.

Introduction to Basic Printing QGIS 2.2

Creating maps that you can pass on to others is often a central and regular requirement if not in paper format then in a digital format that can be e-mailed or printed out. Here’s a quick reference for myself as much as anything else.

To get into the print composer you can create a completely new print composition or alternatively load an existing print composition – Generally the 5th icon in the main menu bar will take you there (should be a white landscape rectangle with a star will give you access to the print composer , demonstrated below;

The 6th icon can be used to get to an existing declared print composition.

PrintComposerDemonstrationEnvironment

Now in the first instance you are going to want to navigate around the map and ensure that the map you wish to produce has the correct extents. In the below image on a 2 screen image I show QGIS v2.2 open on the left screen and the print composer open in the right. To move the composition area around go to the map window within the main program and navigate accordingly. Then within the print composer window hit the command button titled

Set to map canvas extent

This will re-draw your composition with an interpreted boundary defined directly from you map window. You can enforce scale in the item properties. Similarly after changing layers you will need to ensure that you hit the above button again when you want the composition to reflect the layers within the map window.