Final Thoughts

In the beginning of this course, I didn't know much about servers, I had never heard of MySQL, and I had heard of Linux but had never seen it. I also never new about project management. I think I have learned a lot from this course though. I understand better how technology works, how it has to be thought out well and planned for, and how important it is to know the language so you know what's going on. My perspective has changed on digital management. I knew that a lot of work went into it, but not exactly how much and how much you need to know and understand. It is a little intimidating. I sometimes wonder if I can make it through the certificate. It was a really difficult class for me, but I'm glad I took it. I'm feel like I have learned a lot, and things are now clicking for me. The whole LAMP thing finally completely clicked for me. That was cool. I actually enjoyed MySQL and would like to be able to use it better. And the PHP assignments help me to understand how it works with MySQL.

Week 12 Readings

The Cervone articles were great. “Project risk management” was simple to understand and went over how to address risks before they come up and what are the usual risk factors that occur in digital library projects. I thought that these were really interesting. It was really helpful to put things in to risk categories. It then went over what sorts of steps to take to assess and control risks. It was an easy article for beginners. If I were more advanced, I might want more detail in steps to take. “Standard methodology in digital library project management” was also helpful to me. It went over why a structured methodology is important in structuring the project environment. He specifically talked about PMBOK. After reading the long PMBOK material, and then reading this, it was helpful to read someone else going over and kind of summarizing the process. I think that these last two articles would be helpful even if you weren’t doing a digital library project. In "How not to run a digital library project," he begins talking about project management and librarians getting glazed eyes when it is mentioned. He says many librarians do not come from backgrounds that use project management, especially if they are from humanities and social sciences backgrounds. I was a literature major, and I never heard of project management so it was scary to me at first and seems overwhelming when reading about it. I like how he goes over the things to not do in a sarcastic way. It made it interesting. “ Making Decisions: Methods for Digital Library Project Teams” also useful. It showed how to break down decision making and how to make a decision. I like how in all of his articles, he takes something that can be pretty complicated and intimidating, and lays it out in a simple and helpful way.

SQL Versus Other Topics

Learning SQL was easier for me than most of the other topics. Of course, I am no good at it right now, but I'm sure I can get it with a lot of practice. It at least made sense to me, and I understood what was happening in the videos and in the assignment. Data modeling last week was harder for me, especially the joining together of two tables that had multiple relationships. This made a little more sense this week when working with SQL. I also has some difficulty with the join function. It made sense in the lecture, but then in the videos I became confused. I then looked at the W3Schools and it helped. SQL was a little harder for me than XML. I was scared of XML, but it really isn't bad. Since I know some HTML, it helped. The hardest topics were things dealing with the server and networking and learning all of the new terminology. I am a lot more comfortable now entering commands in the command line though. Although I will still have to look most of them up to make sure I'm doing it right.

Data Modeling and Normalization

The Wikipedia article on data modeling was a little hard to get through. I understood it better when I read the article Data Modeling: Finding the Perfect Fit and it talked about entities more clearly. Then it really helped when I read about the ERD. The UACBT-VTC MySQL videos were helpful too. I didn’t get everything about the ERD though. I understood the crow’s feet and the O. But when it started getting into lines and dashes, I got a little confused. The Entity Relationship Diagram Example was helpful, but I was still confused some. I just need to practice.

For normalization, the UACBT-VTC MySQL videos were pretty easy to understand. But when I got to the Wikipedia article, I had no clue what it was talking about. The University of Texas page on normalization was a little confusing, but I started to understand it better. Then the Database Normalization Pt 1 and Database Normalization Pt 2 were really helpful. Part 1 summarized the benefits right away and talked about the primary key right away, instead of waiting until later to say how important it was. It made it seem simple, but maybe that’s because I had already read several things by then. The Three Normal Forms tutorial was a little hard to look at. I had to scroll up and down to see the spreadsheet and then read about it. It is nice that it is provided as a pdf. I saved it and might print it in order to read it better. But I liked that it showed a real spreadsheet. That was helpful.

I think I need to reread some articles and I think that something like this really takes experience to understand completely. I understood somewhat because of working with Access and trying to create a database. It’s hard work and a lot of thinking and planning. Data modeling and normalization helped me to understand why it’s so hard and why it’s important to really plan the database out well before creating it.

Week 9 Readings

"Technoplans vs. Technolust" by Michael Stephens was a good article. It made a technology plan simple to understand. I liked how it talked about who should be involved - "administrators, IT personnel, reference librarians, and others, including those who interact with patrons and understand what they want." I was happy that he added those who interact with patrons and that he mentioned that communication is important for staff buy in. Staff seem to be overlooked a lot when decisions are made even though they really know the customers well.

Another good article was "What went wrong? Unsuccessful information technology projects" by Brenda Whittaker. It was helpful in understanding why technology plans failed. It really made a lot of sense and made it clear for me why some projects that happened in my work place failed.

"Life is what happens to you when you’re making other plans" by Michael Shuyler was in interesting article. He seemed to think that technology plans were not that helpful and were needed for others and not for those who write them. I liked how he mentioned that they should be flexible and gave an example with things that really happened to him.

"Information technology plans" by Robert Dugan was a really good article. It explained well the process for writing a technology plan. It talks about how it can be a guide for many different things such as identifying weaknesses and strengths concerning technology implementations, letting everyone know what the library is doing, to manage a budget, among many other things. It talked about how information technology plans can be structured three different ways in academic libraries. Where I work, it is part of the strategic plan. It also talked about how to write a plan and what sections are recommended to be included. I think that this article is really helpful.

Demo system update

My demo system is running fine. I completed all of the week 8 assignments successfully. I had a problem pinging my demo until I figured out that I didn't have the ethernet cord plugged in. It was really cool learning how to connect remotely and creating a webpage.

XML Tutorials

The 3M tutorial was fine. It was like the HTML one. Seems simple, but boring to look at and the screen is too busy. I went through the XML schema tutorial too. I had to read that one at least three times before I understood it somewhat. It makes sense why one would make a schema.

The UACBT videos were pretty good. The parts where he just did PowerPoint was pretty boring to watch. The parts where he showed how to right XML made a lot of sense. He explained things well and clearly. He really made the difference between and the uses for HTML and XML clear.

Demo system status

I have successfully installed the server on my demo system, selected an IP address for it, and installed and set up everything that I did before with my virtual machine server. The only problem that I had was the ping to it from my main machine. It worked with the IP address and with the server name (even though it wasn't supposed to with the name I think) until I added it to my HOSTS file.

HTML Tutorials

I took HTML basics at my job a few years ago and I only ever used them to post in a blog where if you wanted to use HTML, you had to do it yourself with tags. I only ever used it when I wanted to insert links or pictures, so all I ever used were those tags plus paragraph, bold, italics, and break. The w3schools tutorial was easy to use, although it was boring to look at. It was organized well with the list of topics on the side, which made it easy to navigate through and to pick and choose. It was also nice that it gave links to examples and that you could edit them and then see what it would look like with your edits. It was a helpful tutorial over all. I didn't go much into the advanced part. I had enough to try just with tables, lists, and frames and figuring out the attributes for different tags.

I also like the mcli tutorial. It required that you do the exercises along with it, which was helpful because it made me do it. It wasn't organized as well as the w3schools tutorial. Also, it had some things in the advanced section that were in the basic section of the w3schools. Overall, I think it helped me going through the exercises.

Various installations for Week 5

My installations went really well. Installing a gui desktop in my Ubuntu server went perfectly. I pinged a known host and it worked. I installed the desktop. I connected to the internet and when I typed in the URL http://localhost/, a window opened saying "It Works!" I was really happy.

I installed Ubuntu Desktop in a virtual machine by following the YouTube videos. They made it really easy. When I checked the disk, it said I had no errors. That was great, because whenever I copied the ISO image to a disk it came up with errors.

I installed Webmin and it was a piece of cake! These installations went really well for me, which makes up for all of my struggling with the Ubuntu Desktop boot disk. It's really easy when you have step by step instructions.

Server gone

I went back to open my server and my virtual machine was gone. I started to panic. I thought I would have to do everything all over. But then I did a file search in my start menu for .vmx files and I found it. What a relief!

Some commands I tried in the Linux server

My exercises all went fine. Nothing went wrong when configuring the two files using nano.

When in the server, I tried many commands. The following are some of them.

ls showed me my home files.

ls /bin showed me a screen full of files.

ls –l showed me the home files in long form.

ls -1 /etc /bin showed a couple pages of files.

ls –la .. showed four lines, the first line said “total 12.” The next three were
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2008-06-09 19:35 .
drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4096 2008-06-09 19:27 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 megan megan 4096 2008-06-15 20:15 megan

cd /etc and then ls to see files. One file was named magic.

less magic went into something and I wasn’t sure what it was. I couldn’t get out. I finally just pressed a bunch of buttons and a screen called “Summary of Less Commands” came up. I scrolled down and it gave more instructions on how to search, jump, change files, miscellaneous commands, options, and line editing. When I got to the bottom, I pressed q to get out. But then I was in the same stuck place. Finally I typed :q and got back to the command line.

ls –lt head got the same results as ls –la.

du sort –nr got the results:
44 .
40 ./megan

grep stop\)* and nothing came up. Then I didn’t know how to get the command line back again. I tried :q, but it didn’t work.

Vim Text Editor

I installed the vim text editor tutorial and the installation went fine. I went through the tutorial and I thought that it was ok. It was pretty different from any text editor I have ever used because it is modal. It was weird pressing escape to get back to the normal mode. The directional letters took a little while to get used to, but it was not bad since they are in a line on the keyboard. There were a lot of commands that I like and that seemed to save a lot of time using over other text editors. An example is the d command to delete. It is especially useful being able to add a number to delete several words in a row (d5w) or typing dd to delete a whole line. I also like the replace command (r). I did get confused a little in the substitution section. It's cool that you can also do outside commands within the text editor. At one point accidentally hit v before I got to the part about what v does and had a hard time getting out of it.

Tutorials

The tutorials from UA CBT were fairly easy to understand. I did not get everything that he said, but it will make more sense once I try out the commands he talked about. I liked that the videos weren't too long. Plus, he sounded really nice. I watched these tutorials before reading any of the other print tutorials. I liked how he talked about what was in each directory. I also liked how he explained the way files are displayed and what it means. I also liked the find and grep utilities. Those were interesting. I didn't really understand the linking part.

The Learning the Shell lessons were easy to understand. I really like how things are broken down into small lessons. It made me wonder if I should try using a mouse.

The YouTube videos (Part 1: http://youtube.com/watch?v=S30OUYsu2Qo, Part 2: http://youtube.com/watch?v=jEcAD1cMWIY, Part 3: http://youtube.com/watch?v=sNL512ScRfs) for installing the Ubuntu Server were really helpful and easy. The only thing is that in the beginning, it starts with VMware server and I was using VMware Workstation, but that was no big deal. And I didn't have the problem in the end with the kernel issue. Mine restarted fine after the install. It was nice having it playing while I was doing it. It was reassuring to be able to see the same thing happening on my screen as in the videos.

Installing Ubuntu Server in VMware Workstation

This went a lot better for me that Ubuntu Desktop. I followed the YouTube video instructions and it was pretty easy. In the beginning it mentioned something about the VM Workstation clocking my CPU speed to be so many MHz but Windows reports that it is a different number of Mhz and this will make the clock lag or something. I should have written it down. I clicked ok and then I got another message saying that it couldn't connect to a virtual device floppy and asked if I wanted it to attempt to connect to this drive every time I powered on, and I said no. After that, every thing went smoothly. I chose to install the LAMP and OpenSSH servers. I then tried out some commands at the end wehen it rebooted and I logged on for the first time. From my home directory, if I enter "ls", I only get one file (named "megan" - my username). I wonder if this is right.

Ubuntu Desktop Part 2

I tried to burn another cd, because my first one didn't work. The first cd I burned said there was an error before it finished burning. The second cd burned, but wouldn't boot. The third cd I burned would boot, but when I selected check cd, it said, "Error reading boot cd."

So, I downloaded Ubuntu Desktop again. I did the MD5 check and it was fine. I burned a cd again, and it got an error again before finishing. The second cd wouldn't boot, and when I checked it in My Computer, it said it was blank. I reinstalled the ISO Recorder. I then burned another cd, it booted, I selected check cd, and it said it had 9 file errors!! I then selected "Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer," and the Desktop did come up after several minutes. So I played around for a little while. I checked out all of the games and applications. I messed around with OpenOffice, which is pretty much like MS Office 2003 (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint). I went to the Terminal and played around with the commands.

Next, I am going to try burning Desktop on a different computer because mine is obviously having a lot of issues with it.

Trying to boot Ubuntu Desktop

First I put in the Desktop boot disk and restarted by computer. The Ubuntu screen came up and I was asked to pick a language. Then I scrolled down to check the cd. It said it was loading the Linux kernel. I thought it might be stuck at first, but after a couple of minutes it said it was checking the integrity. This took about 5 minutes, at which point it said that it found errors in 6 files. It asked me to press any key to reboot, which I did. It then asked me to pick a language again. Then I selected "Try Ubuntu without any change to you computer." It said it was loading the Linux kernel again. It said it was 100%, but then it just sat there. After about 20 minutes, I pressed F1 for help. It then thought for a while and then started rapidly repeating a couple of lines over and over. I tried to write them down, but they were going so fast it was hard to read. I think that it said:

SQUASHFS error-
unable to read page block 29f9fc73
sb_bread failed reading block Oxa7e8d

I wonder if I should just download Ubuntu again and create a new cd?

By the way, I booted the cd on the computer I burned it on. I did the MD5 check and it was correct.

Ubuntu Forums

I was reading in the Ubuntu forums and came across a post from someone who who having trouble booting Ubuntu for the first time. Everyone who responded was really nice to him and patient. He had downloaded Ubuntu, checked winMD5Sum to make sure it was ok, and burned a boot cd. But when he runs the cd to boot Ubunt, it freezes. Several people tried to help him. Some of their help was hard for me to understand, and I wondered how he understood it if he was new to Ubuntu. One of the replies looked like this:

"HI there, ive got the same laptop as you, to get it working under 8.04 you need to do the following.
download the ubuntu alt CDat the cd boot prompt press F6 and type in noapic.
once installed to your liking and you have rebooted, let the os load up, once its stoped at loading local scripts press alt F2 and login.
you need to install and configure the xorg-driver-fglrx via envyng.Type (each line individually separated by return)
Code:sudo bash *//..and then enter your password, this logs you in as root.
update-pciids
apt-get update
apt-get install build-essential
apt-get install envyng-core *// Installs Video Driver Install system.
envyng-t
Select option 3 to install the ATI Preparatory video driver.
shutdown now *// shuts down the computer, reboot and let it load.The xserver should load up.

To get the wirless working with your card, if its the same as mine, Atheros AR5007EG you need to download and patch the madwifi kernel modual.
Loadup the terminal (applications > accessory's > terminal) and type..
Code:sudo bash *//Same as before.
apt-get install build-essential *//Installs a build inviroment.
wget http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz
tar zxvf madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz
cd madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007
sudo make uninstall
sudo make clean
sudo make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe ath_pci *//loads the patched ath_pci module....and then reboot."

Wow! That seems pretty crazy to me. And intimidating. And this post was for someone who hadn't even gotten it installed or running yet. I thought that was pretty interesting. It was cool that so many people took the time to help and he did get it running in the end.