maulin

questions about XML

So now that we're into the second part of the course about XML etc, I think it will be interesting. The lecture on thursday about XML was somewhat confusing. I feel the structure of XML as a language and its syntax is rather confusing as compared to other programming languages. It looks like html but the structure is definitely not. I am a little confused about the use of XML. Its obviously used for web publishing etc but how is it any different than other languages. I am sure Bud talked about this a couple of times in class but for some reason I just cant remember what the differences are. Bud mentioned something about how XML is like a standard language now. What was that about? Just want to clarify my understanding about XML.

My reasoning for some questions

So the exam was tricky but I feel some questions could be looked at from another way. To start of, in Question 25 which asks about whether Departments cannot exist without sections. The ER diagram can be looked at from the course side of the diagram. The department does not necessarily have to provide a course and if a course may not be offered, there will be no section. I know the answer key says that the analysis is unaffected by the fact that deparments do not have to have courses and I do not understand how.
Now in the Hail Big Sugar Dog ER model, the cardinality is ambiguous. In question 15, if you look at the relationship between offered and course, the cardinality from course to offered is ambiguous. It may have a 0 or 1 minimum requirement. Hence I would argue that the question could be true or false. Similarly for some questions based on this ER diagram, I feel the answers could be argued.

regarding the project

Well I have been working along with my group on our project which is luckily extended till next week. I am confused as to how we should go about checking whether our tables are normalized since we created the tables from scratch. Should we go about printing each table and study each table? Also, does our ER model have to have very well defined cardinality? Also if i can remember correctly, we must submit a username and password of an Oracle account where the project is functional. How do we get this username and password or is it one of the team members username and password who has the project functional? Also, a hardcopy of the SQL commands used in our project must be submitted. Does this have to include each and every command cause many commands used to enter data in certain tables were not stored. If anyone have answers to some of my questions, i would greatly appreciate some help.

post xam

well i dunno whether i should celebrate that the exam is finally over or whether i should worry about how tricky the exam was. I was pretty well prepared for that exam but the questions on that exam definitely made me think otherwise. Oh well, now that i am done with exams for a while i was relaxing and came across this pretty funny interview of Jon Stewart on Cnn Crossfire. Here is the video I found it really funny. Something to help us forget about BIT 320 for a while!!..

chapter 3 from mySql

Well I have been lagging behind in doing the chapters from the mySql book. I was doing chapter 3 in class today and found that some queries were definitely very confusing to write. If we had to write queries for the exam, it would definitely be really stressful. But lucky for us Bud is giving us a multiple choice exam which I dont really know if it is good or bad. I tried reading through some of the scripts posted online and found that reading some queries and understand what the result would be could be pretty difficult. I personally found the queries which use 'grouping', 'having', 'in' etc at the end of chapter 3 kind of hard to understand. I guess the best way to understand these queries is to practice them more and more. Fall break looks like a lot of fun with Bit 320 and other class midterms to study for!!!

queries abt the exam

Well its mid-term week and being a BBA1 definitely makes it a little harder to think of what the exams are going to be like. I wanted to know if there will be a review session for the exam. Would there be any practice exams put up or we would only have to practice the problems given in the coursepack. Will the exam be multiple choice or we would have to make ER models or normalize tables in the exam?

databases with SQL

So the fun with SQL has started!! I was going through the 2nd chapter exercises and even though I personally found it relatively straight forward, I felt that creating and maintaining databases using raw sql code would be very messy and time consuming. Aren't there many user friendly applications that use oracle/sql language for creating and maintaining databases such as Microsoft Access. Although I know Access is not as powerful when it comes to enormous databases, am sure there must be other applications. Are we going to be using any of those softwares in this class? Do most businesses use raw sql coding on unix to maintain their databases or they use other powerful applications? I remember fooling around with an oracle application which looked way more user friendly than what we are using in class and hence was curious.

Bloggers taking over journalism

Well the endless number of posts about blogs and its uses are definitely redundant but this one caught my attention. There was an article on www.cnn.com about how blogs are taking over the journalism industry. I feel that probably in the long run, bloggers will take over the news industry. The article talks about how internet bloggers were the first people to expose or rather "challenge the authenticity of the documents" in the CBS case which took place a couple weeks ago.
However, personally I would question the legitimacy of any news passed on or published by internet bloggers since the identity and credibility of any internet user and blogger cannot be confirmed. I feel that internet blogging would be a good enviornment for starting rumours which could have many negative effects on people's everyday life. Well i guess this is a point of debate and am pretty sure many people would disagree with me.
This is the article.

Re: computers- Idea and a question!

I think 'computer's' idea is a really good one. From what i have seen on the internet I am very sure you can set up blogs and keep the users anonymous. I mean if you set up a blog name which is totally abstract, it can be really easy to stay anonymous. I dont think you can view and use that person's email address. I feel such an idea can be implemented in many organizations specially if feedback and comments were valuable for the betterment of the same. Oh and by the way for some reason I couldn't see your name at the end of the blog which is why I was refering to you with your blog name.