Week 8 Lab

http://www.pitt.edu/~kmm202/index.html

Week 7 Lab

http://www.pitt.edu/~kmm202/index.html

Week 8 Notes

This week I decided to go backwards in the readings. I am unfamiliar with CSS so I decided to read chapter two from Cascading Style Sheets, designing for the Web first in hopes that it would give me a good introduction.

• CSS seems to be a style add-on to HTML
• Have you ever read something and then had to go back and read it all over again because you have no idea what you just read? Yeah...
• This gluing thing... wait what?
• Why not just write the style sheet into the HTML sheet in the first place? WRITE THEM TOGETHER!
• This book must be old if it is referring to Netscape and IE4. Obviously the material is still relevant.
• I believe that all browsers today have CSS capabilities. That or I'm living in an alternate reality.
• Now we're inserting text gifs?!

• Does anyone realize that one can write a blog in HTML with CSS? It seems to be a good way to practice the techniques in these readings cause that's how I wrote this one!

• I love the W3 Schools tutorials. They break everything down into terms that a former liberal arts major like me can understand.
• Now I see why they call them "cascading" style sheets. These things can really get away from you if you're not careful.
• Well at least W3 answered my question about why CSS is contained in a different style sheet:

"When tags like <font>, and color attributes were added to the HTML 3.2 specification, it started a nightmare for web developers. Development of large web sites, where fonts and color information were added to every single page, became a long and expensive process.

To solve this problem, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created CSS.

In HTML 4.0, all formatting could be removed from the HTML document, and stored in a separate CSS file."

• Also I was right. All browsers today do support CSS. One that doesn't is just silly.

Week 6 Lab

BARCODE: 19842006

Week 7 Reading

• "A markup language is a set of markup tags." That really does not tell me much.
• Dreamweaver sounds like some kind of program from children, not an HTML editor.
• I'm so glad that we have an HTML cheat sheet. I cannot memorize all of this stuff.
• I wonder if the web development librarian at Georgia State University Library had as much trouble composing MySQL command prompts as I did. Sometimes, it made me so angry that I had to walk away from it for a while. 
• Is a lack of awareness the reason that the CMS model has not been picked up by other academic libraries?

Week 5 Lab

http://www.pitt.edu/~kmm202/index.html

Week 6 Notes

• ISP = Internet Service Provider
• POP = Point of Presence- place for local users to access the company's network, often through a phone number or dedicated line (I wonder how much it costs for a company to set up something like this. Also the picture is using a T3 line which is VERY expensive.)
• NAP = Network Access Points
• Maybe the concepts presented in this first article do not seem revolutionary or amazing to me because I was born in 1989.
• T1 lines are also expensive, but they are RIDICULOUSLY fast. It's like popping a six foot wide hole in the Hoover Dam. The amount of data that can be bounced back and forth over it is mind boggling. 
• IP Address = Internet Protocol- language computers use to communicate over the internet
• Re-tooling ILS will prove to be a profitable business ventures for some companies, but can libraries really afford the cost? Probably not. This is depressing.
• "Moreover, libraries no longer want to search myriad information silos but desire one-stop search and retrieval. They no longer serve 300–400 users in a controlled environment but thousands of users over the web." I do not think that we in the library world anticipated the internet boom, so it caught us unprepared.
• "Librarians are also motivated to seek solutions because of healthy competition with peers and disparate information resources." I feel like the term "healthy competition" is an understatement. Especially when some of us look like this while changing these systems for the better or coming up with solutions of our own. The competition makes us crazy!  

Courtesy Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

• We have to dismantle ILS to rebuild it? YOU DON'T SAY?

• The fact that there is internet in Antarctica is mind boggling. The environmental road bumps that they run into must be crazy.
• Does the Google Foundation still exist? I've never heard of it until now.
• Also, does Orkut still exist? I think they call it "Google plus" now.
• I have an alternative to Google Answers. It's called IPL2 and it's FREE.
• I understand the idea of making information more accessible through the Google Book Project, but what bothers me is that since these books are being digitized, there are less physical copies of these books and eventually, you will only be able to find them in a digitized format. One of my biggest fears is an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) that destroys the servers and such where these files are being stored. If there is no existing physical copy of a book who's digital counterpart was lost in the EMP or other natural disaster, then it is lost forever. We could end up losing important deposits of knowledge this way. Maybe I am being paranoid, but I feel like my fears are justified.
• But from a historical stand point I like the idea of being able to preserve authors' works through digitization. I love being able to read a broadside from the 18th century without having to travel to archive where it is physically stored.

Week 4 Lab

I was unsuccessful in this week's lab. I could not even connect to the database. I attempted to connect on several occasions over the past two days, but to little avail. I have disabled my firewalls and my virus protection but to no avail.

I sought help, but Jiepu was unable to assist me. I even tried someone else's computer. I was still unsuccessful.

I am very disappointed.

Week 5 Notes

• I have used LANs before mostly for Halo Parties with friends. Setting up a LAN is not that hard, you just have to have some basic IT experience to do it.
• Saying that something is "the year of the LAN" makes it sound a lot more exciting than it actually is... but I guess that at the time, the idea of hooking multiple computers/printers together so that they could communicate with one another was a truly revolutionary idea. 
•  The internet is a series of tubes OR a series of networks.
• I always find it difficult to keep a remote connection to the ULS network when I am off campus. It seems to be unstable.
• RFID = radio frequency identifier
• I have heard of using RFID tags in libraries, but unfortunately the tags have short read ranges and are expensive.
• The PA Turnpike uses RFID tags in their Easy Pass devices.
• My parents' dog has a microchip that uses RFID technology.
• I still remember when bar codes were introduced to our library when I was in elementary school. I certainly streamlined the work flow of the library.
• RFID tags would be helpful in the library especially when trying to locate books that were put back in the wrong place! I cannot tell you how many times I have gone to get a book of the shelf, only to find that it has been lost in the stacks due to someone being irresponsible with it!