Measured for Success

Keeping in the theme from last week, every day will have a specific theme, and I will keep the same ideas of last week. So without adieu, here is this weeks plan:

Monday – Measured for Success; Planning ideas and thoughts
Tuesday – You Did What?; focusing on coding
Wednesday – I am Not All Alone In the World; ideas and code segments for people like me, social lepers
Thursday – Everywhere and Nowhere; examinations on location services, social integration and strategy
Friday – Riddle Me This; fun stuff to finish up the week

Birds Fighting Over Food
Image courtesy of Ducklips Photography

And today’s topic is figuring out what is the measure for success. If we look at last week and my posts, I wanted to have a post every day of last week, and I got through Thursday. I missed Friday, and that should have been the easiest one to do. So based on my own goals, was last week a success? I would have to say no. I put a goal of 5 posts in 5 days. I did 4 posts in 5 days, so I fell short. And that is what is important to understand when trying to plan a new application: what is the measurement for success, and can it actually be measured. When planning for an application, it is important to understand what will define the success of the application. It is much like a goal. It should be conceivable, achievable, measurable, and desirable (others do exist, but these are important when planning on gathering statistics). Another important part of this measurement is the fault tolerance allowance. This includes the level of error, or missing the set goal, that you are willing to accept. For this, let’s examine two different scenarios.

(more…)

0 Comments

Focus on the Locus

Location services, good or bad? Well that depends on how it is used. If you you it to stalk other people, then it could be bad. It could also be a better way to stay engaged. Locus, defined as: 1. a place; locality. 2. a center or source, as of…

0 Comments

Ideas for the Social Leper

Social networking, check-ins, friending, linking-in, and other items have made for an interesting world. Some people may see this as a purely consumer/individual niche, with only the younger crowd getting into this new fangled technology. The internet has been around for a while and people sometimes have a hard time…

0 Comments

Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

CakePHP is one of those frameworks where it is easy to set up and get an application running in a minimal amount of time. It provides different securities, helps, and functions in the framework so that your application can run smoothly and be safe. As with all applications, the level of security and functionality depends on the developer, not the code, not the language, not the database. An application is only as secure, functional and reliable as the person/team who is coding it. One of the reasons I do like Cake is that the built in security and helpers offer a developer a great way to secure data, validate it, and display it. And that can also be one of the more trickier parts of getting the application to work correctly, finding the data to do something with it.

CakePHP
CakePHP

CakePHP provides some functionality for finding the data, this is done using the “find” method. You can read more about this at the Cookbook. Using this, one can grab data from many different tables if needed, or just one table. For this exercise, I am going to use dummy data to show how to find data, using simplistic finds, and using joins, and sub-queries. So first lets examine the data tables. Not all of these are going to be connected. This is a very simplistic, quickly drawn up solution to a lending library

Sample Tables
Sample Tables

(more…)

1 Comment

Whats the plan, Stan

After nearly a month off, I believe it is time for me to institute a new way I am going to blog. Topics range from a ton of different items, and I think we should have a specific way of what I am doing. So, starting today, and hopefully I…

0 Comments

At the Dance

When I was a younger kid, I would watch different shows with my parents. A couple of these shows had a similar gag. The Muppet Show had a segment called "At the Dance", which was similar (a homage maybe?) to Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In cocktail party segments. These segments were…

0 Comments

Update to comments

Just a quick note, and then maybe another post later today. I changed around the comments of this site to use Livefyre. Having two comment systems (Intrinsic WP comments and the Facebook comment plugin) was just a little too much. If you had comments in older posts and now they…

1 Comment

Data Model Relationships – CakePHP’s HABTM

For today, lets dive back into some code, well data modeling at least. When you set up an application that connects to a database, you need to understand the data that will be working in the application. This is the data that will be edited, added, read and even scrutinized…

0 Comments

Online Identity

I got to this link from my Twitter feed, following @AdamSinger: 4chan founder: Mark Zuckerberg is “totally wrong” about online identity. Before I get into the meat of the article, for those who do not know what 4Chan is (and I am assuming that everyone knows Facebook): 4Chan is an…

3 Comments

Social Media and Crisis

With the recent events of the 8.9 earthquake in Japan, news traveled fast, and it was just not second or third hand accounts. it was live, it was real, and it brought you into the middle crisis. I do not post this to take away from the real horror and…

0 Comments