An Introduction

This used to be my least favorite part in grade school. On the first day of school all the teachers would go around the room and have everyone give a spoken introduction of themselves. The horror continued into college where I realized that it wasn't just high school teachers that liked to torture me, but college professors as well. But the fact that this is a written introduction rather than a spoken one where one could worry about their voice cracking or making some lame attempt at a joke that only ends in feeling stupid makes me cringe slightly less.

First of, as you can tell, I like to use sarcasm whenever necessary, and sometimes when unnecessary, but never when it is without purpose. I am taking this class as a requirement for my IT degree through UAF. Web and graphic design particularly interest me, although I am willing to learning the more technical side of IT as well to increase my marketability in the IT job market. I don't have any current work on the web, but once I finish my degree I would like to put together a portfolio for the viewing pleasure of potential employers.

I'm currently working as a parts advisor at the Chrysler dealership in Kenai. It has been an interesting ride since I started here, as anyone can imagine with the present condition of the automotive industry. We actually closed and reopened within a week back in January. Things are looking better for us now, even though Chrysler has closed over 800 dealerships across the US.

I've had a modest amount of experience with social software. Years ago I was talked into creating a myspace. It was fun and useful for keeping in contact with friends. I also used to record my own music so I used my myspace page to post my songs on the web. My profile has become stagnant as of late due to the lack of time to keep in touch with people via it, but my wife just opened up a facebook account for the both of us so maybe it'll be a little better if she's in charge of running it.

There's not much else to say expect that I'm looking forward to learning more in this class and in future classes that I will be taking.

Three Interesting Blogs

http://darfurdiaries.org/
This is a good blog that follows the human rights crisis in Darfur.

http://chocolateandzucchini.com/
A food blog that has some interesting and unique recipes from around the world. Not sure if I'd want to try some of these, even though I love trying new recipes.

http://awfulannouncing.blogspot.com/
Everyone who loves sports loves to hate the announcers. Some are good, other are annoying and distracting. This blog is funny and informative.

Microsoft Access Security

In the ever-changing world of computer software and programming, it is only inevitable that malware will also change. It would be convenient if malware never changed, never was updates, was always the same. This would make combating it not only easy but could be done with very little effort what-so-ever. But unfortunately the creators of malware are almost as smart as the creators of anti-malware, so it is an ever changing battle. The three types of malware discussed in the book are phishing, spam, and spyware. (In correction, only one of these is actually malWARE, but I use the term as a general description of any program, device, or scheme used in an attempt to uproot the integrity of a program's or person's security. Basically, scum is scum, no matter how you label it.)

Phishing is a sometimes elaborate scam to steal your identity through the creation of a mock website. For example, a familiar website is altered to look like that the victim is familiar with. The domain name is created using characters from a different language. These are called homographs and are usually sent to the receiver's personal email requesting personal information. Many fall for this because the homograph they are viewing looks identical to the real one. Spam is unsolicited email sent out in mass quantities. The sheer number of spammers out there is mind boggling. Imagine if you got a hundred telemarketing calls a day. Spyware is software that has purpose of collection personal information off of your computer. They piggyback on programs that sound legitimate and then hide in your system. Spyware is closely related to Adware, which upon being downloaded onto your computer it displays numerous pop-up ads and advertisements. This is much like inviting someone into your home that once inside turns out to be a traveling salesman.

Microsoft Office 07 has a feature called the Trust Center which helps to protect you from attached code attacks. The Trust Center checks add-ins for trusted publisher and code locations, and gives you the heads-up if something looks phishy (pun intended). It is always good to activate macro, ActiveX, add-n, and VBA code detection and notification when using Microsoft Office programs, especially when using them on a network. The Trust Center also helps to protect you against homographic attacks by detecting potentially phony domain names and addresses. Basically it's like having your own personal FBI agent inside your computer, but you still have to use wisdom and discretion. Never open emails or download programs that you are unsure about. The Trust Center can do its job well, but if you are consistently opening the door for malware to disrupt your systems integrity it is only inevitable that something phishy will slip through security.

My experience with these types of malware is limited, more of it being from an observational stand point rather than through actual mistakes. I did make the mistake once of cluttering my computer up with adware and spyware, but after cleaning up the mess with anti-malware programs I conceded to learn my lesson and have never had a problem with them again. I’ve seen phishing websites, and they do look very legitimate, but was never foolish enough to fall for them. And who hasn't had to deal with spam. It is the most ridiculous form of advertising known to man. I've taken marketing and sales classes in college and one of the most important things they teach you is that niche marketing has a much greater effect than mass marketing. If you're sending out your spam to 10,000+ email address, this is an example of what will happen: a) 20% of the email addresses will be invalid or inactive, b) 90% of what is left will be automatically sent to the recipient’s junk mail folder and deleted without viewing, c) 80% of what actually reaches an inbox will be deleted without being read, d) of what is even read-either out of curiosity or ignorance-80% will be deleted, e) of those who even look into what you are offering by visiting the link or whatever else you provide, 90% will decide that it is stupid or uninteresting because they aren't in the target niche to begin with. So when taking these percentages and using a hypothetical number of 10,000 email addresses, you would have 3-4 people actually interested (albeit naively) in what you are offering. This is a 0.035% success rate. Not exactly a profitable enterprise is you ask me.

Exporting & Importing with Access

I had fun experimenting with Importing and Exporting data with Access. I didn't have too difficult a time in doing so either, although when exporting data from Access to an html file some of the information did not show up. In this instance it was a graph that I was trying to export. Everything exported fine except for the actual graph, and I'm not exactly sure why.

I found all of these exporting and importing options to be really useful tools. Even though some of them I might never have a use for, it is good to know the usefulness of them and the versatility of the Access program. Attaching a database to an email message would be very useful, especially if you are emailing your boss or a potential client a sample database. You can use several of these tools together. You can import a chart created in Excel into a report on employee productivity created with Access and then export that report as an attachment in an email that you can send to your boss. Or you can import a list of employee contacts from your outlook email program and input them into a table in Access and then import the same Excel productivity chart into a report created with employee contact information. This final report that displays employee contact information along with a productivity chart can be exported into a Word file that can then be printed and handed out to the necessary parties. The possibilities with importing and exporting data are numerous. It is fun to be creative and come up with unique ways of using these tools.

Exporting to HTML files opens up a whole new world of possibilities that I would like to spend more time experimenting with and integrating into my own web development. Any of the above examples could be exported into HTML files that could be uploading via ftp to a web server. This would be useful, for example, if there was a company website that had a page for employee contacts. Through what I learned this week, I could integrate a database on employee information into this website, and then any changes I need to make to this website I could do in the database, rather than having to update the HTML.

Database Integration

Microsoft Access 2007 is a very extensive and versatile program; one of its most useful features being its ability to integrate with the Internet. In this blog I will talk about a few important uses of Access integration, and also a few warnings.

From my research, I found the best use of Access on the Web is for sites that contain data which changes often. The most formidable that comes to mind is an online store with an ever changing product catalog, such as Amazon.com. The inventory on such a site is constantly changing, constantly being added to, subtracted from, or modified. Imagine the tedious work that would be involved in editing such a site through basic HTML (or XHTML). It would be ridiculous. If such a site is driven by a database, making these edits would be much simpler. This integration is made possible through a data access page, which is a webpage that is connected directly to the data in your database. Any changes made in that database will be integrated into your online store via this data access page.

Another big part of online stores, besides the online inventory, is the shopping cart. Access comes in handy when you need to perform calculations or apply some sort of algorithm to the data that affects the way it is presented on your site, which a shopping cart is a prime example of. A database is very useful for the ever-changing environment that an online store calls for. It is easy to see why such sites as Amazon.com or Ebay.com would be reliant on database/Internet integration.

During my research, I also found several warnings concerning the use of database driven websites. While this method is excellent for online inventory and sales, it should not be used for the entire format of your site. Formatting and styling of page layouts is much more difficult on text elements derived from a database. Also, articles should not be stored in a database because all of the formatting necessary for such file types is much more difficult through a database. Large Access databases consume much more server resources than most other file formats. Database connections are also more expensive in terms of time and processing power, and many search engines may not be able to "see" your pages if they are completely database driven.

In conclusion, Access integration with the Internet can be very useful and profitable, but must be used wisely. Use it for what is necessary to ensure the quality of design that you require, but use standard web design for everything else. This will help your website to continue to run proficiently, even if it contains large database files.

Thinking About Queries

Chapter Six outlines several different types of queries and how to use them. Here is a listing of the queries I learned about and an example of how each can be used.

Parameter Query: This query prompts the user for the value of a particular field. An example would be if I had a table listing restaurants in four different cities I could use this query to list only the restaurants in one of the cities, and each time I opened the query I would be prompted for which city I want to display information on.

Find Duplicate Query: This query is used for finding duplicate values in particular fields. When creating a find duplicate query you can specify which field you want to find duplicate entries in, such as a last name field where some of the last names are listed more than once.

Find Unmatched Records Query: This query is the opposite of the previous one, only displaying entries in a chosen field that are not repeated.

New Table Query: Queries are not tables, although Access allows you to work with the data in queries as if they were tables. This query saves the result of your query as a table. This would be great if you wanted to create a similar table to one that already exists but don’t want to retype all of the values in.

Add Records Query: This is also known as an append query. It can be used to add records to a table when the query you are using shares a common name with the table you want to add to.

Delete Query: This query is used to remove records from a table based on your chosen criteria. For example, if you want to delete all records in an employee table that contains an employees name, this would be the query to use.

Update Query: Let’s say for example that you have a huge orders list table and you need to increase the unit price of one of the products. Rather than scanning the entire table to add a dollar amount to every entry, you can let this query do the work for you

Crosstab Query: This query allows you to summarize the contents of fields that contain numeric values, such as date or numbers fields. You can choose between average, sum, maximum, minimum, and count.

Information on SQL

Based on my research on the subject of SQL, here is the information of I have come up with to describe it. As an analogy, SQL is to databases what HTML, or XHTML, is to web design programs. It is the programming language behind the graphical interface that makes up a software program. Although it is not necessary to know
SQL in order to create a decent database, much the same as a knowledge of XHTML is not necessary to create a webpage, it is helpful to known at least a little bit about it in case you need to ever manually edit a project. However, to average user would probably have no need for it.

Here are the basic commands in SQL:

-The SELECT operation is the most common operation in SQL language. It is used to retrieve data from a specific table, or multiple related tables, in a database. An asterisk symbol can be used to indicate that all available columns of a table are to be retrieved.

-The FROM clause. This indicates the source table or tables from which the date for your query is to be retrieved from.

-The WHERE clause. This is used to restrict the number of rows used by a query.

-The GROUP BY clause. This is used to group together rows with related values.

-The HAVING clause. This is used to elmininate rows after the GROUP BY clause has been implemented.

-The ORDER BY. This is used to identify which columns are used to sort the resulting data and in which order they should be sorted.

Here is a simple example of an SQL query that I found on Expedia.com:

SELECT *
FROM Book
WHERE price > 100.00
ORDER BY title;


I don't really see the need for using SQL when such a user-friendly interface is available. But like I said, it is good to know at least a little bit about it in the case that manual editing of queries is necessary.