A Good Experience

I happened to open this webpage, which has been lying in my bookmark for a long time.
CMPS 598, Fall 2008, is the most impressive class I have ever had during the 2 years study in UL Lafayette.
It was the semester that I just got U.S., everything was fresh to me.
We had blog articles (at first it was just home work, but at last we found that's what we learned), team projects, pictures, and special memories here.
As a student who will graduate soon, I feel good being one of CMPS 598 group.

Wish Dr.Wu, and you guys good luck in the future!
:-)

Facebook sets up new horizon in Social Networking ::

Facebook invented a new technology by enabling users to browse other sites through networking portal. The system is called 'Connect'. It lets Facebook users to access other websites by using their login credentials. This system also provides feedback about a user's friend's activity on those partner websites.The first few sites, which can be viewed by using 'Connect' are Discovery Channel, social news sites e.g. Digg, as well as some video sites e.g. Hulu.

One of Facebook's biggest rivals MySpace has already rolled out somewhat similar system, so the launch of Connect is Facebook's response to their rivals.

These built-in tools for sociallising on these sites such as MySpace and Facebook will help friends to virtually gather at one place to watch a video via video hosting site Hulu and chat about it. Developers can add rich social context to their site. Inclusion of these tools will make social networking sites more all-encompassing portal and automatically become more attractive to advertisers.

In order to avoid the same mistake that happened during the launch of their prior application Beacon, which resulted a bad response, Facebook said it would support all those sites that wanted to be engaged with Connect and review what they will do with the data gathered about members.

With Facebook connect users can bring their login information with them wherever they go on the web. It will also be a dynamic security application, as a user moves around the open web, their privacy settings will follow them, which ensures that users's information and privacy settings are always up to date.

Here are four upcoming primary features of Facebook Connect :

- > Trusted Authentication : Users will be able to connect their Facebook account with any partner website using a trusted authentication method, e.g. SSL.

- > Real Identity : With Facebook Connect, users can bring their real identity information with them wherever they go on the Web.

- > Friends Access : With Facebook Connect, users can take their friends with them wherever they go on the Web.

- > Dynamic Privacy : It will ensure users' profile is always up to date, while they make any change while roaming around the participant websites.

You can have more knowledge about Facebook Connect and developers can get information about how to register their websites in Facebook Connect by clicking on this following link:
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Connect

Build Your Search Service:

BOSS, is an open search web service platform by Yahoo with an aim to “foster innovations in search industry”.

Yahoo opened its search infrastructure around four months back giving developers an opportunity to use Yahoo’s core search technology to build their own search engine.

The queries sent via yahoo API returns 50 results in XML or JSON format along with imposed ads from yahoo displayed next to or within the result. Yahoo may impose some fees associated with the search if the developer decides to keep the search ad free. One exception to this imposition will be the academic developers.

The developers are free to hide the fact that their search is based on Yahoo. Another benefit is the fact that it does not impose any upper limit to the number queries searched or on the design of the page.

Now, the main differences between BOSS and Google’s Ajax is that the former is found to be more developer-friendly offering more features and flexibility, for example there is an option of getting XML output. Also, use of BOSS doesn't require "a valid and accurate http referrer header" as in case of AJAX.

BOSS is a bold move and is getting popular among developers. HAKIA and Med.ium have already moved to BOSS. Yahoo plans to give even more flexibility to the developers by allowing the developers to push their own data for indexing.

Read more (references):
http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/04/google-search-rest-api.html

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/09/yahoo-radically-opens-web-search-with-boss/

ATTRIBUTES IN DBMS AND ER MODELING

Attributes
* The set of possible values for an attribute is called the domain of the attribute
Example:
o The domain of attribute marital status is having four values: single, married, divorced or widowed.
o The domain of the attribute month is having twelve values ranging from January to December.
* Key attribute: The attribute (or combination of attributes) that is unique for every entity instance
o E.g.: the account number of an account, the employee id of an employee etc.
* If the key consists of two or more attributes in combination, it is called a composite key
Simple Vs composite attribute
* Simple attribute: cannot be divided into simpler components
E.g.: age of an employee
* Composite attribute: can be split into components
E.g.: Date of joining of the employee.
* Can be split into day, month and year
Single Vs Multi-valued Attributes
* Single valued : can take on only a single value for each entity instance
E.g.: age of employee. There can be only one value for this.
* Multi-valued: can take up many values
E.g.: skill set of employee
stored Vs Derived attribute
* Stored Attribute: Attribute that need to be stored permanently.
+ E.g.: name of an employee
* Derived Attribute: Attribute that can be calculated based on other attributes.
+ E.g. : years of service of employee can be calculated from date of joining and current date
Regular Vs. Weak entity type
* Regular Entity: Entity that has its own key attribute (s).
E.g.: Employee, student ,customer, policy holder etc.
* Weak entity: Entity that depends on other entity for its existence and doesn’t have key attribute (s) of its own
E.g. : spouse of employee
Relationships
* A relationship type between two entity types defines the set of all associations between these entity types
* Each instance of the relationship between members of these entity types is called a relationship instance
* E.g if Works-for is the relationship between the Employee entity and the department entity, then Rohan works-for CSE department,
Riya works – for EEE department ..etc are relationship instances of the relationship, works-for
Degree of a Relationship
* Degree: the number of entity types involved
# One Unary
# Two Binary
# Three Ternary
E.g: employee manager-of employee is unary
employee works-for department is binary
customer purchase item, shop keeper is a ternary relationship
Cardinality
* Relationships can have different connectivity
o one-to-one (1:1)
o one-to-many (1:N)
o many-to- One (M:1)
o many-to-many (M:N)
E.g.:
Employee head-of department (1:1)
Lecturer offers course (1:N) assuming a course is taught by a single lecturer
Student enrolls course (M:N)
Relationship Participation
* Total : Every entity instance must be connected through the relationship to another instance of the other participating entity types
* Partial: All instances need not participate
E.g.: Employee Head-of Department
Employee: partial
Department: total
ER Modeling - Notations
Steps in ER Modeling
* Identify the Entities
* Find relationships
* Identify the key attributes for every Entity
* Identify other relevant attributes
* Draw complete E-R diagram with all attributes including Primary Key
* Review your results with your Business users

These are some issues regarding attributes and ER modeling.
Some content taken from wikipedia.

How To Create An MSN Robot

From the incesoft website, one can create an MSN robot using the ibot platform provided by the site.
“You can create your own robot simply by following steps:
1.
Go to the website Home of Service Provider to register as a service provider of Incesoft iBot Platform
2.
Download the Incesoft iBot Platform SDK from the website
3.
Create your own robot with the SDK and run”

From the very beginning, you should register one MSN account for yourself to be the view of the robot, because only when you have the MSN account, you can access to Microsoft MSN server and use those sending message or receiving message functions.
Then register an Incesoft robot holder account to get service of holding your MSN account accessible and running your customized program.
After that, please provide your account’s username and password to Incesoft website, and your program later. When the account is activated, then there would be a new “user” which keeps online. Everyone sends a message to this “user”, the information would be sent to Incesoft’s server. The server would find the corresponding holding program and put the message onto this program. There would generate a reply through the program rules, and finally send it back to the source.
It would be OK if you only upload the MSN account information without the rule program. When you active the MSN account on the holder server, you could see that "user" is online. But whatever you send to this "user", there would be no reply.

Gmail account is now an OpenID

Currently, many websites require user to apply an account to visit it. However, the application is such a bothering procedure. Sometimes, when the number of your accounts increasing, you may forget your userID or corresponding password. So in this scenario, the Concept of OpenID comes out. “OpenID is a shared identity service, which allows Internet users to log on to many different web sites using a single digital identity, single sign-on, eliminating the need for a different user name and password for each site. OpenID is a decentralized, free and open standard that lets users control the amount of personal information they provide.” Now, Google has moves towards single sign-on with OpenID, and Gmail becomes an OpenID after Yahoo ID does. It complies with the protocol of OpenID. Along with the increase of OpenID applications, you may be released form the fussy procedure when visiting websites in the near future. However, Gmail, in the current phrase, just has a few applications in terms of OpenID. You can test your google account on Zoho.com. However, the security of Gmail is very important issue we should take care of. So one’s most important Gmail account is not encouraged to be used anywhere as OpenID.

INTRODUCTION TO SQL

SQL
* SQL is used to make a request to retrieve data from a Database.
* The DBMS processes the SQL request, retrieves the requested data from the Database, and returns it.
* This process of requesting data from a Database and receiving back the results is called a Database Query and hence the name Structured Query Language
* SQL is a language that all commercial RDBMS implementations understand.
* SQL is a non-procedural language
* We would be discussing SQL with respect to oracle syntax
statements:These are the statements present.
* DDL (Data Definition Language)
o Create,Alter,Drop,Truncate
* DML (Data Manipulation Language)
o Insert,Update,Delete,Select
* DCL (Data Control Language)
o Grant,Revoke,Commit,Rollback
Data types are
* Number,Char,Varchar2,Long,date
NULL
* Missing/unknown/inapplicable data represented as a NULL value
* NULL is not a data value. It is just an indicator that the value is unknown
Operators
* Arithmetic operators: +, -, *, /
* Logical operators: AND, OR, NOT
* Relational operators: =, <=, >=, < >, < , >

SQL Data Definition Language
Types Of Constraints available are:
* Column Level
* Table level
Types Of Constraints
* Primary Key Constraint
* Foreign Key Constraint
* Unique Constraint
* Check Constraint
* Not Null Constraint
There is a lot to say about SQL.This is just the introduction about the types of constraints and few more things.
Some content from wikipedia.