Kindle Tablet?

Monday, 5 September, 2011

Nice article over at TechCrunch on the possible Kindle Tablet. For those time-stressed….. it looks like a Playbook, runs a completely forked version of Android and is highly integrated in to Amazon services.

The Kindle platform and integration to mobile services (aka books, music, video and apps) seems to be taking shape…

Memory Techniques and Learning

Sunday, 4 September, 2011

I’ve just finished reading slew of books on memory techniques; Donald Clark put me on to Moonwalking with Einstein by Josh Foer. This is an incredibly readable book about the 1-year journey of a fresh journalist training for the US memory championships, however he spends considerable time looking at the history and science behind memory. This is what makes it readable and backs up the hyperbole with facts and, ultimately, his own performance in memory. If you want one book on memory (in addition to “Brain Rules” I introduced a while back) then this is it.

It’s also worth mentioning two other books:

1. Ed Cooke’s Remember, Remember: Learn the Stuff You Thought You Never Could. Ed has been in the top 10 memorists and trained Josh Foer (above). This is a series of 4 examples to memorise and work as a great adjunct to Josh’s book providing real examples (e.g. memorise the 63 monarchs of England).

2. “Boost your memory” by Darren Bridger. 52 top tips on memory. All the salient info is there in bite-sized nuggets, but it trivialises it to a certain extent and doesn’t highlight (amongst the other tips) the truly important stuff. However, after reading Foer it is a useful addition. It was free on Kindle for a number of weeks but is now back up to £8. Still worthwhile though.

Merging database records

Friday, 2 September, 2011

I was recently sent a set of records to update a database on schools in Central Bedfordshire but realised that it was only a partial match for the full set of schools in said database….. a common enough occurrence for many people maintaining records. For those that use Excel this is actually a real headache….. Excel is not a database system and whilst it has some (very) limited database functionality, one of the key things it can’t do is relationally link different tables together and then run queries on those tables. Its just one of those things Microsoft has left out to get people to use Access, although third party developers have created Add-Ins to do some aspects of this.

It still makes updating a database where you receive the data as a spreadsheet harder, but ultimately the solution is staring you in the face. Ignore Excel from the outset, load the data up in to a temporary MySQL table (or other db) and then perform the JOIN on the data to produce a new dataset that contains all the data. This can be saved and then used to manually update your main database.

JOINs are one of the key elements in relational database management so its worth being familiar with the different types (something every intro to DBs cover). In this particular instance we want a JOIN that links the two tables together based upon school ID and returns ALL the records. That’s a LEFT JOIN and worked a treat.