Data Flow Diagrams

How useful are the old fashioned data flow diagrams in today’s world, in particular how useful are they in demonstrating process flow? They showed the relationship between external entities (actors), functions/processes, data stores and data flows.

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Converting dates to strings using Python

While working on converting ello.json to rss, I needed to convert the date formats, I needed to do it in Python and found the following code worked, using strptime and strfmtime. I had to augment the date string with the name of the day of the week attribute, so felt it had to via a…

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RSS from JIRA

For those of us for whom email is a bit passé, we want to recieve our Jira updates using feeds, either because it allows us to choose our browser, or for other reasons. I hope the following links help.

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SPARQL on WordPress

For various reasons I needed to look at SPARQL again. What’s the easiest way to put it up?, Here! I’ve been working with LH-Tools which is commented on at its authors site, and LH-RDF. I did not get this to finish satisfactorily, mainly based on my lack of SPARQL skills. May 2015 I returned to…

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Disqus and Ghostery

Disqus needs to be whitelisted in Ghostery for it to work properly. (I have white listed the site rather than approved the specific cookies/trackers). It can stop you performing the login.

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VLOOKUP vs INDEX ( MATCH)

How awesome is this! Excel =INDEX, is a matrix retrieve i.e. =INDEX(array, row, col) retrieves an entry from the two dimensional array. If we combine this with MATCH which returns a row number we can use these functions instead of =VLOOKUP, its allegedly faster too. MATCH operates on a column or linguistically a list.

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My little mail server

What a pile of poo! I have access to four smtp servers and they all have limits on the distribution list size! (They are all about the same size of 100). Google will allow 2000 per list but only if you use one of their clients. Let’s try and bring up an SMTP server, connect…

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Planet, mingle & wordpress

While developing the new web site, I had a look at how my mingle was organised. The current regime has a conversion rules file for each output format and one for HTML. I need to incorporate the HTML output in a wordpress page and also apply the wordpress style rules to the HTML. I solved…

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Docker

About Docker, looks awesome. Easy to create bootable, runnable images, easy to deploy because the global hub site is a crucial part of the proposition. The free usage of the hub, encourages the publication and sharing of images which are then imported over the internet. Originally written the summer of 2015, and revised in the…

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JSON to XML

In order to export the ello.co feed, I need to convert the JSON to XML. This isn’t the first time I have needed to look at this sort of problem and so I have created a page to hold my notes. I have put these things together in a python script, and posted it to…

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using github

I finally got a git account, my site is here. This page is about how to, but does not have any command runes. They are held elsewhere. This page was started in 2011 and I have returned to using git at several times over the years. I tidied up the page in Feb 2019 and…

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Exporting ello.co

This it seems is no longer relevant. I have marked it deprecated. The ello URL syntax described i.e.  http://ello.co/username.json no longer works. They weren’t very helpful to the project when I first looked at it. This post morphed into a generic web login via scripts page. I will consider splitting it and making the ello…

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