Tech Friday: Bento database - First Look

Well, although I've managed to not worry about a database for several months, it finally happened and I need to keep track of my "opportunity matrix", that is, a list of grants, their deadlines and status, the responsible contact person, partners, and whether I've created all the necessary collateral: prospectus, project summary, grant application, etc.

Typically this would be done in Access on a Windows machine, and I've got Access 2007 installed in my copy of Parallels so that I could run this up pretty quickly.

But, since I want to stay native on the Mac, I poked around at an old favorite, Filemaker Pro. One thing I've always thought about FMP is that is relatively expensive, even in an academic edition, especially if you want to share the data using a server. But FileMaker now offers a "home" version called Bento for about $50.00, and this looks promising for my app.

I've downloaded the 30 day trial, and installed without fuss. Installation consists of dragging the the file to the applications folder. I started playing with one of the templates, and after ten minutes or so, I've ended up with the following data entry screen:



Points of Interest:

• Bento integrates with iCal, Mail and the Address book. You can eMail from a field which is designated an email field.
  
• One to many relationships are supported. For example, you can have a task list for a project, with multiple tasks displayed for a single project. Some relations are already connected; for example the tasks list from iCal can be embedded into a Bento form
  
• What one would consider to be a "database" in Access, or, loosely, a "group of tables" in another database program is called a "library" in Bento.
  
• What might be called a "recordset" in Access, or a "cursor" in an SQL database is called a "collection" in Bento. Collections are much like playlists in iTunes, they are a subset of records from the entire library.
  

You can create your own drop down list, so I've attempted to capture the workflow in a "status" field which currently contains the following:

Seeking Partner: Since virtually all my projects are with others, this is the first step in any application project.

Developing Project

Application Submitted

Awaiting Feedback from Funder (may be redundant with the previous step)

Under Revision

Revised Submitted

Awarded

Rejected

I was curious about the name, but I think it refers to a Japanese bento box, which are the compartmented dishes for serving Japanese food.

Here's a review of Bento in MacWorld. They point out a couple of limitations. For one thing, there is no way to export data in anything other than a comma delimited ASCII format. 

Another limitation is that the Bento data libraries are strictly single-user data files for a single machine. Anything larger needs to go into something like Filemaker. So, is is inadvisable to think that we could run a multi-user grant flow application using Bento. That's OK. For $50.00 we can play with Bento for awhile and work out the data that we need to keep track of. We'll be that much farther ahead when we're looking to move up.

Marketing is Really Like This

http://view.break.com/542649 - Watch more free videos

Over Lunch: Fortune Cookie

I never look at Fortune Magazine....but then, I did over lunch, and it looks as if I've been missing Stanley Bing. And he is very funny.

Look. Throughout the course of human history, life on earth has been a struggle, a disappointment to most, a tragedy to some, a triumph to a few. But for most of us, the small things in life make it worthwhile, not the megatrends that make us nuts and take place around us. People managed to live through the plague years in Europe 500 years ago. Aren’t things better than that now? We have IPods.

Backing Up Is (not) Hard To Do

It sounds like a country music song title. After reading maybe the fourth post somewhere about somebody's MacBook hard drive had crashed, I thought I really really truly this time must take another look at the native backup program that comes with the Macbook called Time Machine. Previous efforts to coax TM to back up to a network drive hadn't worked. This time I went to Staples and bought a Maxtor One-Touch4 Mini drive of 250 gigabytes in size for all of $149.00. This is a USB drive, powered from the computer's USB ports. I say "ports", because the cable includes two plugs for connecting to the computer and both of them must be plugged in to power the drive. So, this wouldn't be the ideal solution, unless you have a USB hub or docking station.

Once plugged in, the Time Machine program came right up without me even starting it, with a dialog box asking "Do you want to use the OneTouch 4Mini as a back-up drive for Time Machine?" I said yes, of course, and then it told me that it needed to reformat the drive as a Macintosh Drive. Off it went and then the program automatically proceeded to perform a full hard drive backup. With the first backup complete, Time Machine will continue to back up changes every 15 minutes.

I expect to leave the hard drive permanently attached to the docking station, as it doesn't make a lot of sense to have the backup media with the computer when I'm traveling. Still, if I wanted to, the drive is small and lightweight enough to easily fit into my briefcase along with all the other computer paraphernalia.

Looking back at the history of the Microcomputer

Even when I was reading his magazines back in the '70's I figured that Wayne Green was a little bit, well, odd. I may have forgotten exactly how odd, but this interview in Computerworld is great reminder. The link via Jeff Dunteman's Contrapositive Diary, includes another link to more discussion.

Green was present at the creation of the "personal computer industry". It is hard to imagine these days that thirty-five years ago, a bunch of hobbyist tinkerers came up with some of the more profound ideas that would evolve into the technical infrastructure that we take for granted. Things like cell phones (an outgrowth of ham radio repeaters), email (an outgrowth of ham radio teletype experiments), satellite communication, and, of course the downsizing of computers to create the first desktop and laptops.

That's why I still occasionally enjoy checking in with people who wrote for the early computer magazines, such as those started by Mr. Green. Jerry Pournelle, Don Lancaster, and Jeff Duntemann are still going strong and they've got decades of archived material online at their respective web sites. Perhaps their best work is behind them, but they all continue to offer a surprisingly unique and consistant perspective on our world.

The Case for Vacation

Most years in August I manage to get away for four or more days to a lake in western Maine. The lake was formed by a dam, which flooded the surrounding countryside in the 1940's. There is a lot of driftwood around, and the lake is relatively shallow, making it unsuitable for power boats and jet skis. This means the lake is relatively quiet, and it is a favorable habitat for moose and loons.

The place I stay in has no electricity, and, being in the shadow of a substantial mountain range, it has no cell phone service, (for Verizon at least). Usually I arrive relatively fried, and yet even after a couple of days my head starts to clear. Before returning to the fray, I wanted to remind myself of some of the good things:

1. The ratio between time spent being active, and time spent in a chair is reversed compared to a normal workday. We spend the these days paddling, hiking, exploring, swimming, cooking, photography, walking, chopping wood, bicycling and picking blueberries.

2. Most of our idle time is spent in company. We sit around drinking beer, conversing, counting loons and mergansers, and watching the sun set. We spent a couple of hours watching a spectacular lightning storm where we were practically inside the storm.

3. As time is spent away from personal electronics I find I can think more clearly. When you are not responding to persistent external electrical stimuli, you can take notice of the natural world.

4. As the workday world begins to fall away, I find that I have the mental space to think of less trivial things.

5. In a different environment, you can cultivate and improve skills and competencies that you've neglected, or try something that you have never done before.

6. The Fallacy of Indispensability. After I get back, I'm reminded again that the world managed to get along just fine with out me...that my inbox isn't exploding with important messages, that there is little or nothing that I need to deal with that can't gracefully be dealt with even with several days delay.

7. What my inbox does show, however, is that I'm subscribed to dozens of useless eMail lists. My RSS feeder delivers fifty or sixty useless messages per day. I've got too many files on too many computers on too many servers.

8. Above all, what these days teach me is immediacy and focus. Or rather, they remind me again of how far we have strayed from our ability to give each other our undivided attention in our conversations, and in our work. Somehow, little by little, we have allowed all these electronic toys to erode our lives. Which means.. happily.. we should take more vacations. :-)

Introduction: August 2008

Welcome to Tech for Non-Profits, the unplugged version of Microdesign Consulting. Part lab-notebook, part brain-extension, it is a repository for new and evolving ideas and projects that we stumble across as we move our former database development and network support company into startup mode for a technology-based home health-care delivery service provider. Being grant funded ourselves, we're very much looking over the the grant landscape.

We are located in the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologiesa technology incubator affiliated with the University of Vermont. Our major extracurricular activity is the Vermont Software Developer's Alliance, a non-profit trade group which promotes economic development in our area, primarily for software development companies. Both organizations, by the way, are looking to encourage high-tech businesses to start up and/or relocate in our state.

Mac Mail Hints

My quest to duplicate the functionality of OutLook using Mac Mail seems to be chugging along.

1. When forwarding, you get an automatic insertion of a "quote" line which goes along the left margin. To eliminate this line, highlight the text. Then Select Format->Quote Level->Decrease This will eliminate the quote line.

2. I didn't "get" the inbox, and the smart mailbox paradigm, until somewhere I saw it pointed out that this is similar to the ITunes interface where you see your entire collection all at once, but you can create "playlists" from the whole collection. Think smart mailbox=playlist, and miraculously it works.

3. What I was really looking for are rules that I can define which causes inbound mail to be moved to a custom folder. In fact in the "On My Mac" section allows you to do just this. Create a folder for a subset of inbox messages. Then create a rule which moves the message from the inbox to the folder.

With these revelations, and further refinement of iCal and Google calendars, I could almost dump Windows. Exceptions are Word for Windows (Mac Word is too weird), and OneNote. So, I'm still running Parallels with Windows Vista Business for these applications.

Logging in as Root in Ubuntu with Live CD

We just had a little contretemps as we attempted to replace system files on our Windows XP embedded machine with a new image. The easiest way we've found to copy the files is to run an Ubuntu Linux Live CD, which boots up a Linux desktop. Since the default user in the Linux desktop is guest, the user does not have privileges to replace the files a second time. To get around this, you have to log in using the root account. Steps:

1. in the original desktop, under the security tab for logins, be sure to check the box "allow local administrator to log in" under system->administration->login window.



2. Open a terminal session

3. type sudo passwd root

4. enter a password for the root user

5. re-enter a password for the root

6. shutdown - change user, and log in as root with your new password.

Background: There are three sort of funny things about this process for users who are not familiar with Ubuntu.

1. Ubuntu does not install a root user account by default. Or, maybe it installs the account, but it doesn't allow its use. Thus, the act of assigning a password to the root user account is necessary to activate the account.

2. Even if you have a valid root account set up, by default Ubuntu does not allow you to log into a standard Gnome desktop. That's why you have the change the setting in the security preferences.

2. In this example, since we are using the Live CD, you have do step 1 first. If you restart the computer from scratch all configuration settings are lost, because the Live CD does not allow you to permanently write anything to the disk.

Woof.

In any case, this solved our problem; we were able to blow away the system files on our target hard drive C:, so that we were able to copy a fresh version of our XPe image to the drive.