The Geography of Jobs – TIP Strategies

The Geography of Jobs – TIP Strategies

Posted using ShareThis

Data Visualization

As you may or may not know I’m a big fan of data visualization. Being either left brain or right brain influenced (I can never remember which is which) I’m drawn to representations of data that not only look cool but convey information in an interesting (perhaps unique) way.

Try and guess what the following is before clicking on it to see:

inFAMOUS – another must have !

So I’ve been playing the (ps3 exclusive) demo of inFAMOUS for a few days and finally finished it – damn what a bunch of awesomeness.

Another reason (there aren't really that many) to own a PS3

I used some mad money from christmas to add a PS3 to our family of electon emitters mostly for titles such as GranTurismo and Ratched and Clank.

I was exceedingly pleasently surprised by Little Big Planet (as I posted earlier) and now I can add to the list of 3 must haves a fourth – and again it’s a PS3 exclusive title. The reviews are glowing and I can see why – this game is non stop action!

Can’t wait for fathers day  (hint hint).

Oracle Analytics – amazing what they did (years ago).

So it’s somewhat sad to admit but I’ve not until today had a need to utilize any of the analytic functions that Oracle introduced into it’s flagship database roughly a decade ago. I’ve gotten by with simple counts, sums, averages, that sort of stuff but nothing more complicated.

I’m preparing for a presentation I’m giving next week to the Upstate New York Oracle User Group (UNYOUG) during which I’ll be talking about our adoption of Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control. I have a slide in the presentation in which I talk about the mix of targets we are monitoring and how many targets we’ve been adding on a month by month basis. Some time ago (being somewhat lazy) I realized that there is no way I should be compiling this information manually and so I wrote an EM report that showed 2 things:

1) A pie chart that shows the current mix of target types. This one was easy enough and the SQL for that looks like this:

select target_type, count(*)
from sysman.mgmt_targets
group by Target_type
order by 2 desc

2) A bar chart showing target additions grouped by month. This one also is pretty straightforward and the SQL looks like this:

select to_char(load_timestamp,’yy/mm’) “Month”, count(*) “New Targets”
from sysman.mgmt_targets
group by to_char(load_timestamp,’yy/mm’)
order by  to_char(load_timestamp,’yy/mm’)

These two SQLs appear as report elements in the custom report and so produce pretty graphs that look like the following:

Now we come to the interesting part (I hope).

In my presentation I have a pretty graph that shows cumulative target additions by month  – showing a nice curvy line reflecting just how hard our EM group is working adding targets to our EM repository and how the number of targets we monitor has grown from 12 to over 1200.

Up until now I’ve taken the monthly numbers from the bar chart and plotted these in  numbers.app or (gag) excel to get this pretty little line. I came to the (not so shocking) conclusion that I really don’t want to keep on doing this and I’d really rather have the ever so brilliant EM report I had written do this for me. The rub is how do I use simple SQL to get a running total ???

Turning to our friend google I quickly (damn quickly) came upon an excellent post over at ORAFAQ written by Kevin Meade that explained in substantial detail a number of different ways to accomplish this. Building from a very simple (and inefficient) self join of the base table, Kevins article winds its way to the ever so powerful sum(xyz) OVER (partition by … order by … ) capabilities of analytic empowered SQL.

After some experimentation I came up with the following SQL and its accompanying pretty graph – pretty darn cool I must say

SQL:

select to_char(load_timestamp,’yy/mm’) “Month”
,sum(count(*)) over (
/*partition by to_char(load_timestamp,’yy/mm’)*/
order by to_char(load_timestamp,’yy/mm’)
) running_target_total
from sysman.mgmt_targets
group by to_char(load_timestamp,’yy/mm’)

Data:

Month	RUNNING_TARGET_TOTAL
06/07	12
06/08	45
06/10	47
06/11	54

… 09/01	… 932
09/02	1,009
09/03	1,152
09/04	1,237
09/05	1,279

Chart:

F1 continues it’s slide :(

Now the twin geniuses Max and Bernie are destroying the very essence of F1 and both Ferrari and Renault (and probably soon some others) are threatening to not rejoin in 2010.

The conflict this time is based around propsed budget caps and the big teams (who have nearly endless amounts of money) are seriously thinking of leaving.

To me the basic principle was that teams should be allowed to ‘go nuts’ on the engineering and make the cars as fast as possible. I have no problem with new technical rules being introduced each year because they are invariable designed to make the cars safer and more competitve. Its these rules that force the teams to innovate and ultimately this innovation makes its way into everyday (well okay maybe not EVERYDAY) cars that we all benefit from.

I wish Max and Bernie would just piss off and go ruin some other sport for a change. How about baseball – there’s one I don’t care about.

As much as i didn’t care much for Ferrari while ‘herr Schumacher ‘was ruling the world I am appreciative of the history they bring to the game and would seriously miss them should they leave and I daresay I’d probably not pay nearly as much attention to the sport. On a global scale I’m sure that substantial ticket and advertising sales losses would start pilling up too.

UPDATE:

It seems that Max and Bernie may be totally out of line on not only this but a number of things … according to pitpass:

Will FOTA strip the FIA of its lawmaking powers? 16/05/2009 Friday’s announcement that Ferrari is seeking an injunction against the FIA to prevent it from introducing a two-tier structure to F1 puts a new light on comments made to Pitpass‘ Chris Sylt late last year by Bernie Ecclestone. At that time, Ecclestone bluntly told Sylt that since F1’s regulations affect the commercial side of the sport, the FIA should not be writing them. FOTA, the association of F1 teams, may well have cottoned on just in time. “The sporting regulations basically are what generate the income and we run the commercial business. The FIA should just be the police looking at the rules,” said Ecclestone and the teams agree. “The international federation should simply be the referee. We should write the rules, not have them imposed by Max without speaking to anyone,” said Flavio Briatore, Renault F1 team principal, on Thursday and it looks like he has the law on his side. The reason for this is a European Commission ruling in 2001 that said the FIA must “have no influence over the commercial exploitation of the Formula One Championship.” Ecclestone’s comments echo this is as he told Sylt that “when we had this problem with the European Commission, they made it very clear that the FIA purely regulate the sport. Even to the extent that the teams and us should be writing the technical and sporting regulations.” But even before the EC ruling, Mosley acknowledged the FIA could not dictate on areas which interfere with the teams’ businesses. In 2000, at a UK government Select Committee meeting covering tobacco sponsorship of F1 teams, Mosley said “the difficulty is that we are dealing with commercial entities whom I have to persuade. If I could just say that is it and dictate, but I cannot. We can on the rules, on things like safety, but we cannot on things which would interfere with their commercial affairs.” ‘So how can the FIA make the cost-cutting regulations?’, you may well ask. Well the answer, according to Ecclestone, is: “They can’t really. The teams allow them.” He explains that the FIA has been writing the regulations because the teams haven’t opposed it. However, by suggesting the budget cap, Mosley looks to have tipped the balance and the teams are no longer playing ball. Pitpass understands that on 10 May FOTA Vice Chairman John Howett was reminded of Ecclestone’s comments that the FIA should not, under European law, be writing F1’s regulations. So even if Ferrari’s injunction fails, the FIA could face further action from the teams and this time its very powers of lawmaking could be at stake.

My Daughter – the geek

So my daughter (the 9 year old) suddenly decided  that she NEEDED to draw a chart showing how many webkinz she and her friends own.

She made this 100% by herself in Numbers with absolutely NO help at all – there’s hope for her yet

Based upon information available to her from the WebKinz website, she’ll never understand how impossible it would have been to do this type of work in this fashion just 10 years ago.

New Colour pallete tool

I’ve posted in the past about some superb tools that help you select aesthetically pleasing colours for web content – well I have to post again because I stumbled upon ( I do love stumbleupon)  one that is even better than both of those in many ways.

Firstly it’s even easier to use – requiring even less thought. One single click anywhere on the spectrum yeilds a (to my eyes) exceedingly appealing pallete of complementary colours. Explore the theme options (mono, compliment, triad, tetrad, analogic and finally accented analogic) to easily see more variations. You can tweak many of these as well – play aroung and go nuts…

Secondly – thanks to the two preview buttons you can see what a site built based upon the scheme looks like in a flash!

Check out Color Scheme Designer 3 by Petr Stanicek right now!!!!

Harry Beck.

I stumbled upon a really great BBC video on the history of one of the worlds most popular and influential bits of art – the map of the London Underground (subway) system.

I’ve never been to London myself, but I’ve already seen many derivatives of this style – thinking rather ridiculously to myself that it was ‘modern’. It’s amazing (to me) to learn that this type of design work was going on in the 30’s and equally not amazing to hear that his work was initially shunned, that it came from someone not ‘in the mainstream of such things’ and finally that he was barely compensated at all.

How utterly dumbfounded the officials must have been with his map that did away with physical reality for the sake of clarity. Distance means nothing in this map and the only somewhat realistic rendering of reality lies in the stylish Thames River.

You can read more yourself over at wikipedia and you can watch the video (it’s a bit long by todays ADD standards but interesting none the less) over here. Click the image to see a rather nice article with considerably more content than the tease I have provided.

No more money down the drain

Ecodrain looks like a smart, simple and straightforward enough approach to saving money that we otherwise let flow right down the drain:

According to the Canadian manufacturer there are no moving parts either!

Colour me impressed (and notice the correct spelling!).

Me want !

I have no clue if this thing really exists or where to get one (or how much one would cost) but I want it!

Click to see more awesome images of this most awesome 'action figure'