http://www.identityarchives.com/

“Welcome to the Identity Archives Project – a keyword-searchable database of logos and brand identity designs from around the world. … There’s no need to register, and use of the database is free and open to designers, brand managers, marketing professionals, educators, students, brand identity design enthusiasts, and the general public.”–From the Web site.  Also from the Web site:  “If you are planning or designing a new logo, researching brand identity design, or exploring the design landscape of your region or industry, the Identity Archives Project’s database will be an immensely useful tool for drilling-down into the descriptive, subjective, and conceptual elements that make each logo design unique (or not).”

You’re done opening presents, all your guests have left, and the kids have finally drifted off to sleep. Now what? Find a cozy space to READ.

How do you find great reads during this holiday season to relax your mind and calm your spirit? No worries, we have just what you need.

Make sure you get this list ahead of time, so you can go check these items out from your local library. Ok, are you ready to get started? Great!

1. Go to our homepage, lvccld.org
2. Next, Click on Databases A-Z
3. Now scroll down the list until you find the database entitled, What Do I Read Next.

How easy was that? Now there are several ways to search for great books, so let’s take a look at a few of the ways. Remember, you must me a resident of Las Vegas with a valid card # and PIN to access this source.

1. You love a favorite author, but have not read all the books by this person. Ok, simply click on Author Search to get a list of books written by this person.
2. You have read all the books by your favorite author and want to find similar titles. Ok, that is also easy to do. Simply click on Help me find a Book. You simply enter a title that your favorite author has written and this source will recommend similar titles.

3. You love to read a specific genre and are looking for some new titles and new authors to read. Cool, just click on Genre Search. You can limit the categories simply by clicking on the drop down arrow under each category and then clicking the search button.
4. You can also search for books by title, series, characters in a story, time period and much more. Just visit this source to see what other ways you can search for titles.

Happy reading!

Abstract
Many web services nowadays rely on users’ geo location information. It can be required purely for statistics purposes, or to add value to provided service itself. In most cases the only possible way to detect user location is to use IP address of originating request. IP addresses are not hierarchical in a geographical sense, large block of IP addresses is reserved to an ISP, and then broken down for smaller companies or individuals. There is no much order in the system. So a quick database is required in order to be able to make millions of lookups.

Geo location data
Surely enough companies exist which provide such IP-based geo location data. Maxmind is one of them. Fortunately they provide free version of their database under some legal constraints. There are other providers too, I’ve recently came across IpInfoDB. So far so good, now we need a system to make use of the data.

Physical database design
Data consists of (startIp, endIp, country) tuples. If IP address is in the range, it is originated from that country. There blind unassigned ranges, there are private ranges, and as said above multiple (very many) ranges map to a Country. In my table there is > 100K distinct IP ranges.

Physical design in MySQL:
CREATE TABLE LookupIpToCountry (
startIp int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
endIp int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
countryId tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (startIp),
KEY fk_countryId (countryId),
CONSTRAINT LookupIpToCountry_ibfk_1 FOREIGN KEY (countryId) REFERENCES Countries (id)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

Other database or engine can be used, provided that startIp is clustering index, i.e. data in the table is physically sorted according to startIp in ascending order.

Fast lookup query
mysql> select * from LookupIpToCountry where startIp<=INET_ATON('74.125.19.99') and endIp>=INET_ATON('74.125.19.99') order by startIp desc limit 1;
+------------+------------+-----------+
| startIp | endIp | countryId |
+------------+------------+-----------+
| 1249693272 | 1249773023 | 230 |
+------------+------------+-----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

The idea here is to find the first region into which IP of interest falls. SELECT ... WHERE startIp<= X ... order by startIp desc will navigate through B-tree index to the last row satisfying startIp criterion and setup scan iterator in descending order. (Because it can only validate second condition endIp>= X by scanning). But the iteration ends immediately because of LIMIT 1 if second condition is satisfied. So effectively whole query is reduced to B-tree lookup of one value. Of course, in case of the miss (IP address does not fall to any of known ranges), there is a performance hit:

mysql> select * from LookupIpToCountry where startIp<=INET_ATON('255.255.255.255') and endIp>=INET_ATON('255.255.255.255') order by startIp desc limit 1;
Empty set (0.39 sec)

In order to fix it you can simplify the query to select * from LookupIpToCountry where startIp<=INET_ATON('255.255.255.255') order by startIp desc limit 1; and check second condition endIp>=INET_ATON('255.255.255.255') at application level, if you think it is worth.

The most comprehensive introduction to the core concepts and methods of data warehousing.

Data warehouses provide a much-needed strategy for organizations to collect, store, and analyze vast amounts of business data. As businesses expand both brick-and-mortar and online activities, the field of data warehousing has become increasingly important. Since it was first published in 1990, W. H. Inmon’s Building the Data Warehouse has been the bible of data warehousing– it is the book that launched the data warehousing industry and it remains the preeminent introduction to the subject. This new edition covers the latest developments with this technology, many of which have been pioneered by Inmon himself.

An overview of all the fundamental components of data warehouse systems offers you a refresher of the methods used for data warehouse design; various data warehouse migration strategies; and the technologies that can be applied for loading, indexing, and managing data. In order to bring you up to date, this in-depth guide then features the latest advances in data warehousing.

New chapters cover: Understanding methods for handling unstructured data in a data warehouse Storing data across multiple storage media Examining the pros and cons of relational vs. multidimensional design Measuring return on investment in planning data warehouse projects Exploring advanced topics, including data monitoring and testing.

The new edition of the classic bestseller that launched the data warehousing industry covers new approaches and technologies, many of which have been pioneered by Inmon himself In addition to explaining the fundamentals of data warehouse systems, the book covers new topics such as methods for handling unstructured data in a data warehouse and storing data across multiple storage media Discusses the pros and cons of relational versus multidimensional design and how to measure return on investment in planning data warehouse projects Covers advanced topics, including data monitoring and testing.

Download : Building Warehouses by Inmon

This is an old procedure, which is commonly understood by PostgreSQL administrators. However, if you’ve not done it before, over at the FreeBSD Diary there is a nice article describing how to upgrade the client and the server when moving from one version to the next (such as from 8.3.x to 8.4.x).

The basic thing to remember is that a complete dump of the databases is necessary, with the appropriate reload process. The article describes this process well.

Anybody who is interested in FreeBSD should follow the FreeBSD Diary; this “blog” has been around longer than blogs have been.

Enjoy!

If you have any questions.  Please contact Christa Werle.

Essential SQL Server 2008: Database Infrastructure and Scalability

Database Mirroring enhancements, automatic page repair, log stream

Backup compression and using Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) to encrypt data

Hot-add CPU, DBCC CHECKDB enhancements, failover clustering enhancements

Peer-to-peer replication enhancements

Policy-Based Management and Multi-Server Administration

Central management server metadata, multi-server script execution

Policy-based management overview, conditions, facets and policies

Applying facets and conditions to policies, policy enforcement

Policy based management architecture and execution

Applying policies to multiple servers

Policy based management advanced topics

Performance Data Collection

Creating and configuring a management data warehouse

Data collection overview and architecture

Configuring system data collection on an instance

Transact-SQL custom data collection

Data collection reports and module summary

Resource Management and Troubleshooting Enhancements

Resource Governor

Extended events, predicates, actions, targets, types, maps, sessions

Security Enhancements

Transparent data encryption

Backups and transparent data encryption, transparent data encryption limitations

Integrated authentication enhancements, SQL Server 2008 auditing improvements

SQL Server 2008 all actions audited

Security Summary

Management Implications of New Features Part 1

spatial indexes, integrated full-text search

Problems addressed by sparse columns

Sparse columns and column sets

Sparse columns and filtered indexes, best practices for sparse columns

Constructing tabular data sets with sparse columns

Limitations of sparse columns and interaction with other features

Overview of filtered indexes

Using filtered indexes with sparse columns

Filtered statistics, monitoring filtered indexes and statistics

Using filtered indexes for improved index coverage

Management Implications of New Features Part 2

Filtered index best practices

Filtered index system metadata

Filtered index limitations

Change tracking overview, change tracking best practices

Change data capture (CDC) overview

Blob storage with Filestream overview, enabling Filestream

Filestream security, filestream and transactions, monitoring filestream storage

Filestream manageability

Scalability Enhancements

Data compression overview, data compression trade-offs

Estimating data compression space savings

Estimating data compressing space savings, choosing row compression

Enabling compression and comparing performance

Enabling and disabling compression, data compression options and syntax

Service broker improvements, Service Broker conversation priority

Query optimizer enhancements, MERGE overview

Forcing query optimizer plans with plan guides

Using plan guides

Star join optimizer improvements

Partitioning enhancements overview, partition-aligned indexed views

Partitioning and lock escalation enhancements

Improving concurrency with partition lock escalation

Remember: No matter where you are during winter break, as long as you’ve got Internet access, you’ve got full access to the library’s many databases.

Whether you access the databases through the catalog or the online resources page, all you need to do is authenticate by providing your name and all the numbers on the back of your ID card.

Fu Ssu-nien Library – Harvard Yenching Library Chinese Rare Book Digitization Project.

This resource provides full images of about 300 Chinese rare books held by Harvard-Yenching Library, as part of an international cooperative project. More digitized books will become available via the online catalog of Harvard library.

What do you think of this resource?

We have three trial accounts to evaluate Job & Career Accelerator. Please let Christa Werle know if you are unable to access this trial product.

Getting Started with Job & Career Accelerator:

In order to experience all that Job & Career Accelerator has to offer, we encourage you to follow the recommended path provided within the application. After logging in using one of the trial accounts below, click on the ‘Get Started’ tab and use the ‘Next’ buttons at the bottom of each page to guide you through completing each step including the Personal Profile and Occupation Matcher. Once you have completed the Occupation Matcher, you will see your recommended occupations where you can: view and save occupation profile cards; learn more about each occupation; view available jobs; create resumes and cover letters; and track your job application progress.

You can also move around within Job & Career Accelerator using the navigation bars and return at any time to where you left off. Your work is always saved as you progress.

As you complete different sections, you can also monitor your progress in the My Accelerator dashboard as well as access all of your saved work by clicking on the My Accelerator tab in the top navigation.

Trial Login Instructions:

To access the trial site, CLICK HERE

Enter the user name and password corresponding to one of the trial accounts listed below in the “Returning User” login screen.

Trial Account 1:

User Name: JCA36025

Password:  gethired

Trial Account 2:

User Name: JCA77848

Password:  gethired

Trial Account 3:

User Name: JCA57875

Password:  gethired

The following is the schedule of availability as we migrate to BusinessDecision 2.0.

PLEASE NOTE: due to the migration BusinessDecision will not be available 12/31/09 through 1/3/10.

• Access to the legacy version of BusinessDecision (what you are currently using) will end on 12/30/09.
• Access to BusinessDecision 2.0 will begin on 1/4/2010.
• The transition to BusinessDecision 2.0 will be completely seamless for you. You will not need to change anything on your website. Your current link to BusinessDecision will automatically direct end-users to BusinessDecision 2.0.
• The first time end-users log on, they will be prompted to reconfirm their account by using their e-mail address as their username, and to create a new password.
• We are working on migrating all projects created between July 2009 and December 2009.
• Thematic maps will not be available on 1/4/2010. CIVICTechnologies is dependent upon delivery of code from ESRI to enable us to make thematic maps available to our end-users.  Once we receive the necessary code from ESRI we will provide a delivery date for thematic maps.
• ESRI has informed us that thematic maps will require the use of Microsoft’s Silverlight. Therefore, Silverlight will eventually need to be installed on library computers using BusinessDecision 2.0. Silverlight can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/default.aspx.
• Geographic coverage is likely to be set to National coverage for a few weeks for all BusinessDecision customers to avoid potential problems during migration. Once the migration is complete in mid- to late-January we will reset your unique geographic coverage (if you have National coverage it will just remain that way).

BusinessDecision 2.0 Training

Training will be held at 8:00 a.m. Pacific and 1:00 p.m. Pacific every day during the week of January 4. Registration for training is required. Click here to register for one of the training sessions.

We at CIVICTechnologies wish you and everyone one at your library a very happy holiday season and we look forward to sharing the new features and capabilities of BusinessDecision with you and your patrons in the New Year. We will have a list of all the new features available when you log on January 4, 2010.

Have you ever wondered how other cultures celebrate Christmas? Great, let’s get started with Lands and People!

Remember to access this electronic resource; you must be a resident of Las Vegas, with a valid card # and PIN.

Lands and People is extremely easy to use, you can simply enter a search term in the search box next to Find it Fast. Or you limit your results to one type of publication, such as an Atlas, Encyclopedia or Dictionary.

Find it Fast
1. Simply enter the term Christmas in the search box. You will get a list of several countries that celebrate Christmas.

2. Scroll down the list until you find a country you are interested in, and then simply click on it.

3. Next, scroll through the article until you see the word Christmas highlighted in red. This is where you will find the information about the traditions and how this country celebrates Christmas.

Publication Search
1. Click on any publication to search in. the list includes, Encyclopedia, Atlas, Almanac, and many more.

2. This allows you to limit your search only to the publication selected, which will give you fewer results than if you search all publications at once.

Was that easy? Remember this does not only have to be used for celebrations, you can also use this when you have to do your country projects as well.