Looking for the web designer for your project ? - Use Haystack

Finding the right web designer for your project can be a big pain. It would be good to have a site that shows web designer availability across cities, and across price points. Well, Haystack (link) is one such service.
From the site:

Why Haystack?
If you're like most web designers, you have a great site but you're having a hard time getting qualified leads to visit your site. Haystack is here to help drive potential clients to your site. We promote Haystack to thousands of businesses, they find your work on Haystack, and then we direct them to your site so you can finish wowing them. Haystack helps them find you so you can do your magic.
Does it cost anything to hire a firm I found on Haystack?
No. Haystack isn't involved in any financial transactions between a firm and a client, and there's no fee to browse or hire anyone via Haystack. Transactions and negotiations are handled off Haystack. Haystack is just a place for clients to meet firms - after that everyone is on their own.

Photo Blog - A beautiful long corridor inside the Jaipur City Palace

The Jaipur City Palace is a magnificent building, and is very well maintained. Here, you can see this image of a long corridor, with openings on either side, and painted in soothing off-white and cream colors. The floor is inlaid with designs and colored stones.

Photo Blog: Slightly askew photo of a decorated door inside the Jaipur City Palace

This door was in a slightly inside section of the Jaipur City Palace, and it was also hot, hence there were few tourists in this section at this point of time. I took this opportunity to take some photos of this well decorated door.

Photo Blog: A pigeon sitting near a wonderfully decorated section of the Jaipur City Palace

Take a look at this section of the Jaipur City Palace that is visible; it is very wonderfully decorated with a flower and leaf design motif; and right next to that, you can see a pigeon sitting right next to it. Pigeons can be found in huge numbers in this structure.

Designing of Multimedia Databases

Many inherent characteristics of multimedia data have direct and indirect impacts on the design of multimedia databases. These include : the huge size of MMDBs, temporal nature, richness of content, complexity of representation and subjective interpretation. The major challenges in designing multimedia databases arise from several requirements they need to satisfy such as the following:
- Manage different types of input, output, and storage devices.
- Handle a variety of data compression and storage formats.
- Support different computing platforms and operating systems.
- Integrate different data models.
- Offer a variety of user-friendly query systems suited to different kinds of media.
- Handle different kinds of indices.
- Develop measures of data similarity that correspond well with perceptual similarity.
- Provide transparent view of geographically distributed data.
- Adhere to real-time constraints for the transmission of media data.
- Synchronize different media types while presenting to user.

DIFFICULTIES INVOLVED WITH MULTIMEDIA DATABASES :
The difficulty of making these different types of multimedia databases readily accessible to humans is:
- The tremendous amount of bandwidth they consume.
- Creating Globally-accepted data-handling platforms, such as Joomla, and the special considerations that these new multimedia database structures require.
- Creating a Globally-accepted operating system, including applicable storage and resource management programs need to accommodate the vast Global multimedia information hunger.
- Multimedia databases need to take into accommodate various human interfaces to handle 3D-interactive objects, in an logically-perceived manner.
- Accommodating the vast resources required to utilize artificial intelligence to it's fullest potential- including computer sight and sound analysis methods.
- The historic relational databases do not conveniently support content-based searches for multimedia content.

Multimedia databases are essential for efficient management and effective use of huge amounts of data. The diversity of applications using multimedia data, the rapidly changing technology, and the inherent complexities in the semantic representation, interpretation and comparison for similarity pose many challenges. MMDBs are still in their infancy.

Conceptual Data Models for Database Design

Conceptual modeling is an important phase in designing a successful database application. The database design process consists of a number of steps listed below:

Step 1: Requirements Collection and Analysis
- Prospective users are interviewed to understand and document data requirements
This step results in a concise set of user requirements, which should be detailed and complete.
- The functional requirements should be specified, as well as the data requirements. Functional requirements consist of user operations that will be applied to the database, including retrievals and updates.
- Functional requirements can be documented using diagrams such as sequence diagrams, data flow diagrams, scenarios, etc.



Step 2: Conceptual Design / Data Modeling
- Once the requirements are collected and analyzed, the designers go about creating the conceptual schema.
- Conceptual schema: concise description of data requirements of the users, and includes a detailed description of the entity types, relationships and constraints.
- The concepts do not include implementation details; therefore the end users easily understand them, and they can be used as a communication tool.
- The conceptual schema is used to ensure all user requirements are met, and they do not conflict.

Step 3: Database Design
- Two sub-steps called Database Logical Design which define a database in a data model of a specific DBMS and Database Physical Design which define the internal database storage structure are defined.
- It also defines file organization or indexing techniques.

Step 4: Database Implementation
- Many DBMS systems use an implementation data model, so the conceptual schema is transformed from the high-level data model into the implementation data model.
- This step is called logical design or data model mapping, which results in the implementation data model of the DBMS.

Step 5: Physical Design
- Internal storage structures, indexes, access paths and file organizations are specified.
- Application programs are designed and implemented.

Quick Tech Tip: Encapsulation - What does it mean ?

Encapsulation is not a common word in the English language; however, it is an important phrase in the word of software design, especially in the world of Object Oriented Programming. So what does encapsulation mean ?
In computer science, the principle of information hiding means the hiding of design decisions in a computer program, those decisions that are most likely to change, thus protecting other parts of the program from change; especially if the design decision is changed. The protection involves providing a stable interface which shields the remainder of the program from the implementation (the details that are most likely to change). The purpose is to achieve potential for change: the internal mechanisms of the component can be improved without impact on other components, or the component can be replaced with a different one that supports the same public interface.
The term encapsulation is often used interchangeably with information hiding, while some make distinctions between these two terms (although to most people these terms seem the same). It seems that people, however, fail to agree on the distinctions between information hiding and encapsulation though one can think of information hiding as being the principle and encapsulation being the technique. A software module hides information by encapsulating the information into a module or other construct which presents an interface.
The concept of encapsulation is a term that is an integral part of object-oriented programming, where the interface to an object is defined by its public methods, while its internal state is represented by private data. Encapsulation is a good principle of object oriented design, and part of well designed systems.

Software processes: Effective Modular Design

Information hiding: Modules should be specified and designed so that the internal details of modules should be invisible or inaccessible to other modules. Hiding implies that effective modularity can be achieved by defining a set of independent modules that communicate with one another only that information necessary to achieve software function. Hiding defines and enforces access constraints to both procedural detail within a module and any local data structure used by the module.

Major benefits: reduce the change impacts in testing and maintenance.

Functional independence:
Functional independence is achieved by developing modules with “single minded” function and an “aversion” to excessive interaction with other modules. Independent modules are easier to maintain because secondary effects caused by design or code modification are limited, error propagation is reduced and reusable modules are possible.

Design modules based on independent functional features
Major benefits: effective modularity

Independence is assessed using two qualitative criteria : cohesion and coupling.
Cohesion: a natural extension of the information hiding concept a module may perform a number of tasks. A cohesive module performs a single task in a procedure with little interactions with others.

Goal: to achieve high cohesion for modules in a system.

Different types of cohesion:
- coincidentally cohesive: a set of tasks related to each other loosely.
- logical connection among processing elements ---> logically cohesive.
- data sharing among processing elements --> communication cohesion.
- order among processing elements --> procedural cohesion.

Coupling : a measure of interconnection among modules in a program structure. Coupling depends on the interface complexity between modules.
Goal: to strive for lowest possible coupling among modules.
Good coupling ---> reduce or avoid change impact and ripple effects.
---> reduce the cost in program changes, testing, maintenance

Types of coupling:
- data coupling: parameter passing or data interaction
- control coupling: share related control logical (for a control data)
- common coupling: common data sharing
- content coupling: module A use of data or control information maintained in another module.

Quick tip: What is Abstraction and how to do effective modular design ?

Abstraction is the process of taking away or removing characteristics from something in order to reduce it to a set of essential characteristics. Through the process of abstraction, a programmer hides all but the relevant data about an object in order to reduce complexity and increase efficiency. In the process of abstraction, the programmer tries to ensure that the entity is named in a manner that will make sense and that it will have all the relevant aspects included and none of the extraneous ones.

Effective Modular Design

Information hiding:
Modules should be specified and designed so that the internal details of modules should be invisible or inaccessible to other modules. Hiding implies that effective modularity can be achieved by defining a set of independent modules that communicate with one another only that information necessary to achieve software function. Hiding defines and enforces access constraints to both procedural detail within a module and any local data structure used by the module.

Major benefits: Reduces the change impacts in testing and maintenance.

LEGO Digital Designer

LEGO Digital Designer is quite simply the best virtual building system out there – with its “Click-Stick” method of 3D modeling winning praise from children, parents, teachers and design enthusiasts everywhere. And, as the virtual design platform behind a growing number of LEGO products, LEGO Digital Designer is here to stay.

A host of improvements and new features are already in development, including an improved user interface, new connectivity, more life-like building, Technic compatibility and improved train building and animation. So stay tuned – with LEGO Digital Designer, the future is yours.

New features include:

* New brick assortment
* Support for train elements
* Animated trains
* Backgrounds in view mode
* Sound effects
* Minifigs and decorated bricks
* HTML building instructions
* Copy, Cut, Paste, Select All
* Ldraw exporter
* New “Check Price” button
* Mac version runs on Intel Macs

Available from this location.