Does anyone know where i can find some training on WebFOCUS? - webfocus

There are some webpages on commands etc I found online but would you happen to know where there could be videos or better described pages on how using the data in the system to run queries, commands, syntax, build reports, building equations in your reports to use the data.
There is a technical library by the info center of Webfocus but it only lists the commands. I am not sure how and where to use them. Some of the commands seem intuitive but I dont know how to properly use the language.
None

There is a small video library located here: https://webfocusinfocenter.informationbuilders.com/wfappent/video.html
There is a lot of fragmenting with IBI though, and there are different things that work on different versions. What version of WebFOCUS are you on?

Related

How to detect location/place type from the image?

I have a web application where user uploads the images of their locations. I want to write a program to detect the type of location and list of objects from the image. I write a program in C# using alturos YOLO to detect objects in the image. The result is fine for me but the problem is i want to detect the place type from the image. Like, if you upload some image that has snow then it should detect the "Snow" keyword. If you upload the "Lake" image then it should show keywords like "Lake, water, river etc". I am a web developer and never done any Machine Learning or image processing thing. But i am keen to learn this. Is there any way to do this or anyone can tell me the right path to do this.
I found this "https://www.clarifai.com/" but i want to write my own code because i have large number of images.
All in all, I'm pretty sure that there's no single correct answer to this. You could implement image recognition in a hundred different equally correct ways using different tools. So here's my opinionated perspective. Anyone and everyone is free to agree/disagree with what I'm saying.
I've worked a bit with Open CV (Python) in the past. There are a great number of libraries available based on it, so you can probably find a working base to build off of. I think that it should be capable of doing the task you specify, although I'm not quite sure how it would be done.
The other framework for machine learning and object recognition that I have seen is Apple's Create ML/ Core ML system (Swift or Objective-C). My experience with that one is as limited as cloning a git repo and poking around inside, but it looks pretty powerful.

How to Tag or Metadata Image Files Across Mac and PC

someone asked a similar question a few years ago, but I need some additional detail.
I'm looking to build out a searchable image library for my company. We have thousands of images and I'm trying to find the best way to "tag them" so-to-speak. The images are stored on a network drive and accessed by both Mac and Windows users. I work on a Mac and have Adobe Bridge, but not everyone accessing these images will. I've seen that in Windows, you can add tags to files for searching, and in OS X, you can add Spotlight comments (delimited by commas, it can be used as search tags), however, the 2 don't carry over across platforms.
Is there anything out there that may help in accomplishing this goal?
I'm not sure how XML works. If I apply tags in Bridge or another software, will these tags be available to everyone, on whatever platform, if they are using a software that can read them? How does this work? Do they simply open the folder in one of those programs and have the ability to search and filter?
Thanks in advance!
I am afraid I don't have a panacea for all file formats (JPG/PNG/TIFF etc) across all OSes (macOS, Linux, Windows) across disparate application software (Photoshop/Lightroom/GIMP and MS-Paint or whatever Microsoft's offering is). However, if I put what I know, maybe someone else will know better and tell us so! Or maybe someone will know some better solutions for some pieces of the puzzle. So, in that vein...
If you have, know and love Adobe Bridge and you are "The Keeper" of the data, I would input, manage and control all metadata through that.
Then I believe you will need to find a way to do a nightly/weekly automated distribution of that data in a format intelligible to the "users" of the data. So, you will need to achieve the following:
Schedule an export from Bridge - my idea would be OSX's launchd
Export metadata from Adobe Bridge - my idea would be Adobe Extendscript
At this point I am thinking I would want to go with the easiest to parse, probably CSV (Comma Separated Values)
Now you have the info and will have to look at what your client users are using for application software and OS, and generate something intelligible to them from the CSV. I am thinking of tools like jhead, exiftool, ImageMagick (which can insert IPTC data).
So, there's a marker in the sand... if anyone knows better - please share your knowledge!
Other possibilities that spring to mind, are Lightroom which is reputedly excellent with metadata handling, or a dedicated picture-searching web-based application on your Intranet that runs on a small database updated nightly from exported Bridge metadata.
I guess the nature of the users' enquiries will be pretty important in deciding a way to go....

Codeigniter and Google maps Api V 3

I am looking for some advice from somebody who has used Google maps and Codeigniter. I am new to maps and working on a project that is built with Codeigniter and uses Google Maps. I am wondering whether to incorporate it directly into the project or use a library for it.
I have found a library here - http://biostall.com/codeigniter-google-maps-v3-api-library and have started using it and have found it easy to use for incorporating maps. I am wondering however if anyone else has used it and if so does it have the full functionality of Google Maps.
I know that Google Maps has amazing features and I am a bit anxious to continue with the library and discover later in my project that it doesn't support the functionality I might need. I am going to keep researching it but if anyone has experience with it I would appreciate some advice.
Yes, I've used two different Google Maps libraries for CodeIgniter 2.
I ended up keeping the one you've linked for both projects. It was cleaner to use than the other, less helpers to load and lines to write in order to create a simple map. I don't know what else you're really looking for here. Also, with this library, I only needed to pass two variables into the View... where with the other, the View needed a bit more complex code. Really, there's only two variables that need to be passed into the view... the Map and the JavaScript for the map. If you're clever, you could also combine them into one.
Quote OP:
"I know that Google Maps has amazing features and I am a bit anxious to continue with the library and discover later in my project that it doesn't support the functionality I might need."
So what? If that's your only concern, then don't worry. Switching out something like this is pretty easy. Since it's invoked and configured in your Controller (or it should be), there's relatively little code to change.
(The developer was also very responsive to my support requests, which is saying a lot for a open source project.)

Performant and Easy to Use Non-GPLed Genetic Programming Library

I would like to build an application that uses Genetic Programming to figure out what exactly the user is asking. It's a programming application for non-programmers. Basically the user feeds the application a bunch of examples, and from the examples the application will derive the rules required to build a new program for the user's own use/distribution.
I've built prototypes using linear regression but it could only solve simple problems. This week I experimented genetic programming using pyevolve and it worked much more brilliantly than I expected! However, I suspect it being written in pure python made it require dozens of seconds to solve an example, whereas in my application I only have at most a couple of seconds time.
I've been trying to find a more performant library that was as easy to use as pyevolve but cannot find a suitable one. I tried openBeagle but after getting an example running, and hours of poring through the documentation later, I still cannot find a way to actually pick an individual out of the "Vivarium". I've seen people recommend GAUL but that is a GPL library and will limit how I can license my future application. I've tried to download lil-gp but the ftp download links are locked by a university's login screen.
Since the application will be a Mac OS X cocoa application, I did not consider Java, C# or Matlab GP libraries.
As a developer of Open BEAGLE I still recommend you to use that library if you seek a fast GP library. Retrieving your best individual would actually be done by running a second program that parses the XML file that is logged at the end of the evolution. Otherwise, you can access it through the Vivarium.getHallOfFame() method and then sort it and access the first element with the HallOfFame.operator[]. The Member you'll get is a struct of the individual with the generation it was recorded and in what deme it was.
That way you can get access to the best individual that ever lived in your evolution.
If you have specific questions on Open BEAGLE I recommend you to ask them directly to the developer list, we usually answer very quickly.
Although, if you wish to try a very different library in Python I recommend you DEAP that allows a lot more flexibility than Pyevolve. Some GP examples run much faster under PyPy than Python.
If you ask the key developer of the GAUL project for permission to use an alternative license agreement, then he* is quite likely to agree.
*"he" is me.

Windows Help files - what are the options?

Back in the old days, Help was not trivial but possible: generate some funky .rtf file with special tags, run it through a compiler, and you got a WinHelp file (.hlp) that actually works really well.
Then, Microsoft decided that WinHelp was not hip and cool anymore and switched to CHM, up to the point they actually axed WinHelp from Vista.
Now, CHM maybe nice, but everyone that tried to open a .chm file on the Network will know the nice "Navigation to the webpage was canceled" screen that is caused by security restrictions.
While there are ways to make CHM work off the network, this is hardly a good choice, because when a user presses the Help Button he wants help and not have to make some funky settings.
Bottom Line: I find CHM absolutely unusable. But with WinHelp not being an option anymore either, I wonder what the alternatives are, especially when it comes to integrate with my Application (i.e. for WinHelp and CHM there are functions that allow you to directly jump to a topic)?
PDF has the disadvantage of requiring the Adobe Reader (or one of the more lightweight ones that not many people use). I could live with that seeing as this is kind of standard nowadays, but can you tell it reliably to jump to a given page/anchor?
HTML files seem to be the best choice, you then just have to deal with different browsers (CSS and stuff).
Edit: I am looking to create my own Help Files. As I am a fan of the "No Setup, Just Extract and Run" Philosophy, i had that problem many times in the past because many of my users will run it off the network, which causes exactly this problem.
So i am looking for a more robust and future-proof way to provide help to my users without having to code a different help system for each application i make.
CHM is a really nice format, but that Security Stuff makes it unusable, as a Help system is supposed to provide help to the user, not to generate even more problems.
HTML would be the next best choice, ONLY IF you would serve them from a public web server. If you tried to bundle it with your app, all the files (and images (and stylesheets (and ...) ) ) would make CHM look like a gift from gods.
That said, when actually bundled in the installation package, (instead of being served over the network), I found the CHM files to work nicely.
OTOH, another pitfall about CHM files: Even if you try to open a CHM file on a local disk, you may bump into the security block if you initially downloaded it from somewhere, because the file could be marked as "came from external source" when it was obtained.
I don't like the html option, and actually moved from plain HTML to CHM by compressing and indexing them. Even use them on a handful of non-Windows customers even.
It simply solved the constant little breakage of people putting it on the network (nesting depth limited, strange locking effects), antivirus that died in directories with 30000 html files, and 20 minutes decompression time while installing on an older system, browser safety zones and features, miscalculations of needed space in the installer etc.
And then I don't even include the people that start "correcting" them, 3rd party product with faulty "integration" attempts etc, complaints about slowliness (browser start-up)
We all had waited years for the problems to go away as OSes and hardware improved, but the problems kept recurring in a bedazzling number of varieties and enough was enough. We found chmlib, and decided we could forever use something based on this as escape with a simple external reader, if the OS provided ones stopped working and switched.
Meanwhile we also have an own compiler, so we are MS free future-proof. That doesn't mean we never will change (solutions with local web-servers seem favourite nowadays), but at least we have a choice.
Our software is both distributed locally to the clients and served from a network share. We opted for generating both a CHM file and a set of HTML files for serving from the network. Users starting the program locally use the CHM file, and users getting their program served from a network share has to use the HTML files.
We use Help and Manual and can thus easily produce both types of output from the same source project. The HTML files also contain searching capabilities and doesn't require a web server, so though it isn't an optimal solution, works fine.
So far all the single-file types for Windows seems broken in one way or another:
WinHelp - obsoleted
HtmlHelp (CHM) - obsoleted on Vista, doesn't work from network share, other than that works really nice
Microsoft Help 2 (HXS) - this seems to work right up until the point when it doesn't, corrupted indexes or similar, this is used by Visual Studio 2005 and above, as an example
If you don't want to use an installer and you don't want the user to perform any extra steps to allow CHM files over the network, why not fall back to WinHelp? Vista does not include WinHlp32.exe out of the box, but it is freely available as a download for both Vista and Server 2008.
It depends on how import the online documentation is to your product, a good documentation infrastructure can be complex to establish but once done it pays off. Here is how we do it -
Help source DITA compilant XML, stored in SCC (ClearCase).
Help editing XMetal
Help compilation, customized Open DITA Toolkit, with custom Perl/Java preprocessing
Help source cross references applications resources at compile time, .RC files etc
Help deliverables from single source, PDF, CHM, Eclipse Help, HTML.
Single source repository produces help for multiple products 10+ with thousands of shared topics.
From what you describe I would look at Eclipse Help, its not simple to integrate into .NET or MFC applications, you basically have to do the help mapping to resolve the request to a URL then fire the URL to Eclipse Help wrapper or a browser.
Is the question how to generate your own help files, or what is the best help file format?
Personally, I find CHM to be excellent. One of the first things I do when setting up a machine is to download the PHP Manual in CHM format (http://www.php.net/download-docs.php) and add a hotkey to it in Crimson Editor. So when I press F1 it loads the CHM and performs a search for the word my cursor is on (great for quick function reference).
If you are doing "just extract and run", you are going to run in security issues. This is especially true if you are users are running Vista (or later). is there a reason why you wanted to avoid packaging your applications inside an installer? Using an installer would alleviate the "external source" problem. You would be able to use .chm files without any problems.
We use InstallAware to create our install packages. It's not cheap, but is very good. If cost is your concern, WIX is open source and pretty robust. WIX does have a learning curve, but it's easy to work with.
PDF has the disadvantage of requiring the Adobe Reader
I use Foxit Reader on Windows at home and at work. A lot smaller and very quick to open. Very handy when you are wondering what exactly a80000326.pdf is and why it is clogging up your documents folder.
I think the solution we're going to end up going with for our application is hosting the help files ourselves. This gives us immediate access to the files and the ability to keep them up to date.
What I plan is to have the content loaded into a huge series of XML files, each one containing help for a specific item. This XML would contain links to other XML files. We would use XSLT to display the contents as necessary.
Depending on the licensing, we may build a client-specific XSLT file in order to tailor the look and feel to what they need. We may need to be able to only show help for particular versions of our product as well and that can be done by filtering out stuff in the XSLT.
I use a commercial package called AuthorIT that can generate a number of different formats, such as chm, html, pdf, word, windows help, xml, xhtml, and some others I have never heard of (does dita ring a bell?).
It is a content management system oriented towards the needs of technical documentation writers.
The advantage is that you can use and re-use the same content to build a set of guides, and then generate them in different formats.
So the bottom line relative to the question of choosing chm or html or whatever is that if you are using this you are not locked into a given format, but you can provide several among which the user can choose, and you can even add more formats as you go along, at no extra cost.
If you just have one guide to create it won't be worth your while, but if you have a documentation set to manage then it is the best to my knowledge. Their support is very helpful also.

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