Author Archives: Chris Kottmyer

Powerful Accessories to Excel – Introduction

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Dear Readers,

I wanted to start a quick tutorial targeted at Excel users and highlighting cool technologies that are relatively easy to learn and can provide a lot of benefit.  Basically, they are technologies that provide a lot of bang for their “effort” bucks.  The technologies I want to cover in order of ease to learn are:

Bash/Batch – Bash and Batch are shells for Linux/Mac and Windows respectively.  Shells interact with your operating system to allow you to do things like read files, manipulate data, create remote login sessions and schedule tasks on your computer.  One of the great things about bash and batch is that if you study it long enough, you can start using “cloud” computers, which allow computers to do work, while you are sleeping.

SQL/RDBMS – Relational databases allow you to store data compactly on your computer and provide a convenient interface for doing data manipulation.  One great reason you should pick up this tool is that it allows you to specify relationships between data: Student – Class -Teacher – School being a good example and then make statements like: I want only class taught by John Naughton that are considered math classes and only students whose first name starts with A.  One great thing about databases is scale.  You can work with 100s of millions of rows. Since SQL is a standard for data access, there are SQL-esque access to big data tools like Hadoop and Spark, which is software that allows you to take dozens of computer and have them process things in parallel.

Python – Python is a general purpose programming language that provides countless libraries for different purposes.  Do you want to develop a website or automate networking?  Python can do this.  Do you want to scrape a website, travel through a social network or do analysis on wikipedia?  Python is a great tool for it.  Do you want to be on the cutting edge of machine learning and AI by having direct interface to more advanced libraries?  Python…  Python can also be used for data manipulation and processing, which I will focus on.

I focus on the above three based on my knowledge.  Other noteworthy technologies include R, which I hope to cover in a future article.  During these tutorials, I might also mention other cool concepts or technologies.

If you are interested in this lecture series, I will put it under tutorial categories.

Best,

Chris

 

Learn Web Development: Front End Certificate

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Hello Readers,

I’m finally finishing up freecodecamp.com front-end certificate after spending about 1 months on it (on and off).  Great course if you want to learn some basic Javascript and html manipulation.  Some of the cool little projects you’ll end up doing:

Weather App:

Wikipedia Search:

Twitch TV:

Calculator (note calculator is not responsive):

There is also a nice algorithms section, which has some rather complicated problems.  For example, you need to find all primes within a given number range, calculate the greatest common denominator for a given number and manipulate records.

Best,

Chris

 

Learn Web Development: Quick and Simple

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Dear Reader,

A non-profit called free code camp provides lessons in JavaScript, HTML and CSS. These are core web technologies. The nice thing about this service is that it is bite size. A lesson might take about 3 minutes to complete. As you go further along, they become progressively harder and tackle more advanced topics:

https://www.freecodecamp.org

Most of the lessons explain a very simple concept: How to change the color of a specific component on a website, how to add text to your website or how to make a element shake? Once you get to around lesson 200 or so, you’ll start doing more advanced stuff, like going through arrays of arrays in JavaScript. This is nice, because you’ll get to learn the basics well and then start getting into more challenging topics.

The other nice thing about this program, other than being free, is that you get to do bigger projects. For example, you might end up doing a tribute page to a specific artist, Chester Bennington for me, or make your own web portfolio. These are hosted on codepen.io:

My examples are below:

Tribute Page:

Web Design Page:

50 lessons and you already get some tangible results. Definitely worth it if you are new to web development and want to learn. If you are more advanced, this is a good 3 day course that will let you brush up on basic web technologies and get some practice at JavaScript.

Chris

WordPress and Adsense (Google’s ad campaign)

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Good Afternoon Readers,

Google has an ad-network called Adsense. Adsense uses predictive intelligence to cater ads to people that visit websites. It seems to do this via cookies and google search results. Adsense now runs on: ChristopherKottmyer.com.

The process of getting advertisements is pretty easy. You sign up for google using your gmail.com account at: adsense.com. They then provide you with a small snippet of code, which you put in the header tags of your website:

<head>
Somewhere in here!!!
</head>

They then give you this ominous message about taking 3 days to verify your website (in case you display things like explicit content). After a bit of impatience, you can check your account and if you are lucky, you become certified and can start placing advertisements on your website:

After certification, you get can log-in to Adsense website. If you want to ad advertisements, you need to first define your ads and then get a code snippet that you can put in the body tags of your website. You can find this in ( My Ads > Add units ) section:

If you click the [ New ad unit ]. You’ll get a series of options to define you advertisement. These mostly involve things like the pixel size: 300 x 400, color of the advertisement and where the advertisement would be placed. A few examples of placements include between blog posts, on top/bottom of the blog or on the side bar. A cool thing I noticed is some advertisements are responsive, which means they resize for your phone (neat trick)! After setting all the options, google generates some code for you. Place these anywhere between the body tags to start advertising in your websites (where start can take up to 2 hours). You can’t control what advertisements you get (maybe…still exploring this).

How much does a click/impression get you in terms of dollars? The first click I got generated about $1.75. Now, it’s all gone down hill and I’m seeing $.30 a click. With just 3 clicks and a whooping $3.00 total, I’m completely lost as to what the average going rate is. Sadly, I won’t be able to cash this out until my account reaches $100.00 (at this rate 100 clicks). That’s googles policy.

Best,

Chris