how to pick the correct NSPropertyListFormat - objective-c

what is the criteria of choosing the format ?
These are the formats
NSPropertyListOpenStepFormat
NSPropertyListXMLFormat_v1_0
NSPropertyListBinaryFormat_v1_0

Well, you almost certainly don't want the OpenStep format, so that leaves XML or Binary. Do you want it human readable or not?

Just pick NSPropertyListXMLFormat_v1_0
unless you have a reason to pick another one, then you wouldn't be asking this question.

Related

How to use Alignment API to generate a Alignment Format file?

I am going to attend the Instance Matching of OAEI, now I need to make my results to Alignment Format. In order to achieve it, I have learned official tutorials.(link:http://alignapi.gforge.inria.fr/tutorial/tutorial1/index.html).
But there are many differences between the method taught and the method I want. In other words, I can't understand the API.
This is my situation:
I have 2 rdf file(person11.rdf and person12.rdf respectively.data link is http://oaei.ontologymatching.org/2010/im/index.html, the PR dataset), each file has information of many person. I want to find the coreferent entities, the results must be printed in Alignment Format. I find the results by using SPARQL, but I don't know how to print it in Alignment Format.
So, I have three questions:
First, if I want to generate a Alignment Format file, is the method taught the only way?
Second, can you give me your method(code better) to generate the Alignment Format file? Maybe I am wrong from the beginning, can you give me some suggestions?
Third, if you attended OAEI or know something about Instance Matching, can you give me some advice? I want to find the coreferent entities.
Thank you!
First question: I guess that the "mentioned method" is the one in tutorial1. It is not the appropriate one since you have to write a program to output the alignment format and this is a command line interface tutorial. In this case, you'd better look at http://alignapi.gforge.inria.fr/tutorial/tutorial2/index.html
Then, there are basically two ways to do:
The advised one (for several reasons and for participating to OAEI) is to follow these tutorials, to create an empty alignment in it, to create the correspondences from the results of your SPARQL query and to render it. Everything is covered by the tutorials but the part concerning your SPARQL queries. This assumes that you are programming in Java.
The non-advised solution (primarily non advised because you will have to debug your own renderer), is to write, in any programming language that you want a program that output the format (which corresponds to what you cite).
Think about it: how would you expect that the Alignment API knows the results of your SPARQL query? If you come up with a nice solution, contact the API developers, they may integrate it and others could benefit.
Second question: I cannot do better than what is above.
Third question: too general. Read the OAEI results (http://oaei.ontologymatching.org) and look at the code of others.
Good luck!

What is the difference between the sql blob and image types

This question was actually posed to me this morning by one of my compadres, and it completely threw me, in so far as I didn't even realise SQL had an 'image' datatype so I've always simply gone down the route of compacting files/images etc into BLOB fields.
After having a (very) quick look around msdn the most I could really find was the info that the image datatype pages works like a blob or varbinary(max) up to a [max] size of ~2GB but past this can't seem to find too much more about it.
I'm wondering if maybe the image datatype is a way of providing indexable/searchable metadata on images within SQL...?
Does anyone have anything to offer, by way of links or explanations regarding this?
Any help would be gratefully received, so many thanks in advance of any replies!
UPDATE / Possible answer
After a little more digging I've perhaps acheived some headway with this...
It may well be that my original thoughts on what the "image" type relates to may have been somewhat misguided, maybe due to the type being titled "image" (which I apparently found quite misleading on first look) which I thought related to an image in a mimetype kinda way, but which appears to infer more of a "disk-image" or "binary-image" sort of idea.
In this way it seems that the IMAGE type was introduced to SQL before the varbinary type was allowed as a (max) field, possibly as a way of storing files in SQL in the way that is now taken for granted (by myself at least) with the use of VARBINARY(MAX)...
For Reference (both reasonably old but seem to fit the bill):
http://channel9.msdn.com/Forums/Coffeehouse/138883-Storing-Retrieving-images-from-SQL-Server-2005
http://www.basenow.com/help/Data_types_in_Microsoft_SQL_Server.asp
If anyone can offer any constructive crit on this possible answer that would be really useful in trying to understand this...
Cheers All!
It is vendor dependent but generally:
A blob/image data type is a column type which stores binary data in the database separate from rest of the columns. So everytime you ask for image/blob data, database looks up the location and reads the data and send back to you.
Some vendors do TEXT data type which is the same thing wit the the difference it accepts textual data so you can put full-text indexes on them.
As you're referencing Microsoft SQL Server, one important thing to keep in mind when choosing between IMAGE and VARBINARY data types is that Microsoft is deprecating the IMAGE type - so the fact that you did not use it is in your case a very good thing.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143729.aspx

Is "campaign_$" a bad name for a SQL column?

PostgreSQL has allowed me to name a column "campaign_$". I like the name because it's short and to the point, and other potential names like "campaign_receipts" seem longer and less clear.
BUT, I wonder if I'll eventually regret putting a $ symbol in a column name, either in PHP or in some other distant part of the architecture. Should I just stick to letters and underscores?
Thanks!
Yes, you should. "campaign_receipts" is a better name.
You probably won't regret, but I still wouldn't recommend it.
What happens when you expand into Europe?
Also, it will look strange and confusing to new developers.
In addition to the other excellent reasons I'll also mention that "$" in my mind is not clear at all. Does that mean campaign expenses? Campaign savings? Campaign values?
There's a VERY strong convention that tables and columns are named using only letters, numbers, and (possibly) underscores, so I would consider this poor style. Beyond the i18n concerns that other posters mention, there are probably a very large number of tools that expect table and column names following this convention.
I think it is bad practice to put special characters into a column name. Just spell out the word like campaign_money or campaign_funds and then the issue of internationalization or other possible issues become a thing of the past.
It should be fine, however it may cause you more problems down the line when you want to export the data to another system, things like that.
It's good to get into the habbit of naming columns/variables etc with no special characters, as usually they are more trouble than they are worth.
I wouldn't use it.
The "$" might not be valid in future databases you use (at some point you might migrate away from PostgreSQL to something else) and it also might pose problems at the application level if you do anything that maps column names to object properties if your programming language doesn't allow method names to have "$" in them.
Just my suggestion.

Should I use proper punctuation for single sentence alert/notification popups?

Is it necessary to use a period for single sentence notification boxes? Even though its considered proper grammar to do so, it just looks ugly and feels too formal.
Here are two screenies for comparison (first includes period, second doesn't).
alt text http://wordofjohn.com/files/stack_alert_1.png
alt text http://wordofjohn.com/files/stack_alert_2.png
Can't go wrong with correct grammar
Good grammar shows to your customers that you took time to make a good software even where others might not took time.
This way they can expect the best out of you and your company.
If you are using a full sentence to tell the user what to do, then I think proper grammar is important, although I always stay away from exclamation points, I find them annoying.
It is more preference that anything, but I like to maintain the best grammar possible in any situation.
In both instances you capitalized the first word in the sentence so I would say go with proper grammar
but it really is a preference
I'd vote No.
These alerts are like signposts or roadsigns, they need to present a brief but important message as succinctly as possible.
My reasoning extended - I think it's subjective, and so I doubt anyone's going to have a bad user experience because of the presense or absence of a full stop (period). A question mark might be confusing if it was left out, but a full stop is kind of implicit.
If you use periods at the end of your sentences, then users will know that the string hasn't been truncated (well OK, they won't know that it hasn't been truncated, but it's a good indicator. Plus, as others have said, it shows you went to the trouble to get it right.
I can't remember - what do MS/Apple do?
Let me explain my preference with an analogy.
I used to work at a bookstore where they sold Bibles. Some of them were Cambridge calfskin leather bound deluxe editions that came in special boxes for over US$100.00 each. Some of them were mass market paperback throw-away versions for US$1.99 each. The cheap ones often had glaring grammatical and spelling errors. I don't think this was a coincidence.
Regardless of where my software is going to be used or what it is for, I try to do my best to make sure it gets put (metaphorically) on the high-quality, expensive rack. Every time. Even at the risk of sounding "too formal".
If you are using the string as a normal resource, you (or someone else in your project) could use the text in another context, which would mean you need to keep track of which resources contain a period or not.

When to join name and when not to?

Most languages give guidelines to separate different words of a name by underscores (python, C etc.) or by camel-casing (Java). However the problem is when to consider the names as separate. The options are:
1) Do it at every instance when separate words from the English dictionary occur e.g. create_gui(), recv_msg(), createGui(), recvMsg() etc.
2) Use some intuition to decide when to do this and when not to do this e.g. recvmsg() is OK, but its better to have create_gui() .
What is this intuition?
The question looks trivial. But it presents a problem which is common and takes at least 5 seconds for each instance whenever it appears.
I always do your option 1, and as far as I can tell, all modern frameworks do.
One thing that comes to mind that just sticks names together is the standard C library. But its function names are often pretty cryptic anyway.
I'm probably biased as an Objective-C programmer, where things tend to be quite spelled out, but I'd never have a method like recvMsg. It would be receiveMessage (and the first parameter should be of type Message; if it's a string, then it should be receiveString or possibly receiveMessageString depending on context). When you spell things out this way, I think the question tends to go away. You would never say receivemessage.
The only time I abbreviate is when the abbreviation is more clear than the full version. createGUI is good because "GUI" (gooey) is the common way we say it in English. createGraphicalUserInterface is actually more confusing, so should be avoided.
So to the original question, I believe #1 is best, but coupled with an opposition to unclear abbreviations.
One of the most foolish naming choices ever made in Unix was creat(), making a nonsense word to save one keystroke. Code is written once and read many times, so it should be biased towards ease of reading rather than writing.
For me, and this is just me, I prefer to follow whatever is conventional for the language, thus camelCase for Java and C++, underscore for C and SQL.
But whatever you do, be consistent within any source file or project. The reader of your code will thank you; seeing an identifier that is inconsistent with most others makes the reader pause and ask "is something different going on with this identifier? Is there something here I should be noticing?"
Or in other words, follow the Principal of Least Surprise.
Edit: This got downmodded why??
Just follow coding style, such moments usually well described.
For example:
ClassNamesInCamelNotaionWithFirstLetterCapitalized
classMethod()
classMember
CONSTANTS_IN_UPPERCASE_WITH_UNDERSCORE
local_variables_in_lowercase_with_underscores