OakLeaf Systems

Updated 1/6/2012 with addition of Collection of Personal Information (Office Store) section.

Updated 12/31/2012 with addition of Collection of Personal Information (Windows Store) section and change of contact information.

Your Privacy
OakLeafLogoMVP100pxYour privacy is important to us. To better protect your privacy we provide this notice explaining our online information practices and the choices you can make about the way your information is collected and used. To make this notice easy to find, we make it available on our homepage and at every point where personally identifiable information may be requested.

Our Commitment To Children’s Privacy
Protecting the privacy of the very young is especially important. For that reason, the OakLeaf Systems Website will never collect or maintain information at our website from those we actually know are under 18, and no part of our website is structured to attract anyone under 18.

Collection of Personal Information (OakLeaf Website)
When visiting the OakLeaf Systems Website, the IP address used to access the site will be logged along with the dates and times of access. This information is purely used to analyze trends, administer the site, track users movement and gather broad demographic information for internal use. Most importantly, any recorded IP addresses are not linked to personally identifiable information.

Collection of Personal Information (OakLeaf ToDo List Sample and Windows Store Apps)
The OakLeaf ToDo List Windows Mobile Services Demo is a free Windows Store App for computers running Windows 8 and devices running Windows RT. This app accumulates the text of ToDo items from users who sign in with their Microsoft Account (formerly Live ID). Access to individual users’ ToDo items items is provided by disguised representation of their Microsoft Account ID in the form of a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID). A user cannot view other users’ active ToDo items. Representatives of OakLeaf Systems can view all users’ ToDo items, but cannot associate them with a user’s identity. Representatives of OakLeaf systems periodically delete all ToDo items marked completed to reduce the database size.

Collection of Personal Information (OakLeaf Systems Retail Survey App and Office Store Apps)
The OakLeaf Systems Retail Survey App is a free Office SharePoint App available from the Office store. The app requires access by a Microsoft Account (formerly Live ID) to the user’s SharePoint 2013 Online site. OakLeaf Systems does not have access to others’ SharePoint 2013 Online sites, so it cannot collect personal information from this source.

Links to third party Websites
We have included links on this site for your use and reference. We are not responsible for the privacy policies on these websites. You should be aware that the privacy policies of these sites may differ from our own.

Changes to this Privacy Statement
The contents of this statement may be altered at any time, at our discretion.

Affiliate Disclosure
This blog does not accept cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation. Any compensation received will never influence the content, topics or posts made in this blog.

This blog may contain content which might present a conflict of interest. This content may not always be identified.

Contact
If you have any questions regarding the privacy policy or anything else about this site, you may contact us at support@oakleafsystems.org.

Posted by Roger Jennings (--rj) at 10:33 AM 0 comments  

Labels: OakLeaf, OakLeaf Blog, OakLeaf Systems Privacy Statement, OakLeaf Systems Website Terms of Service

My live OakLeaf Systems Azure Table Services Sample Project demo runs two small Windows Azure Web role instances from Microsoft’s South Central US (San Antonio, TX) data center. Here’s its uptime report from Pingdom.com for March 2012:

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Following is detailed Pingdom response time data for the month of March 2012:

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This is the tenth uptime report for the two-Web role version of the sample project. Reports will continue on a monthly basis.

The Azure Table Services Sample Project

See my Republished My Live Azure Table Storage Paging Demo App with Two Small Instances and Connect, RDP post of 5/9/2011 for more details of the Windows Azure test harness instance.

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imageI believe this project is the oldest continuously running Windows Azure application. I first deployed it in November 2008 when I was writing Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform for Wiley/WROX, which was the first book published about Windows Azure.

The application runs the default set of Windows Azure Diagnostics. About 5 GB of Event Counter data provide the source data for my Generating Big Data for Use with SQL Azure Federations and Apache Hadoop on Windows Azure Clusters post of 1/8/2012.

For more details about the Table Services Sample project or to download its source code, visit its Microsoft Pinpoint entry. Following are Pinpoint listings for three other related OakLeaf sample projects, two of which are live in the South Central US data center:

• Microsoft Codename "Data Explorer" Mashup with "Social Analytics" Data (1/24/2012, live)
• Microsoft Codename “Social Analytics” WinForms Client Sample (11/22/2011)
• SQL Azure Reporting Services Preview Sample (10/24/2011, live)

Posted by Roger Jennings (--rj) at 8:09 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Azure, Azure Table Storage Services, Downtime Reports, OakLeaf Blog, Pingdom, SQL Azure, SQL Azure Reporting Services, Uptime Reports, Windows Azure, Windows Azure Storage

Updated below on 7/30/2011 with reasons why I abandoned attempts to use Google for sharing data from relational tables.

Google opened a public beta version of Google Base to testers on 11/16/2005. According to program manager Bindu Reddy’s First Base post to the Official Google Blog:

imageToday we're excited to announce Google Base, an extension of our existing content collection efforts like web crawl, Google Sitemaps, Google Print and Google Video. Google Base enables content owners to easily make their information searchable online. Anyone, from large companies to website owners and individuals, can use it to submit their content in the form of data items. We'll host the items and make them searchable for free. There's more info here.

Google Base pages no longer are available from the Google site and the last post to the Google Base site in the Wayback Machine appears to be 12/18/2008. The following table provides links to my early posts to the OakLeaf Systems blog about a number of Google Base tests I ran in 2005, as well as a review of the DabbleDB beta in March 2006:

It’s interesting to note that Google supported data insert operations using the Atom format before AtomPub became a standard. Microsoft later adopted AtomPub as the foundation of it’s Open Data Protocol (OData) for RESTful create, retrieve, update, and delete (CRUD) operations on Windows Azure storage, as well as SharePoint lists.

Added 7/30/2011: I abandoned my attempts to use Google Base for sharing database and spreadsheet tables at the end of 2005 because I encountered issues with severe latency (as long as a few hours to publish inserted data), limited and restrictive data type repertoire, chancy (and slow) data upload techniques, and a cumbersome, unintuitive client UI.

Google removed Google Base’s search page on 10/8/2009 and abandoned Google Base in September 2010 by moving it into the Google Merchant Center as the data store for Google Product Search. Google Merchant Center’s data has a restrictive schema with required attributes predefined for selling products. Google announced on 12/17/2010 that Google Base's API had been deprecated in favor of a set of new APIs known as Google Shopping APIs. Google also abandoned its Google Health services that had database-backed services in June 2011. Microsoft currently is attempting to woo former Google Health users to its HealthVault service with a data conversion application.

Posted by Roger Jennings (--rj) at 5:58 PM 0 comments  

Labels: Atom 1.0, AtomPub, DabbleDB, Google Base, Google Data Services, Google Health, HealthVault, OakLeaf Blog, OData, Open Data Protocol

Smartphone users with Webkit browsers will see OakLeaf Systems’ posts in Blogger’s new generic mobile template, which went live today. Here’s Blogger’s preview of the current appearance:

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The default mobile template is in use because I started with a very early version of the current template and didn’t want to move to the new version, which my Microsoft Access blog uses. However, even the new version doesn’t appear with a designer template in the online preview:

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Overall, I believe the Blogger team did a good job on the templates. Too bad that they render only with Webkit browsers (Chrome, Android, Safari, WebOS, Nokia S60, and others). Perhaps by the time I sign up for a Windows 7 phone from Verizon, the mobile templates will support additional smartphone browsers.

Posted by Roger Jennings (--rj) at 11:52 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Blogger, Blogger Mobile Templates, OakLeaf Blog, Roger Jennings' Access Blog

Amazon has made the OakLeaf Systems blog available for the Kindle for about a year. I occasionally receive 10ドル or so as my share of subscription proceeds.

[画像:image]A bargain.

On 3/13/2011, I received the following message from the Amazon’s Kindle Publishing for Blogs group:

Dear Publisher,

[画像:image] We noticed your blog (listed below) has not updated for more than 60 days.

Blog Title: OakLeaf Systems

Blog ASIN: B0029U16XO

On investigating the feed URL, we received the following error message:

Feed Error: XML error in feed. Details : feed.xml:603:0: junk after document element Feed URL registered with Kindle Publishing: http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml [Emphasis added.]

Kindle customers expect to receive frequent updates for blogs and news feeds to which they subscribe. Because blogs should update at least once per month, we are canceling blogs that have not updated in more than 60 days. Accordingly, if you do not fix this issue and publish new updates within 7 days, we will remove your publication from the Kindle Store.

If you have any questions or concerns, please write to us at kindle-publishing-blogs@amazon.com.

This message surprised me because I update the blog at least three times per week. I replied on the same day:

Hi,

... [Copy of preceding message]

[画像:image] This blog is updated almost on a daily basis. See http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com.

I use Windows Live Writer, which supports XHTML, for authoring. The Atom feed displays as expected in IE8’s Feed reader. Here’s an example of the first page of today’s feed:

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Here’s the feed in Mozilla FireFox 3.6:

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Note that this blog has exceptionally long posts.

Something appears to [be] wrong with your Atom reader.

Please advise status.

Thanks,

Roger Jennings
OakLeaf Blog
Microsoft Access Blog

I received an acknowledgment of my message the next day. Notice that I didn’t take umbrage at Amazon’s characterizing my blog’s content as “junk.”

After prompting, I received the following response on 4/4/2011:

Hello Roger,

[画像:image] Your blog started publishing regularly to Kindle.

After some investigation, our technical team identified that your blog has too many images and articles resulting in a huge increase in your Kindle Blog's size. This made the blog error out in the Kindle Publishing pipeline.

To prevent this issue in future, we suggest you to reduce the number of images provided in the Kindle Blog feed.

…

Best regards,

Srinivasa Krishnan
http://www.amazon.com

I don’t think I’m ready to write an AtomPub filter to accommodate Kindle’s limitations. The Kindle delivers illustrated books and thick magazines, such as The New Yorker and PC Magazine; why not lavishly illustrated blogs like mine? Hopefully, they’ve fixed the “Kindle Publishing pipeline.”

Guess I’ll need to buy a Kindle to see how Amazon renders my blog. In the meantime, I’ve added a permalink to the Kindle edition in the left frame.

Posted by Roger Jennings (--rj) at 2:00 PM 0 comments  

Labels: Amazon, Amazon Kindle, AtomPub, Blogger, OakLeaf Blog