Pentaho seems to provide more comprehensive coverage of BI than Eclipse BIRT and Jaspersoft. It has the following components:

• Data Integration – Kettle
• Analysis Service (OLAP) – Mondrian
• Reporting
• Data Mining – Weka
• Dashboard
• Large Volume Data Handling (through Hadoop)

Since there is already a comparison of reporting functionality between Pentaho, Eclipse BIRT and JasperReports, I am not going to get deep into its reporting functionality.

The component that I’ve tried is the data integration. It helps me do the some data integration tasks without writing my own custom code. Here I just give a brief introduction to this component.

Data Integration – Kettle
Data Integration is the first thing i tried when I picked up Pentaho. It has a GUI tool (called Spoon) that is built with Eclipse RCP. With the GUI tool, it’s very easy to define a data integration process.

There are two main elements in the pentaho data integration process: Transformation and Job. Transformation, as the name suggestions, is a process that does the data manipulation including data exportation, cleansing, format changing, importation and etc. Job may contain one or more transformation and adds more sanity checks (such as if a file exists) and utilities (e.g., emailing the result).

Both Transformation and Job are made up of steps. Pentaho already includes many types of steps that performs the most common tasks. There steps serve as bricks that you can use to build up the whole data integration process. In the GUI, you can easily use drag and drop to define the steps and hops to form the process. You can even preview the transformed data in some steps to make sure they are doing the right thing.

From the Spoon GUI tool welcome page, you can find a “Get Started” document that helps you build the first working example. In addition, the pentaho community web site provides useful documentation on how to use this data integration tool.

Eclipse BIRT has two components: A report designer and a report engine. the report designer interacts with user to generate an XML report design using its report design engine; while report engine reads the data and the XML report design to generate reports in different types of format (HTML, PDF, Excel, Word, and etc). The following chart from the eclipse BIRT website illustrates well.

Let’s come to Jasper. I use Jasper because there are two different things associated with Jasper: JasperReports and Jaspersoft. JasperReports is the open source java reporting library while Jaspersoft is a collection of software including JasperReports. Apparently, Jaspersoft is heading the BI direction straightforward as it includes more enterprise BI functions such as ETL, analysis, dashboard and etc. It does not seem Jaspersoft is open source, so we here only talk about JasperReports.

JasperReports claims to be “the world’s most popular open source reporting engine”. From it’s website, it says:

It is entirely written in Java and it is able to use data coming from any kind of data source and produce pixel-perfect documents that can be viewed, printed or exported in a variety of document formats including HTML, PDF, Excel, OpenOffice and Word.

Similar to Eclipse BIRT, JasperReports has a JasperReports Engine that reads data from a wide range of data sources (DB, XML, CSV and etc) and generates reports in different formats. This process is controlled via some configuration files or run time parameters, so it can be customized to an extend. The following is the chart from the JasperReports website that shows the process.

It seems the bare JasperReports does not have a component that allow users to design reports （there’s an additional one called iReport for report design), which Eclipse BIRT has. Apparently, an additional report designer make the software more user friendly. However, in another sense, the lightweight of JasperReports makes it easier to be embedded/integrated in a bigger software system.

Stack Overflow has a question asking about the difference of the two tools: BIRT vs JasperReports and someone gives a link that compares BIRT, JasperReports and even Pentaho in terms of their reporting features.

There are a lot of tools available for this big area. A Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence_tools) lists most BI related software. Of course, in this area, we hardly miss big players such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and etc. As always, these big software vendors offer proprietary software.

Apart from them, there are open source BI tools available as well. As I am new in this BI area, I am not sure how these open source BI tools are used in the market (if they are used) or they are just for academic purposes. I am also not sure if the BI market allows this type of open source tools to grow or they will be knocked out by the big players. Anyway, these questions are not important in this post. Here what I want to do is to briefly check some major open source business intelligence tools. Let’s get it started.

Eclipse BIRT and Jasper
Please check this post: Eclipse BIRT and Jasper

Pentaho
This will be discussed later

RapidMiner
This will be dicussed later

Java beans in Spring can also have their collection properties populated in the beans.xml file. The collection properties here mean things like List, Map and Array.

For example, if you want to create a JPA EntityManagerFactory with a set of connection properties, these properties can be configured in beans.xml like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
  xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd">
    <bean id="entityManagerFactoryCreator" 
    class="com.mytechtip.example.EntityManagerFactoryCreator">
    <property name="persistenceUnitName" value="HRMN_Repository"/>
    <property name="jpaProperties">
      <props>
        <prop key="openjpa.ConnectionURL">the_url</prop>
        <prop key="openjpa.ConnectionDriverName">the_driver_class_name</prop> 
        <prop key="openjpa.ConnectionUserName">the_user_name</prop>
        <prop key="openjpa.ConnectionPassword">the_password</prop>
      </props>
    </property>
  </bean>
</beans>

Here, jpaProperties in the actual java class “EntityManagerFactoryCreator” is an instance of Properties. And you can just use this properties to create EntityManagerFactory.

    // ...
    private Properties jpaProperties;
    //...
    public void setJpaProperties(Properties prop) {
        this.jpaProperties = prop;
    }
    // ...
    public EntityManagerFactory create() {
        return Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory("myPersistenceUnit", prop);
    }

Actually, Spring already have something similar for you to access EntityManagerFactory with ease. The beans used for the task are:

• org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalEntityManagerFactoryBean
• org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean

More information / examples can be found here about the support of JPA entity manager factory creatation in Spring.

If you have some RMVB files and want to play them on the DVD player, Then you need to convert the RMVB format to AVI.

Currently, I found out two methods to do this.

The first method is from this article: “How to Convert RMVB“. This method requires you install/download several pieces of software to do this. It’s a bit troublesome, but the article provides very detailed step-by-step instructions and it works.

The other method is to use the open source software alltoavi. It’s quite straight forward to use this software to convert RMVB. And it seems that this method takes less time to do the conversion compared with the first method.

The above two methods both use free software to accomplish the task. There are of course other software that can do this task and they may allow you to have better control for the conversion. Well, you have to pay for it.

Since version 1.6.1, Ant, the java build tool, has a core task called “cvschangelog“. It is quite useful to use this task to grab a list of recent changes committed to the CVS repository. The output of this task is in XML format. Something like the following:

<changelog>
<entry>
<date>2009-09-02</date>
<time>12:00</time>
<author>robin</author>
<file>
<name>test/ant/task/ChangeLog.txt</name>
<revision>1.2</revision>
<prevrevision>1.1</prevrevision>
</file>
<msg><![CDATA[A commit message]]></msg>
</entry>
<entry>
…
</entry>
…
</changelog>

To transform the xml formatted changelog into a human friendly html, you can do an XSL transformation with a XSL file. There is a default one in the Ant distribution, so you can use the following task to get a change log in html format.

<style in=”changelog.xml”
out=”changelog.html”
style=”${ant.home}/etc/changelog.xsl”>
<param name=”title” expression=”Ant ChangeLog”/>
<param name=”module” expression=”the_module”/>
<param name=”cvsweb” expression=”the_url”/>
</style>

The default generated html lists each commit change one by one. In some cases, we want to group the commit changes by dates. To do so, we have to change the default xsl file.

It seems that the new XSLT version 2.0 has specified a group functionality. However, it turns out only a few XSLT tools support this new feature. Fortunately, There is a way that allows us to do the grouping using XSLT version 1.0. By applying this method, we have the following looking xsl code for the HTML <BODY> part.

<body>
<h1>
<a name=”top”><xsl:value-of select=”$title”/></a>
</h1>
<p style=”text-align: right”>Designed for use with <a href=”http://ant.apache.org/”>Apache Ant</a>.</p>
<hr/>

<xsl:key name=”log-by-date” match=”entry” use=”date” />

<xsl:template match=”changelog”>
<xsl:for-each select=”entry[count(. | key('log-by-date', date)[1]) = 1]”>
<xsl:sort select=”date” order=”descending” />
<h2><xsl:value-of select=”date”/><xsl:text></xsl:text></h2>
<xsl:for-each select=”key(’log-by-date’, date)”>

<xsl:sort select=”time” order=”descending” />

<table border=”0″ width=”100%” cellspacing=”1″>
<tr>
<td class=”dateAndAuthor”>
<!– <xsl:value-of select=”date”/><xsl:text> </xsl:text> –>
<xsl:value-of select=”time”/><xsl:text> </xsl:text><xsl:value-of select=”author”/>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<pre><xsl:apply-templates select=”msg”/></pre>
<ul>
<xsl:apply-templates select=”file”/>
</ul>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

</body>

Use the above code to replace the <body> part in the original changelog.xsl file, then it  will allow you to group the change logs by date.

Although bank statements, credit card statement or online bank accounts provide all such information, these pieces of information scatter here and there and you lose track quickly and don’t have a whole picture to see where you are going. It gets worse when there are several bank / credit card accounts. So having a software or web sites to consolidate all such information seems a good idea.

Other than using a spread sheet to keep all the information together, there are quite a few sophisticated software or web site to do this job, some cost your money, some just free. The following lists some choices.

Desktop Financial Software – not free
Quicken, Microsoft Money. They are traditional desktop applications. That means you have to install them one your computer before you want to use them to manage your money. I haven’t used them but it should be easy to get started for a normal person.
It seems that quicken has a free online version for money management. However, don’t know how “free” it is and how many features it has.

Desktop Financial Software – free
GnuCash, jGnash. Both of them are free and probably open source software. GnuCash is actually beyond the personal level and can be used for catering small business (seems equivalent to Microsoft office accounting software). To use them, you may probably need to have a little bit of financial knowledge. For example, what is double entry?

Websites / online services / personal finance 2.0?
If you are confident enough to allow third party websites to handle your financial information, then you may embrace such so-called personal finance 2.0 websites. Among them are greensherpa.com, justthrive.com, rudder.com, mint.com and etc.

Most of them can retrieve your transactions from your nominated financial institutions or banks and aggregate them automatically for you and provide basic financial advice based on the data. Some of them charge you subscribe fee to use the online service, while some of them have free versions. However, it seems most of them are US version, i.e., they can only retrieve data from US banks.

Finally, a few words on the financial data formats and standards.
Quicken Interchange Format (QIF) is an open specification for reading and writing financial data to media.
Open Financial Exchange (OFX) comes from Microsoft and Intuit (the maker of Quicken) and it is a data-stream format for exchanging financial information.

The above two formats are quite popular and most of the financial software support the importation and exportation of the files in such formats. And most of the online banking system support them as well.

Here i’ve gathered some links pointing to tips for installing windows xp, vista or 7 without cd/dvd driver (Imaging your laptop/notebook/netbook does not have an internal cd/dvd driver, and you don’t have an external one either.)

Windows xp

When windows xp came into market, the usb keys/external drivers are not as popular as they are now, nor is the volume of them. So windows xp is not designed with the function of installing from usb keys as I believe. However, the following link Installing Windows XP from USB provides information that helps you install windows xp from USB.

Windows Vista and  windows 7

It seems easier when it comes to windows vista and windows 7. The method of installing them from USB can be found from the link below:
Tips: How to boot/install Windows 7/Vista from USB Flash/Hard Drive