Monday 2 June 2014

Configuration of a Virtual Private Server (VPS) from Godaddy

After having ordered a VPS from ..., and not having been involved in UNIX administration for quite a while, I thought I write a few words about how to do it. As the customer service, as well as the online help are really not very 'helpful', I thought I make it available to the others who might have the same problem. But at least after staying for an hour with the service people I learned, that in UNIX "you have to work with an MS-DOS alike prompt to configure the files" - gotcha. I always thought UNIX boots like Windows and shows all sorts of windows where everything works with one click? Sorry for being ironic, and back to the configuration of the ... VPS:

DNS and Bind (Nameserver Configuration)

  • at first all the documentation on ... how to configure the server is pretty much useless. The only guideline that is relevant is the following [still need to find the link again - sorry for that]:
  • a really excellent description, and HowTo can be found on: http://rimuhosting.com/support/howtolist.jsp. they nicely explain all the steps for more than just DNS Bind configurations
To help others, you can also find my own configuration files here:
  • asdf

[STILL NEED TO COMPLETE THIS ARTICLE, AND COMPILE ALL THE DETAILS]

Sunday 23 February 2014

Taking a First Look at Grounded Theory

As coming from a different background than social sciences, textual analysis, coding, and interviews were always research methods that are too less quantifiable to validate a concrete outcome. However, it was time to take a more closer look into these methods as well, as we started to do quite some qualitative analysis recently, and a more structured approach towards the development of a theoretical concept was needed. Thus while writing on an journal article around the theme 'crowdfunding' with my students, we simply wanted to try a more structured approach to tackle the research problem.

Nevertheless, we heard some things about the Grounded Theory, but as far I never considered it as research method for my works. But let's give it a trial. Firstly, it's a new theory and will require a bit of background work, and discovering of literature to gain an understanding of the method. Second, we will require some software package to perform the analysis. Third, to build a conclusion will differ from the previous approaches that I have been considering or attempting.

Let's start with the first point - where can I find background information about the theory? If you should ever run into the same problem, here are a few interesting links:
Next step, which software packages are available to ease the process in doing a grounded theory based research. In general, a good online resource for describing all the software packages can be found on:
http://www.content-analysis.de/software/qualitative-analysis. However, I played a bit with the following packages, as they are freely available, and provide the features that I would need:
**** more to come ***