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Electric Garden: My First IoT Device
Probably you know that our boss Victoria supports many digital initiatives across New Zealand. One day she has shared with us one of the latest Digital Future Aotearoa initiative called Electric Garden. This is an Internet of Things solution for garden monitoring...
Foghorn is back in Wellington this summer! But where else should it go?
Last summer we brought you Foghorn, an email notification service which lets you know when a cruise ship is due in Wellington harbour. Well, it's back this summer too! You should have received some notifications in the last week or so if you're already signed up, but...
Qlik NPrinting – What is it?
A lot of Qlik Sense customers I interact with have heard of NPrinting, yet never had the opportunity to see it in action so I thought it would be great to put together a blog on what NPrinting is, and how it can help! What is NPrinting? NPrinting is an add-on which...
Qlik Sense Training – building a demonstration app
In recent weeks I have been writing training material for an introductory course for Qlik Sense Cloud. The training course is aimed at business users. It teaches the basic data discovery capabilities available in the Qlik Sense Cloud application. It also gets users...
It’s Ada Lovelace day – and we should all know more about this amazing woman
Earlier this year in a Christchurch auditorium packed with girls, their mothers, fathers and brothers - I learned just what a big deal Ada Lovelace was from the live performance show ADA ADA ADA. And WOW what a show it was. Employing the power of a programmable LED...
Different image formats and their uses (PNG, SVG, TIFF, JPG).
If you have ever had to export pictures from any of the major image editing software (Photoshop etc) then you will know that there are quite a few image types you can use. What many people don't know is when to use each format, and what some formats can do that others...
WordPress vs Drupal – Learning Curve
WordPress and Drupal are two of the most popular Content Management Systems in the market now. It is a common question how WordPress and Drupal are different from each other, there are a lot of articles about this and you might have done some research about it...
Adobe equivalent Free Open Source Software
I’m sure most people have used or at least heard about the Adobe product Photoshop. In this blog I’m going to be looking at some of the programs that are offered by Adobe (the makers of Photoshop) and find free software that will fill the same purpose. To get...
Vi – get in, get out, get it done
It seems to me that a lot of people dislike Vi. I thought a short blog on the essential commands might be helpful. If you just want to know how to either “save your changes and exit” or “exit and abandon your changes” just jump to here.I’ve collated a list of what I...
Amazon QuickSight: A beginner’s guide
Importing data At OptimalBI we love to do cool sh!t with data. In my role in data analytics, I like to investigate new data presentation software and had the opportunity to use Amazon QuickSight to see what its data presentation capability was like. What is Amazon...
Checking a Checksum (Cryptographic hash function) – with PowerShell and Bash shell
When is paranoia a good thing?When it comes to downloading files for sure. Using a cryptographic hash function to test the authenticity of a file is a good practice. Such a good practice, that I wanted to make it as easy as possible to perform.I've written two scripts...
Command Line Interface: Still the Best for Administrative Tasks
We complete daily health checks for our customers and in one specific case, there is a BI tool which notifies us in case of major error, but we also have to scan logs for small errors and unhealthy processes. We check log files for errors, depending on your luck there...
Team work makes the dream work
I like working at a small company for a couple of reasons: I'm a generalist, not a specialist, so small organisations suit my skill set better, which means I'm usually never bored. You know your colleagues better. You know the name of their spouse, their kids, their...
Why is Snowflake special?
The first I came across Snowflake was a few years ago when I was learning how to use Attunity Replicate, that time I established a data load into this cloud data warehouse. This time I have decided to explore what Snowflake is about. Terminology I watched some...
SUNZ – National Conference 2019 – Data and Beyond
The Planets and stars aligned; While visiting family near Wellington and our monthly team meeting was on the same week, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the SUNZ National conference held at the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington. For this short post...
The Hays 19/20 Salary Guide
When I was in Wellington last week, I headed along to the Hays Salary Guide launch for some insights on the labour force, career progression, and what both employers and employees are wanting out of their roles. If this is something that interests you, I highly...
Making Sense of Google Analytics Data
Here at OptimalBI we love data, and we get upset when it's only piled and doesn't produce value. Like many others who have a website, we use Google Analytics to collect its statistics. This is valuable marketing data, so we want to make use of it and help our...
Open Source Data Tools Update.
Back in 2016 Victoria wrote a blog on open source or free to try data mining and analytics tools, and recently we received an email from the team over at Canva about including their ecomap tool in our list. The email got us thinking it was a good time to have a new...