Jon Westfall

OK
Customers Also Bought Items By
Are you an author?
Author Updates
-
-
Blog postDear Student in Fall Twenty Two
Time to Start School, It’s True!
Your Weird Prof Mentioned His Site
You Went There One Night
And Found This Poem – Woohoo!
Welcome student (or wanderer on the Internet), I’m glad you found this post. I try to make one of these every so often, in case students Google me or just wander over to my website. I probably talked a little bit about myself on the first day of class, but in case you need a refresher on the important1 week ago Read more -
Blog postWhat exactly is unhealthy? It probably definitely isn’t BMI (Body Mass Index). In this post I discuss a different number – FFMI (Fat Free Mass Index) and discuss if it should be the standard I judge my own journey on.
Recently I’ve started thinking about different metrics that are used to assess your level of health. Body Mass Index (BMI) is, and has been for around 200 years, a metric that many swear by. But just a quick Google Search for BMI Origins will reveal a very strange histor2 months ago Read more -
Blog postI use Siri fairly often when walking, biking, or just when my hands are busy. One of my frustrations is that Siri hates playing the music I ask for. I used to have a playlist named “Essentials”, and I would frequently say “Hey Siri, shuffle Essentials”. That didn’t work 99% of the time – she’d find some artist’s “essentials” playlist or album on Apple Music and start playing that. So I changed the name to “Jon’s Essentials”, and now when I say “Hey Siri, shuffle Jon’s Essentials”, about 75% o2 months ago Read more
-
Blog postA small update in my Weight Loss Journey, Formerly Fat.
I’m a sucker for a good deal, so when I looked at our Faculty/Staff Meal plan at Delta State and did the math, I realized I could solve a few problems with one solution. The first was figuring out what to eat for lunch most days, which I figured was a decision fatigue situation I could avoid just like Jobs, Branson, & Zuck do with clothes. The second was it would get me out of my office for a short walk most days, and the thi3 months ago Read more -
Blog postThe BP Podcast will be back in the very near future for Season 2. This page will be updated with show notes as needed! If you’re not already subscribed, do so here!
Topics this season will revolve around Abnormal Psychology & Educational Psychology! My plan is to post short 5-10 minute episodes most week days!
4 months ago Read more -
Blog postA small update in my Weight Loss Journey, Formerly Fat.
A little over a year ago, Karey discovered these Kind Energy Peanut Butter Bars, which she got in a sample pack. We liked them, so we ordered a pack of 12 from Amazon. Amazon, being Amazon, sent us 72 instead of 12. And we’re still eating them down (We have about 5 left, and you’d be surprised but they’re still pretty tasty past their “Best Buy” date). Anyway, I just ate one. Because I think I’m hungry. By the time I finish with6 months ago Read more -
Blog postThis is yet another update in my weight loss story. The landing page, Formerly Fat, has all of my previous entries. Check it out and read in order to catch up!
It’s been awhile since I last updated everyone on my weight loss journey, which I started in 2011, re-started in 2018, and then kicked into high gear in 2020-2021. When I last updated you, I had gotten to around 210 pounds, plateaued, then went into loss mode again. For the past 4 months, since around early September, I’ve been7 months ago Read more -
Blog postIn my classes I’ll often have students give short presentations, and recently I wanted to allow my students to also rate each other. Here’s a very quick and easy way to accomplish that while also having the data analyzed to tell you who is the ‘winner’
Create your rating forms in Google Forms. I made a very simple form that just asked for a couple of ratings and some feedback. Optionally have some way for students to easily get to the form – you could send it out via your LMS or create a11 months ago Read more -
Blog postI made this in about 5 minutes… sometimes having the right tool means pay a bit of money to speed up your workflow. Could I have done it for free? Yes. As accessibly? No.
11 months ago Read more -
Blog postIn this week’s podcast I talk about testing at the college level, my philosophy of testing, and the debate between multiple choice and short answer.
11 months ago Read more
Titles By Jon Westfall
The need for every professional to have a solid presence on the Internet is more important than ever before. Having a presence beyond an email account, such as a custom web page or web application, usually requires a clumsy assortment of outside services or hiring a dedicated administrator. Thus it is more sensible for the average professional to become adept at managing their own private server.
In Set Up and Manage Your Virtual Private Server, author Jon Westfall expertly designs interesting, understandable lessons for professionals such as teachers, doctors, lawyers, and more to deploy their own virtual private server. He walks you through choosing the right service and customizing it for your specific business or personal needs, and does this with great ease while instilling invaluable knowledge. Basics such as setting up users, managing security and firewalls, installing and updating software, and troubleshooting by reviewing log files, backing up data, and so much more.
Set Up and Manage Your Virtual Private Server equips you with the power of knowledge to set your web presence apart from the rest. You now have complete control over your virtual brand that is your own—separate from any employer or affiliate. Your career mobility is in your hands with the ability to run your own private server at your fingertips. The digital era centers this technical literacy and independence as a critical skillset.
What You Will Learn- Understand basic server terminology and the way servers operate and are networked together
- See how software is used on a server and its role (for example, Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and so on)
- Get comfortable with the basic command-line operation of a virtual private server to set up users, manage security and firewalls, install software, update software, and troubleshoot by reviewing log files
- Store and back up important information
- Identify, analyze, and deploy open-source software products that can enhance productivity
Who This Book Is For
Non-tech professionals, individuals who have an established professional career, looking to understand more about how to set up and manage a private server.
Use R 4, RStudio, Tidyverse, and Shiny to interrogate and analyze your data, and then use the D3 JavaScript library to format and display that data in an elegant, informative, and interactive way. You will learn how to gather data effectively, and also how to understand the philosophy and implementation of each type of chart, so as to be able to represent the results visually.
With the popularity of the R language, the art and practice of creating data visualizations is no longer the preserve of mathematicians, statisticians, or cartographers. As technology leaders, we can gather metrics around what we do and use data visualizations to communicate that information. Pro Data Visualization Using R and JavaScript combines the power of the R language with the simplicity and familiarity of JavaScript to display clear and informative data visualizations.
Gathering and analyzing empirical data is the key to truly understanding anything. We can track operational metrics to quantify the health of our products in production. We can track quality metrics of our projects, and even use our data to identify bad code. Visualizing this data allows anyone to read our analysis and easily get a deep understanding of the story the data tells. This book makes the R language approachable, and promotes the idea of data gathering and analysis mostly using web interfaces.
What You Will Learn
- Carry out data visualization using R and JavaScript
- Use RStudio for data visualization
- Harness Tidyverse data pipelines Apply D3 and R Notebooks towards your data
- Work with the R Plumber API generator, Shiny, and more
Who This Book Is For
Programmers and data scientists/analysts who have some prior experience with R and JavaScript.
Get started with an accelerated introduction to the R ecosystem, programming language, and tools including R script and RStudio. Utilizing many examples and projects, this book teaches you how to get data into R and how to work with that data using R. Once grounded in the fundamentals, the rest of Practical R 4 dives into specific projects and examples starting with running and analyzing a survey using R and LimeSurvey. Next, you'll carry out advanced statistical analysis using R and MouselabWeb. Then, you’ll see how R can work for you without statistics, including how R can be used to automate data formatting, manipulation, reporting, and custom functions.
The final part of this book discusses using R on a server; you’ll build a script with R that can run an RStudio Server and monitor a report source for changes to alert the user when something has changed. This project includes both regular email alerting and push notification. And, finally, you’ll use R to create a customized daily rundown report of a person's most important information such as a weather report, daily calendar, to-do's and more. This demonstrates how to automate such a process so that every morning, the user navigates to the same web page and gets the updated report.
What You Will Learn
Who This Book Is For
Some prior exposure to statistics, programming, and maybe SAS is recommended but not required.
With Beginning Android Web Apps Development, you'll learn how to apply HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Ajax and other Web standards for use on the Android mobile platform, by building a variety of fun and visually stimulating games and other web applications! If you've done some basic web development, and you want to build your skills to create exceptional web apps, you'll find everything you seek in the discussions and examples in this book.
Each application you'll build in Beginning Android Web Application Development will show you solutions that you can apply to many of your own projects. Each example shares techniques and coding solutions that will inspire your own work. You'll learn how to tie your Android apps into Twitter through two apps that you'll build: Who's that Tweet?!, a quiz game based on celebrity accounts, and I Love Ham, a coding investigation into search phrases and rhyming.
Your Android web app development skills will then proceed in another direction, as you discover the power of HTML5 in two game apps: Scavenger Hunt, which introduces you to the HTML5 GPS location API, and Spies!, a location-based application that shows you how to use CSS3, Ajax, and HTML5 within multi-player environments. You'll also create an Android web application which checks the arrival time of buses and light-rails through the use of Portland, Oregon's open Tri-Met data API! This app is a great template for other apps you may want to build in the future, and showcases the important techniques for incorporating cloud-based apps into web games. After reading Beginning Android Web Apps Development, you will have built real apps and developed along the way the skills you'll need to create highly interactive, professional web applications... and, your journey will be engaging and enjoyable!
With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft has created a completely new smartphone operating system that focuses on allowing users to be productive with their smartphone in new ways, while offering seamless integration and use of Microsoft Office Mobile as well as other productivity apps available in the Microsoft App Store.
Windows Phone 7 Made Simple offers a clear, visual, step-by-step approach to using your Windows Phone 7 smartphone, no matter what the manufacturer. Author Jon Westfall is an expert in mobile devices, recognized by Microsoft as a "Most Valuable Professional" with experience teaching both businesses and consumers. This book will get you started with the basics and then teach you tricks and shortcuts that will save you time and help you maximize your productivity.