If it’s true about Alex wanting to leave Diggnation, then Diggnation is dead. No really. Just Kevin sitting on a couch, with Glen and Prager? That’s not interesting. Alex’s retorts and spontaneous jokes (which sometimes are so spontaneous they don’t make sense) are what make that show interesting. They can’t get another co-host, because they just can’t afford to. They’d have to come from in house, and I’m not sitting thrugh 40 minutes of Martin Sargent.

Anyway, whilst I’m here. My ‘Freelance’ label in my gmail has never been more active. It’s quite intimidating. Priorities say I have to finish that website assignment first though. Well, first food, then website. I’ve decided on just using CC and GPL content to fill the pages. Perfectly legal, if a little lazy.

It’s basically a website. So long as it’s valid XHTML and CSS, and has form pages, I’ve been told anything can pass. I’m actually not going to be putting much effort into content due to that. I just want to make sure that I have it finished. Maybe later, when I have more time I’ll add better content.

It’s basically a website about Leicester from the prospective of a fresher – someone how just needs some information about Leicester and where to go and what to do.

I’ve already done the actual template. I just need to add content. Laura and Chris have already taken photos, which we need to include in our website, so I’ll just use some of theirs. They certainly took enough.

I woke up with the intent of creating this database we need for Database Design Concepts. Well, I say need, but it turns out we might not actually have to hand it in. Because I thought it was integral to my learning, I sat through it and slowly knocked up a few tables following the instructions letter by letter.

When it started explaining, in great detail, how to change the freaking font of a label I gave in. Not only was it offending me, but flicking through the book I can’t see anywhere where it’s telling me to hand the finished database in. Even if it did, what would be the point?  You can’t vary from the obnoxious instructions; even if one person created the database and then gave a copy to everyone in the class the person marking it would never know. They’re all identical.

So, I gave in with that. I’m pretty sure there’s more work to be done, so I asked Laura. Apparently we have a Systems Analysis assignment that we’ve not been told about yet.

The final assignment we have is from Computer Tech, to create a website. I’m not sure why I can’t just give him the URL to one of the many websites I’ve designed and coded to prove my work, but meh. I have to create a guide about Leicester for freshers of DMU, which I’m okay with actually. I might even be able to make some money from it. Even if I do feel slightly underestimated.

Why can’t university be as hard as I actually expected? Why do people walk into a degree with zero knowledge of the course? There are people that have blatantly never even used a computer before on my course; wtf? Just make A Level Computing a requirement of the course entry, and teach with that as a foundation. Don’t freaking teach it me again! Grr.

I’d switch to Computer Science if I wasn’t so worried my math would let me down.

Database design concepts was okay. “Okay” is measured by “did I learn something?” and I sort of did. It was about how DBMSs should handle their integrity, using rollbacks and transactions. Also on user privileges.

When I can be more motivated (or if someone asks), I’ll come back and actually explain what they mean, because a few people missed that lecture. For now though, I’m going to work on my Leicester Guide Website for my computer technology assignment.

The Internet

Huzages ago, in November 1969 the Internet backbone that we use today was started. At the time it only had four nodes (constrast that with today, we have hundreds of thousands). It was solely used by and for American intelligence, and called ARPAnet, Adanced Research Projects Agency.

As a millitary thing it was a genious idea. Because there were four nodes, it meant that one could come under “attack” (be blown up, or suffer natural disasters) and the other three nodes were still available. This was amazing because back then the only real type of networks were circuit ones (one goes down, they all do).

In 1973 the first node outside of the US was created. Until 1992 the Internet was “owned” by the US government. At that point ISOC was created; a non-profit organisation which intended to look after the Internet by creating standards and making sure it’s available to as many people as possible.

Domains

I disagree with most things that’s said on this slide.

Internet sites need two pieces of information

• domain name from domain name service (DNS) registered by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers InterNIC
• IP address, such as 123.123.123.123

–John Cowell

You do not need both of those things. A domain name would be helpful, but you definitely don’t need one unless you’re sharing an IP address. For instance, you can use 64.71.168.124/blog/ to get to one of my other blogs. You can also use the DNS allocated name: www.debiantips.com/blog/

You do need an IP address though – that’s how the internet finds out where you’re looking.

Domains are hierarchical

–John Cowell

That’s incorrect too. My URLs can be formatted however the hell I want. www.dmu.ac.uk is actually on an entirely different server to www.cse.dmu.ac.uk, there’s no hierarchy there. shamess.info and www.shamess.info both get you to the same place, even though that theory would say they aren’t.

He got it wrong about TLDs too; .tv isn’t supposed to be used by TV channels, it’s supposed to be used by people from Tuvalu.

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a part of the Internet. It’s not the entire thing. WWW is generally just the area that you get web pages from and such. It’s just a big bunch of files all linked together. Pages being “linked” together is the most important part of the web. Files were much more linear before; just one huge file telling  you all you need to know. Now though there are links within files so you can get to the bit you need quickly.

It’s ‘governed’ by the WWW Consortium. But to be honest, on governed in a way that you’re governed by your grandparents. You know that you should do what they say, but ultimately they can’t make you. They set out guildlines on how best you should present your information on the web; they were the people that formalised HTML and told people what each tag should do. No one appointed them, but they’re still highly respected as an authority.

As I said, the guidelines for XHTML are totally option if you want to follow them or not.  Recent browsers try their best to these days, so you’ll find that Firefox 3.x, Opera 9, and Safari 3 will all look pretty much the same, but Internet Exploder, even the lastest betas still like to go off and do their own thing. That makes it hard for web designers to make their website look the same on all browsers.

Figure 1: A really basic representation of what happens when you click a link

As well as the HTML, your browser receives your browser also receives HTTP headers, which tell it the status of the document you just tried to get (was the download successful? were you forbidden access? does the page exist?), and some other information.

HTML

The server you’re requesting form will send you a tonne of HTML, which your browser renders (processes) and then outputs onto your screen in a much prettier format.

These days if people mention “HTML” they’re probably talking about XHTML, the newer standard which is much more extensible. It’s almost exactly the same as HTML, so if you were taught it in high school or something, upgrading your knowledge shouldn’t be too hard.

I’m not going to be doing a tutorial of HTML here, but I probably will eventually. Until then use Google.

The next set of slides are simply talking about best practises when having a websites, and making sure you’re doing it right. They’re pretty self explanatory.

Other Internet features

This section quickly touches on search engines. The way they work is by having a “spider” which goes to a webpage and then, using pretty complex algorithms, works out what the page is about. It’ll store that data on a huge database. Then it’ll take every link from that first page and follow them, doing the same process to every link it can find.

Of course on the Internet you can get services like e-mail which use different protocols from WWW. SMTP for sending mail, and POP3 and IMAP for receiving.

There’s also FTP, which is a way of talking to a server and managing what files are on there.

It mentions other things and talks about them in more detail.

It’s title is “Hardware 2″, so I’m guessing it’s a continuation of last week’s lecture, but the first point it makes is about representing data… Okay lets just go with this for now and see where it goes.

The computer can’t store letters, since it only has switches which can be on or off, so instead it stores bits (either an on or off switch). Eight of which make a byte. A word is the term for the number of bytes which an operating system works with best – ie. how many bytes it likes to group together and read and write to at the “same time”. Windows XP and earlier mostly use word sizes of 32-bits. The x84 edition of Windows XP and Vista both use 64-bit sized words. This slide mentions prefixes too, which I have no idea about.

Flicking through the presentation further, it looks like he didn’t actually mean the computer sciences term, but instead the term used to mean the collective terms for bytes; kilobyte, megabyte, etc.

Binary is base two. To explain that a little more, humans use base 10, which means our numbers can go from 0 to 9 before we have to move along to another digit. Binary can go from 0 to 1 before moving onto the next digit.

Hexidecimal is base 16, so it can go from 0 to F before having to move onto the next digit. Base is sometimes known as “radix”.

In order to represent letters, we designed a standardised code where a number relates to a letter. For instance, in ASCII the number 97 is the letter “a”. So if the computer wanted to store that letter, it’d hold the binary 11000001 in memory. ASCII is pretty out of date now though (still used in some places though because it’s really small to encode), these days we use Unicode or another ISO standard.

There’s a slide of real numbers next but to be honest I’m getting bored of this topic, so I’m skipping it.

A dude called Von Neumann thought up our hardware idea about 50 years ago; data is stored on more perminant, but slow to access mediums like hard drives, then it’s pulled out and any changes that need to be made should be done in volatile but super fast RAM. Once it’s in the RAM, it’s worked on by the processor.

When you run a program it’s pretty much the same too; each line of machine code is fetched from the hard drive to the RAM where it’s passed to the processor to work on. Machine code is rarely used by people unless they’re making dedicated systems, since it’s a minimalist language specific to the hardware being used. The language can be different from an Intel system than an AMD system, which is why programmers prefer to use high level languages which can be compiled to be compatible with other pieces of hardware.

Although they’re all different, they mostly do the same things. Either,

• A logic operation (do this is that’s true)
• Control transfer of information around the machine
• Load something
• Add to the input, or output devices
• Look up a memory location
• Or talk directly with the processor

I’ve already talked about slides 16, 17, and 18.

I talked about RAM quickly – say that it’s really fast, but volite memory. That means that when it loses power (the machine is turned off) it loses all the data it had on there. ROM on the other hand doesn’t lose it’s data, but it still incredibly speedy. The down side of it though is that it’s read-only, which means we can’t write to it. That may sound a little useless, but it actually holds fireware perminantly, and the BIOS controls.

(I’m ignoring that floating point slide.)

Originally, process had a limited set of commands and instructions, because they never really needed to be so complex back then, which we call Reduced Intstruction Set Computers. These days though, since the processor can handle low level languages much faster than any other type of higher language, the instruction set has been growing and growing. We now call it computers with large sets Complex Instruction Set Computers.

Of course, the fewer the instructions the processor has to look for, the faster it can compile the rest of the code. Reduced instructions sets are usually much faster than complex ones.

Making faster and faster processors quickly became too much of an investment for Intel and AMD (two of the largest processor producers), so they decided to switch to multiprocessing. That’s where two processors (or more) can work together to handle twice as much load as a single process on it’s own. Although the cores can “think” completely differently, they still share the same connection to the computer, are still on the same chip, and share the same cache.

We have two teachers for this topic, which doesn’t seem to have posed much of a problem yet, but at least once I’ve noticed how Cowell and Samad haven’t communicated their lessons to each other at all. So Samad was somewhat left off guard.

The lectures – with Cowell – are just annoying and at this point I’m rarely bothered to go to them. He’s a clearly oppinionated person and tends to teach to those, rather than just sticking to facts of things. Things like saying “using variable width website design is out of date”. No it freaking isn’t. Using all the available space is a vital aspect of every website I use (especially WordPress and forums since I need all the space I can get to see what I’m typing). He also keeps bringing up his veiws on politics, his favorite being ID cards where he’ll deviate from the lecture so much that people get confused about what they should be learning. I don’t even think that teachers should legally be allowed to talk about politics when they’re in a role where they’re most persausive (teaching their oppinions as fact to students).

Because numbers are dwindling I thought it’d be okay to ask a question about something he was teaching. For some reason, he still thinks it’s standard to put comments around CSS. That was the done thing back in the day, but now it’s just a waste of bytes. I asked why he was doing that and he rudely said “Actually, lectures are a one way learning method, we don’t usually take questsions.” And that was the end of that discussion. I could understand if there were 40 people in the class, but there was only around 10 so no one was really disrupted.

The tutorials aren’t so amazing either. We’re learning basic hardware consepts of the computer; binary, file allocation, how things are stored, et al. It’s not hard, but it is something I need to learn. It’s probably thing I’m worst at on this course but I’m still mentally approching it with a snobby attitude which I guess I have to fix.