May 7 – Something for everyone.
INTRODUCTION TO SEARCH ENGINE: FIND SOMETHING NEW FOR YOU TO LEARN on a computer. Just for fun, go to google search bar at http://www.google.com and type in: primer, computer introduction and be amazed at some of the things that pop up in the search results. I found an acoustics primer at http://www.indiana.edu/~emusic/etext/acoustics/chapter1_intro.shtml, a basic HTML Introduction at http://www.htmlgoodies.com/primers/html/article.php/3478141/Basic-HTML-Introduction.htm, and a primer on computer image processing and analysis at http://www.microscopy.fsu.edu/primer/digitalimaging/russ/index.html. It is no wonder that your results were so wide? What if now you wanted to know something about a car seen in an old photograph and the caption reads “circa 1909 E.M.F.” so go to google.com again and type in a search for the term: 1909, e.m.f. car in order to bring up the EMF auto home page at http://emfauto.org/index.php and browse any of the other other links you like as well. There will come a time when you need to find more specific information in your coursework for a research paper and then you will need to know about the advanced search features available in some search engines for returning very precise search results. Let us believe someone is taking a course in Microbiology and wants to write a term paper about the Bacterial Exotoxins of Escherichia coli commonly known to us as E.coli. Go to Google.com and at the right end of the search bar are tiny letters which read: Advanced Search and click on that Advanced Search feature. In the first textbox for “All of These Words” type in e. coli and then in the text box for “this exact wording or phrase” type in: bacterial exotoxins, then click on on the Advanced Search button. I saw an article today in this search result titled “Bacterial Protein Toxins” and that was about “toxigenesis, the ability to produce toxins, as an underlying mechanism by which many bacterial pathogens produce disease”. The URL of this article from which my above quote came, is http://www.textbookofbacteriology.net/proteintoxins.html. You can see then, that from this one example of an advanced search, you can pretty much find any specific example you want. Advanced Search also includes a feature to not show a page having a certain word or phrase and I have used that before to exclude pages with the words sell, sale when I wanted to exclude commercial pages in one particular search.
Cnet News at http://news.cnet.com/ is my favorite site for top technology news headlines. You can click on “Latest News” tab at the top and today I read “Worm targets Windows users on Skype and Yahoo IM, injects malicious links in e-mail, Word, and Excel files, and automatically copies itself to USB drives, Bkis says.” That is certainly something we would want to find out more about. Right? Think of the impact of those infected USB drives hitting computer labs in school classrooms. This link I just gave you and the “Latest News” tab is a great way for a student to keep up with Internet Technology news bulletins but the student needs to know how to protect their own computer and how to avoid Instant Messaging worms. I cannot teach that, but I myself avoid any Instant Messaging (IM) sites.
AVOID IM AND STOP THE UNAUTHORIZED USE OF SOFTWARE
Young teens use Instant Messaging and haven’t a clue about the dangers of malware, which includes, viruses, trojans, worms, and any other malicious software code that can be passed from computer to computer. Protect all computers in the home with anitvirus software and buy a license for each computer… otherwise the computer company either doesn’t download updates to multiple copies of its software at the same IP number on the Internet, or it files data that your household is using unauthorized copies. Also if you have same license number on your software installation as your buddy across town who also owns the box it came in, but you have a different IP number than the registered owner, you can be prosecuted. IP stands for Internet Protocol and each computer has a piece of hardware for sending and receiving packets of information over the Internet. Each NIC card , one for each computer, has its own IP number and that is way computers can be traced backward to whoever began a computer infection, or who sent the first malicious attachment in a major virus attack…computers are traceable. The time the message was sent can be tracked also. Be a responsible computer user and respect everyone’s right to use the Internet responsibly.
TEACH A TEACHER TO TWEET CLASS ASSIGNMENTS ON TWITTER
It would be so much easier if a teacher would just log in to the class twitter page he/she set up at http://www.twitter.com for free, so that his/her students can follow the tweets on their own twitter page and immediately see when the new assignment is posted. It just needs to be copied and pasted from the instructors regular spot for posting assignments. If a teacher is too prickly about tweeting on twitter for the benefit of the class, perhaps a student in the class would tweet the assignment and pass the tweet address to the other students. Think of one thingfirst: Many computer networks at schools are run by Network Administrators trained in security who set the rules and protocols about which the rest of computer network follows, and certain URLs (Web addresses) can be blocked from a school’s computer network for security reasons.
STUDENT BE AWARE IN CLASS
The computer console the instructor uses is capable to looking at your screen remotely at any time. Some courses or computer lab classrooms have a student policy prohibiting the use of the Internet during a class lecture. Follow that rule, please, or be willing to lose your computer privledges, take a grade drop, or be expelled from that course with an F, and possibly banned from other computer classrooms… can’t it wait until class is out? Same with cell phones, and we all know the drill on that one. Use a computer responsibly, especially at school.
SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR
Are you requiring user authentication for any user on any computer in your entire network so you know or can find out which person was using any console on any particular date and time from your network records, should you be asked to produce that information? Companies want that kind of security ahead of time, before an employee creates a problem which could open the company to liability from damages incurred from the employee’s improper computer useage during company time. How good is the security of company networks? How are you going to prevent any further loss of company’s client/customer data?
IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY http://www.ieee.org/societies_communities/societies/computer.html
IEEE Computer Society members work in a wide range of computing fields such as artificial intelligence, graphics, microprocessors, IT, networking, information security, and software engineering. Its members enjoy a variety of programs and services, including a Distance Learning Campus with hundreds of course modules for Java, Cisco, XML, Microsoft Technologies, and much more. A person may join IEEE.org and the IEEE Computer Society as a student or graduate student, just so you know you do not neet to be already working in a related field to get the benefits of thousands of articles, books, courses as a free benefit of membership. Check it out. Begin at http://www.ieee.org to first read all of the types of technologies represented by IEEE besides only the Computing Society. The home page of the IEEE Computing Society membership at this time costs $50 USD to join for the rest of the year and have access to all of its benefits which you can read about at http://www.computer.org/portal/web/guest/home . One of the benefits is free access to hundreds, often thousands of available professional enrichment courses. Worth taking a peek.
NEW TO COMPUTER PROGRAMMING IN THE ENTERPRISE? OR A STUDENT COMPUTER PROGRAMMER?
You can share with us (blog@hitmill.com) your own favorite sites for programmers and I will tell you about a couple of sites a student may like: For OOP languages, there is http://www.cetus-links.org/ Microsoft Developers: How To Use The Developer Support Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB): http://support.microsoft.com/kb/242971 and MSDN Front Page News http://blogs.msdn.com/.
Java Developers: Sun Developer Network (SDN) http://developers.sun.com/ Students: NetBeans is an open-source Integrated Development Environment, IDE, an extensible platform, and an open-source community. See it: http://netbeans.org/
Object Pascal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Pascal (RE: Embarcadero Delphi) Delphi from embarcadero: http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi .
HISTORY OF TECHNOLGY – AUSTRALIA
History of the Totalisator http://members.ozemail.com.au/~bconlon/ by Brian Conlan. Brian also programmed on core languages and the PDP11.
The Reign of the Totalisator Unlikely History of Australian Computing is recorded here in the Rutherford Journal.
Sir George Julius by Brian Conlan.
I tried to put a little something on todays post for each of you readers. Something new to interest you. Let me know if you a particular topic of interest related to Internet or Computer Technologies. Reach me at blog@hitmill.com.
