Scorched Silicon :: Southern WV Community & Technical College (News)

No meeting tonight. You should have been at home taking your exam. For an open book, open note, Google friendly exam, the test scores are sucking wind. I gave you a 2 hour window and I see some people are taking the test in 18 minutes. Holy crap guys! You can't be machine gunning those answers like that. That's why you scored 25/45. Come on folks let's see some proper work here.

IT183 10/29 - WAR DRIVE!!

Yeah Baby! War Drive! Took the van out tonight for a spin around the town. Manged to find 911 hotspots in about 2 hours. That shatters our record of 753 from last year and we didn't even cover many areas we had in the past. I will post the raw ns1 file in the downloads section. I'll also prep the kml file for Google Earth although I'm having an issue ridding the file of multiple entries. The same networks pop up just with different gps coordinates making a mess of the file. I'll have to work on this.

IT180 10/29 - Overclockin'

Well the best laid plans go straight to hell quickly don't they? I thought that our aftermarket motherboard would allow us to over clock the processor. Unfortunately it did nothing more than allow us to change memory timings (not even memory clock!). So to save face I did manage to have you guys research some overclocking tools for our video cards. We did see an avg of 6.3% increase in performance on both a Nvidia 7900GT and a Quattro 1700. Not to bad for just piddling around for a while. There will be an upcoming exam week after next so you need to get to reading the chapter material.

IT275 10/27

No new material today. Used this day to work on our projects in Flash and update the learning logs and wikis. Remember to take down your blog embed off the learning log page and create a table containing a brief description of what you did for class. I see many nice projects coming along. They are starting to look great. For those who haven't been to class in a while, you are really behind and need to make up time. I need to start seeing you in the lab during non-class hours otherwise I feel you may not have enough time to get your project done.

IT183 10/27

Lecture day today. Finished up with chapter 9 and then planned out our war drive for Thursday.

IT180 10/27

Lecture day today. Went over chapter 8. The information in the chapter isn't difficult, it just happens to be incredibly long. Better get to reading.

IT210 10/22

Met this evening to discuss Windows 7 since it came out last night. I went over several small items but the one you need to remember is the exam next Thursday 10/29. We will not meet since this puts undo stress on most of students being that it is the only class they have on that day. The exam will be online via Blackboard. There will be no study guide since it will be open book open note. I will open the exam Thursday morning and you will have all day to take it. I will have a time limitation of 2 hours once you start the exam. It has 45 questions on it. See me if you have any questions.

IT180 & IT183 10/22

Classes not meeting today due to a funeral I must attend. IT210 will still meet via Skype.

IT275 10/20 - Work all night. Play all day.

We watched a few video presentations from MCTC to get an idea of what they had done in the past. This should give you an idea of what to strive to achieve or surpass.

We will spend the next 2 weeks as in class lab time to finish any work missing from the wikis and to begin work on our trailer videos. So far you all have the tools and skills to put something in motion on a screen. It doesn't have to function as a game, but this will help get your artwork in place for next semester. Approach this as though you were pitching the game idea to a group of investors. Your game technically doesn't have to work but I want a trailer created that shows the basic elements of how your game works. If you want to take this a step further work on at least one technical aspect of the game, ie making a character move about, or creating some functionality that will actually be in your game.

IT183 10/20

Went over anything in chapter 7 we haven't already gone over and did a refresher on the entire rest of the material. Most we've covered already and some we haven't. As an assignment due for next time I want you to do project 7-3 using Network NotePad. Then when you are done with the book example I want you to document our classroom and draw the overall layout. When you are done send me the saved files via email.

I Hate Windows 7 Start Menu

Ok so I haven't put any Tech Hell stories up lately. I’ve installed Win 7 many times in the past several months, never fully getting into using it in daily life. More or less I’ve just played with it and said, “Huh isn’t that neat.” Never really have I found out the little things that make it so cool or so frustrating. I'm posting this gripe under this section because this is just one of those little things that got under my skin and that I can’t let go of. I mean seriously like a splinter that you just can't get out or that strange rash that appears after a long weekend in Vegas. I HATE WIN7 START MENU!

Click here to continue to the story.

IT180 10/20 The Integrated Circuit

We finished up the last of the Triumph of the Nerds videos and had a nice viewing of The Pod Father. A BBC documentary on the history of the integrated circuit and the man who co-invented it Robert Noyce. Just think without this man essentially every aspect of your life would be completely changed. This guy has truly left his mark on society for the rest of time.

BTW if you really get into this kind of thing like I do check out http://www.chiphistory.org/. Very very cool stuff there. Lots of videos and pictures on how micro electonics came into existence and the people behind them.

Haha

3AM F#&* Me Addition

I'm sitting here at 3am about as mad as I could be. Turns out Sapphire Tech lied to me. Eyefinity will not work with 2 monitors on one card and 1 on the other. The second GPU will not act as a pass though. The only way for Eyefinity to work is that it groups monitors on cards in 3's. That being said my second card is useless for the moment. (it is working on my desktop just fine) I can get the Eyefinity support on the 2 monitors that are hooked to one card, but the 3rd monitor becomes extended, ie left in the cold and out of the monitor grouping. I'm pretty livid over this. I got so mad that I actually ordered an active DP to DVI adapter from Dell. That to me is like the biggest sin ever. I feel dirty and want to drink heavily. But good news is that I'll soon have all 3 montiors working properly and CrossFire support has been enabled in a beta driver, so my second gpu will be put to use soon enough. Damn had I known all this I would have just purchased the 5870 and been done with this mess. Oh well the CrossFire support will just give me added life to my system. My god the games look good! BTW I will not be bringing my rig to school until I get the bugs worked out. I now have an adapter, power supply, and hard drive in the mail. Not to mention I'm running a damn RC copy of Win7. I'm going to wait until probably next week after I've had a chance to install an official copy of 7 and get all my software installed.

IT210 10/15

Short class tonight. Uber cool that we managed to get some web cams up and going. I found that we can use Skype for audio and www.mebeam.com to easily have everyone join in via webcam. For those not with webcams it does kick you out of the room, but that may be just because we need to be typing in the chat window. I'm not sure about that but I'll look into it.

The assignment for this week comes from a Microsoft website. It is a page containing videos describing the new features of Winblows 7. Click the link for Windows 7 Feature Walkthroughs. I want you to watch the videos as I am and I will give you a little quiz on them in the near future, maybe not next week but I may throw in a few on your midterm. I guess that depends on how hateful I'm feeling after messing with Win7 start menu. Did I mention I hate M$?