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

Lots of in class lab time today. We setup a wireless access point with power over ethernet. Once the hardware was in place the security on the access point itself had to be setup. Then we all installed wireless adapters in the older Dell's and connected them in. The wireless access point needed a firmware update so that was up next. It showed that we managed to add 2 more types of wireless security with the new firmware, which most of the older USB wireless adapters could not connect to. Finally we began work on our security camera. Unfortunately while searching for a firware update or even a user manual we ran out of time. We will pick that up at a later date.

IT180 10/15

Well since the last class was rather dry and today was kinda dreary outside we decided to watch a couple of short films on the history of Silicon Valley. It is a series called Triumph of the Nerds. Very cool series to watch.

Hard Drive Limited - Upgrade Time

Well I got my rig together and have been playing with it. No overclocking yet since my PSU isn't happy right now and I had to order a nice 1000w job from Newegg. I tried Wolfenstein out in CrossFire mode and it is very very fast with every goodie turned on. The biggest thing that I'm running into now is I'm very limited by the hard drive. The old 300gig I dropped in to test with until my new F3 shows up is struggling to keep up. I watch the task manager while programs load and the processor hits maybe 5% on 1-2 threads and that is it. The cpu is waiting on the hard drive. That new drive better perform well or I'm just going to say screw it and purchase an SSD.
BTW I hate windows 7 start menu. It is driving me crazy. They took out classic menu, and it is very hard to customize the new one. Mind you I don't use the start menu that often since I use ObjectDock but when I do I want it to work for me not fight me tooth and nail. I could get used to it if only for one thing: the recently used programs list. OMG I hate that thing. You're supposed to be able to pin programs to it and do other useless stuff. I tried turning off the option for recording the recently used programs but that didn't get rid of the menu, it just stayed blank. Like WTF were they thinking? So now I have a giant blank menu and I still have to click All Programs to get to anything. There is absolutely no way to change it so that All Programs expands by default. I've scoured the net for answers and I came up with one. Vista Start Menu. The guy who programed it needs to be given an award. It is what a start menu should be and what Micro$oft should have created. I know why M$ locked down the start menu, so that when tards call them for support the tards on the other end of the line don't spend time trying to figure out which start menu people are using so that they can locate programs mindlessly. Makes me want to run back to XP, but EyeFinity won't work so I'm stuck at the moment. Damn Micro$oft.

i7 Commeth!

LOL I made the GF go home for lunch to make sure my stuff had come. The i7 was at the door but the rest of my rig is somewhere on a Fedex truck "Out For Delivery". The anticipation is killing me. I actually haven't been this excited since I ordered my giganto toolbox almost 2 years ago. I'm going to have the webcam up and running tonight for class to show off parts. I do have the heatsink, dvd, ram, case, and ps so far. The i7 just made it to the door and everything else will be here tonight minus hard drive. I'll have to use another older slower drive to test with until Monday when my Samsung Spinpoint F3 shows up. BTW I am going to definitely show off the heatsink. It is is the largest I have ever come across. xBitLabs has a review of the Scythe Mugen 2 Their pictures don't quite do this thing justice. Imagine 4 pop cans setting together. It's HUGE!! Ok got to go, more later.

IT275 10/13 Hey did you hear that?

Tonight was pretty neat. We went over the adding sound and part of adding interaction topics from the wiki. Since you all will be adding some sound to your games one of the first things you need is a sound editor. One of the best is Audacity. It can be found at audacity.sourceforge.net.

I then managed to pull off a good demo of adding the sound to my motion guide fla of the cars sliding around a turn. We then studied how to add sound in real time using action script. We added the sound of a wolf to the bunny demo. Now there is a problem. If the bunny gets trapped by the wolf the sound goes insane. For homework I want you to study how the carrots get moved to a starting location when they hit the bunny and then in turn move the wolf to another location once it too touches the bunny. All of the example files are located on the z: drive. I will soon move those over to the wiki and post links.

The rest of the class was spent working on coding and also recording paper prototypes to post to viddler. I'm serious about this, if the videos aren't posted by this weekend I will take major points off your grade. For those who didn't show up for class this means you too. No excuses here folks I want this stuff posted. Below is your homework as posted on the dry erase board.

IT183 10/13 What Time Is It?

Well we got the old router sorted out to where it isn't giving up to many headaches and working enough for us to play in the lab. This go round we tried to remote in to a machine that was behind a firewall and not part of our network. After sorting out several issues that could cause us problems, Brian found that the time on the machine was off by several hours, thereby any remote invite was expired before we even got to use it. Once that got fixed we were able to successfully login.

IT180 10/13 RAID Setup

Today we spent the lab time setting up a RAID array and benchmarking drives. I'm glad we spent this time doing so since the book only manages to talk about RAID for like 3 pages. SiSoft Sandra clearly showed the speed advantage of a RAID 0 configuration and the performance hit of a mirrored setup. You guys all ned to be working on your online question sets. We will move on to the next chapter on Thursday.

Funny Stuff

I figured I would post something funny 2-3 times a week. If you happen to find something that is pretty funny, send it to me and I'll post it. Keep it clean, and in good taste no p0rn or anything of the like. (you can still send that kind of stuff I just won't post it). No it doesn't have to be related to class or technology. It is good to have a break from that every once in a while.

IT210 10/08 - Skype session 3

Lots of things to do in class tonight. I managed to get all the audio streams fed into Camtasia so we now have a nifty recording of class. Last time we went over how to use remote assistance. That is all well and good, however what if the user's pc sits behind a router? There are a couple of things that you must do in order to modify the router and the remote access invitation. the video will outline these. We all finally managed to remote into the vm. (My pc found its limits, recording everything and running the vm + all the other stuff I was doing.

Next I showed how to partition a hard drive. I also showed you how to encrypt a folder and the easy way to identify which folders are encrypted. (Gotta keep the porn safe from prying eyes.....FREAKS!!) We also modded the windows startup to auto enter a password and log a particular user on. This is handy if you setup a server of some kind and you want it to come back up to a desktop on power restore. There will be an exam next week. Study guides will be posted. I have the recorded sessions posted in the screencast section (yes even the odd ball one with just my voice). Skype you next time. :)

IT183 10/8

Sort of a dry day. Started off with a quiz on chatper 5 to see if you guys even read it ahead of time. I guess that didn't happen since the best score in the class was a 12/15 and the avg was a dismal 9.2. I really don't know if I'm giving you guys too much work, or that the work I give just isn't hard enough. There are only 6 of you and I would think you would take this stuff just a bit more seriously.

Then came the lecture on the chapter. It was an interesting however since it went over nics, switches, hubs and other stuff. We ran low on time and tried getting the old router setup to do remote access outside the lan. I want you guys to figure out how to modify the remote access invite to work when the computer sits behind a router. Note that the router too will have to have something done to it.

IT180 10/8 Test Day

Ahh test day. Not a very big test but the avg from 35 questions was a 31.5. Need to improve on that guys. We went to the lab and talked about the chapter on hard drives. I did go back and cover the material that was misplaced in chapter 2 as well as jumping ahead and talking about RAID from chapter 7. We will be setting up a RAID array in class on tues. The material is a bit on the dry side, but you need to know how to set up an array. Come prepped to take some notes.

I also want you guys to be thinking about the free computer tune up day. I figure we will hold it the week before Thanksgiving. You need to start working with the tolls we played with a few weeks back. Try them out on your own machine as well as someone else's. It is good practice.

IT275 - Take A Picture. It Will Last Longer

Tonight was pretty neat. I saw lots of really good ideas as we began work on our paper prototypes. I went through and collected a bunch of the videos from MCTC to show the class about what others had done with their paper prototypes. Please also take a look at the businesscard.txt file on the Z: drive. It has son very cool links to logos, logo creation, and lots and lots of business card ideas for those wanting to get a card together to hand out.

After that everyone began work with construction paper and office supplies to get their ideas down into something that resembled a game. If you weren't working on the prototype you should have been doing wiki work. I listed on the board everything that you should be working towards for next week. As the old saying goes,"Take a picture, it will last longer." So I did.

IT183 10/6

Since there were networking problems in the classroom today we decided to try and fix the broken router. I did show everyone how to flash the firmware within a Linksys router. Tomato was a great firmware, it just didn't link multi-casting the room with ghost images.

To have some fun I had everyone take 2 computers in the lab setup remote access via windows remote assistance. Everyone also managed to get a free program to gain access to their machines, TightVNC, TeamView, etc. A couple even managed to get Hamachi installed and tunneled a VNC connection through it to create a secure VNC.

IT180 10/6

Wow I'm late on blogging this week. I've stayed so busy I haven't had time to update. Well the morning started off badly due to a hosed router. The Linksys bit the dust so we had to get some connectivity in the room.

We spent the entire class time troubleshooting the network. It was good because the class got to see the troubleshooting process in action. It's a good thing we had a spare router in hand otherwise there would be no internet in the classroom. We still have a couple of issues to work out, namely we no longer hold the same ip address for the servers that we used to. They are working because I made the change on GoDaddy's end. I may have to work with the network admin to see what he wants to do about that, but for now we are just without wireless.

With the 15min or so that we had left over I intro'd the inner workings of a hard drive. Remember the test is on Thursday.

IT180 Study Guide

Chapter 4-6 Study guide has been posted.