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IT183 10/1 Citrix Virtualization |
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Unbelievably uber cool class this evening. A big thanks to our guest and lab setup coordinator Chad Scott for coming in and letting us play with some really cool technology. We worked all day on virtualizing one of the lab machines and then ran that image on 6 pc's at once. Not only that but we copied 1Gb of data into 6 VM's at once without crashing the server. Then to top it off we even played Open Arena and watched the network bandwidth drop clear to .17% on a 100Mbit network! Awesome indeed! It does show that the server hardware doesn't have to be massive, it just has to have plenty of network bandwidth. We managed to saturate a single nic, but it took 6 machines to do it!
After the little experiment we walked over to the computer center to check out the hardware and definite lack of cable organization. I will post pics shortly of the little adventure. Make sure your online work is up to snuff for next week since I have to turn in mid-term grades. We will work on the war drive on Tuesday.
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IT180 10/1 - Random Access....I can't remember?!? |
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 Not a bunch to cover today. The class was small and so we went over probably the shortest chapter in the book, chapter 6. We covered RAM and all the little things to remember about it. It is such an important part of the comptuer and yet there is not much to say on its behalf. There will be an exam on chapters 4-6 next Thursday. The study guide will be posted asap. Have your online questions caught up since I have to turn in mid-term grades next week. What is in the gradebook online will be entered into the school's system. The gradebook itself will be updated on Sunday.
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IT275 9/28 - I wanna be a movie star! |
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.png) Great class tonight! We started off by having everyone present their game ideas to the class. I am very impressed with what I saw this evening. Some people really went all out and even began work on their prototypes! I processed the videos while everyone finished up their bunny demo and worked on changing the hit area of the frog's tongue from the collision detection tutorial.
We all signed up for a Viddler account to begin posting videos. Everyone should have posted their own video to their wiki page. Between now and next week I want everyone to work on their wiki's. You need to post all of the swf files you have created so far as well as links to the fla files so they are easy to find. Remember to blog this week and refine your game ideas. We will begin to paper prototype next class. I'm going to keep adding to the wiki cheat sheet and post it. For now if you want a copy it is in the IT275 folder on the Z: drive at school. When I add some notes to it I will post it here on the site. For those not having been in class you will need to see me during office hours so you can create your game idea videos.
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IT183 9/29 - Multiple Personalities |
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 Today we installed Windows 7 XP Mode and began to toy with virtual machines. After messing with VMware for a while we did the install and found out just how well Virtual PC integrates with Windows 7. I thought it was a great class since we got to play with brand new technology. I really do enjoy installing and discovering new software especially when students are experiencing it for the first time as am I. I've been in contact with Chad Scott and we are going to do more virtualization on Thursday. The school is going virtual and we are helping to setup and load test the server.
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IT180 - The Day the PC's Died |
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 Well it didn't go as badly as the title says. Everyone managed to take apart their computers and put them back together correctly in today's lab. You guys are to document your computer's hardware and then look up driver locations and documentation. Then type it all up and send it to me in a word doc by email. Just as much info as you can find. I'm giving credit more for having done the assignment and taken the pc apart rather than what is in the report.
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Windows 7 Pricing - Ouch! |
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Ouie!That smarts. 320$ for a retail Ultimate copy? WTH man. Vista Ultimate promised so much for the extra money and delivered so little. You would think that MS would take a cue from iTunes and reduce the cost of the OS to the point everyone would just buy it rather than pirate a copy. They really should make it so stupidly affordable that it would just be more of a hassle to go and try and pirate the damn thing.
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IT210 9/24 |
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 Another Skype session and another success! I think this session went very well. The only thing that could have been better is if I could have recorded both sides of the entire conversation as I was recording the screen. The screen cast sounds a little odd with me more or less asking questions to myself, lol! I will post it regardless and work on getting something to record both halves of the conversation.
With that being said tonight's chat session focused on what didn't get done last week. Namely demonstrating Remote Desktop, VNC, and several useful tools that you really need to know how to use as a pc tech. I will have more of these kinds of sessions, hopefully they will turn out as good if not better than these previous two.
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IT183 9/24 Web Warriors and Remote Access |
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 Today we watched a neat film called Web Warriors. It very much related to class in that it showed what a DOS (Denial of Service) attack was and how truely unsafe the internet can really be. I felt this was a good film and I'm glad that the film makers took the time to interview real hackers and not use actors.
With the little bit of time that we had left and because the book material was really dry after having watched a movie, I showed the class how to use the built in remote assistance feature of windows. No homework other than to skip ahead online and work on chapter 7. We will go back and hit 5-6 starting next week.
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IT180 9/24 - Let's Go Shopping |
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 I started off by talking a little about finding items for the cooling solutions assignment. Since you guys really need practice on finding information and especially about parts, I figured a little shopping was in order.
After I finished talking about chapter 5 we spent the rest of the time learning how to properly buy parts. This may seem a little lame, however there is quite a skill to buying parts that will work well together. If you do not know how to buy compatible components then you will end up with a very expensive pile of electronics that just stare back at you and do nothing. I have put together an Excel spreadsheet that can be downloaded from the IT180 downloads section. You are to fill out all of the tabs according to the budget concerns that we talked about in class. This will be due by the end of class on Tues the 29th.
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IT180 9/22 |
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Started off class by showing you guys how to drill down through Newegg's advanced search system to find parts. Take your time guys, this isn't about how fast you can find them, it is the quality of your search and the products that you find. We went over to the lab and finished up chapter 4 and have already hit on most of the info from chapter 5. You all need to be working on your question sets online. We will hopefully finish up chapter 5 on Thurs and be pulling computers apart on Tues after we set the lab up.
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Wiki Work |
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Getting Tricky With Wikis is a nifty site to pick up some tips on how to make your wiki look better. If you've been needing some ideas or needed some help this site has some great info.
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Another Reason Not To Like Apple |
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Ya know I'm really trying to like OS X. I've been playing with the eMac more and more. I like the polished interface and how Office 2008 works on the Mac. Unfortunately Apple is turning into Sony, making products that are as useful as they are proprietarily locked to hardware nobody wants to use (ie Sony's lock on Bluetooth). Anyway Apple has decided to rework math in general to make their hard drives appear to have more space than they actually do. Check out what Hack-a-Day found out about OSX Snow Leopard.
We’ve always felt that hard drive manufacturers were dirty crooks because of their use of fake math to make drives sound bigger than they actually are. Here’s a quick refresher for those who need it: Because digital information consists of 1’s and 0’s (two possible settings), digital architecture revolves around powers of 2. Long ago, when nomenclature was setup for measuring data the term kilobyte was adopted to represent 2 to the 10th power bytes (base 2, aka real math). The problem here is that 2^10= 1024 and when laymen hear the root “kilo” they think 1000 which is 24 byes less (base 10, aka fake math). So, if you have a 500,000,000 byte drive, base 10 math would call that a 500GB drive, but base 2 math would call that 476.8GB.
We understand why hard drive manufacturers use the base 10 system; larger sounding drives sell better. Now we find out that OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard is using base 10 math to calculate storage space. While base 2 math is the standard storage measurement for operating systems it may at first be difficult to understand why Apple would change to a base 10 system. But think about it once more, doesn’t Apple have a lot to gain if all the storage-containing-hardware they sell sounds bigger than it actually is?
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Grade Update |
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I went on a grading bender tonight. I've got the gradebook up to snuff. I'm only missing a couple of random things that I left at the house and will update them when I arrive home from the airport. Looking good folks. You can see who is being responsible and who is slacking. I suggest you take a look at what is recorded and where you need to be.
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