Tech Topic Connection: Week 5 Assignment 1: Post 7: Tech Topic Connection Aaron Bicknell INT100: Fundamentals of Information Technology & Literacy Prof. John Santorio September 20, 2021 The topic that I have selected for this blog post is programming languages. In a previous post, I have provided some background on programming languages in general. The other posts here have centered on other tech topics such as hardware, software, network topology, and digital security. Out of all these topics, programming languages are what tie all these topics together and allow us to use computers as tools in our day-to-day lives. Programming languages allow us to create the software packages that we use to interface with these machines. They are the tools that tell the computers what to do by turning switches on and off. These switches store data. They ...
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Network Security: Security is one of the most critical components of computing in the modern age. Computers are used to store vital information, carry out financial transactions and provide a multitude of services. The compromise or disruption of any of these can be detrimental to people and businesses while being quite lucrative to criminals. A DDoS or a Distributed Denial of Service attack can be used to implement an attack with the ping command. This type of attack is generally targeted at a service provider. With many service requests for ping responses, the servers become unavailable or unresponsive to provide their intended services. Any system connected to the internet is vulnerable to these attacks as long as they are configured to offer ping responses, which many are. The consequences of such attacks can be slow or nonexistent response times from the servers. There are various types of attacks that can be done. Three commo...
Computers in the Workplace: This week I am going to address the role of computers and technology in the power industry. Specifically, I will discuss electric generation. Back before computers were commonplace, generators and equipment in power plants were operated directly by switches, knobs, levers and dials. As computers became more prevalent, they were integrated into power plants to operate electronic control systems, logic controllers and electronically controlled industrial devices. This now allows plant operators to remotely monitor and adjust settings to keep power plants online and supplying reliable energy to the electric grid. For this reason it is important for the control room operators to be familiar with computer operations as it will allow them to interface with and control the machinery that they are tasked with. There are many functions that computers serve in a power plant. Just a few are monitoring screens, Electronic...
Traveling Through a Network: Hello Everyone, Here are my ping response times including google.com and sites from Japan and Australia. As you can see, the turnaround time averages in the 10ms range. I have recently had GoNetSpeed Fiber installed and have been pleased with the response times and low jitter rate. As this is a growing ISP, I have found that when they add routers and switches, I often had to re-boot my router to pick up new routing tables and refresh it, however that has started to settle down now that they have canvassed my local area and the hardware at the last mile has been built up. For the trace routes to the same sites, you can see the path, where the packets leave my computer and head out over my router. The gateway there is the 10.0.0.1 address which is a nice scheme that is commonly used if 192.168.1.1 is not available. After that lightower.net is my last mile provider ...
A Day In The Life: 08/30/2021 / Application Essay Today was a typical Monday for me. I had originally planned on traveling for work, but the project associated with the travel was postponed. Although I am relieved about having more time to plan for the project, I’m wary that this schedule change will create conflicts later this year. As that was cancelled, I instead went through my normal daily routine that Looked like this. · 05:00 – Wakeup: o Wakeup with the alarm clock and make a pot of coffee · 05:15 – Morning routine: o Shower o Breakfast o Laundry o Dishes o Dressed for work · 07:00 – Dr. Appt: o Stop at Dr. office to review blood work · ...
Mobile App Review / Discussion I may have mentioned in my introduction that I have a pastime of power lifting. As part of my training, many of my exercises are based off formulas associated with what is called a “One Rep Max”. This number is a theoretical maximum amount they can be lifted in a single attempt based upon calculations of repetitions of lower numbers. As the formulas to calculate the maximum potential are rather complex, I use an application called “One Rep Max” by Vander soft. As you can see in Figure 1 below there is a data entry portion to log the weight of the lift and the number of repetitions. It then displays the calculated “1RM” or estimated maximum lift potential. One feature that I would like to see is to show both imperial and metric measurements. In the united states, most weights are measured in pounds, however if competitions or in other countries metric is used. It would be very handy to have both ...
Programming Languages: I poked around "Scratch" for this week’s assignment to see what it was all about. I was delighted to find that scratch uses the same block-building interface as the VEXcode software used for programming VEX robots. We use the block interface to interface with C++ or Java to create run commands for custom-built robots. Because of my experience, block programming was a comfortable working environment. I found the graphic editor to be jumpy and not very accurate, and I had difficulty creating or modifying costumes. I overcame this issue by taking my time and adjusting the brush sizes to minimize drawing errors. If this were a real-world scenario, I would most likely outsource the graphic design portion of the programming, as that is not my forte. Please find my version of the dancing crab here: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/563069204 The programming exercises in our textbook were a great learning tool....