Another try…

I managed to get myself so stressed about falling behind over the last few weeks that I don’t think I truly absorbed any of the information presented or any sense of purpose in the tasks I’ve completed. So I’ve taken a few days off, re-read the course details, identified where I think I’ve been hasty, promised myself not to write silly things on the discussion board, and pretty much started again.

The notes on how to control and use study time posted by other students have been invaluable. I’m starting to feel like I’m in control again! So, another try...

Five tips for Top Bloggers

Ahem… yes, the very first task and I somehow managed to miss it. I was wondering why I kept seeing it on everyone elses blogs!

1 – Design
I’ve seen so many blogs, particularly the myspace type, that are practically impossible to read due to a clash, or often likeness, between the background image and the text. Please, if you want it to be read, make sure we can see the text and navigate the page easily!

2 – Audience
I’m starting to wonder if I’m a bit old fashioned. I admit that I insist on spelling out words in full and using proper punctuation on text messages from my mobile phone, and I’m the same when I’m communicating online. I think you should write for your audience. It’s fine to pad out the text in your blog with quotes like this one, from the lovely Jodie’s blog

“Noway ppl r mad nowdyz!lol...well f i dnt spek 2 u b4 u go av gd holidy n ill cya wen u gt bk”

if you are just talking to your friends, but don’t expect your granny to understand it. Choose your words for your audience!

3 – Think
Think before pressing publish. Do you really want that rant about how badly you boss / parents / friends treat you to stay out there forever? Sure, attitudes change over time, but a written slander available to all the world can have lingering after effects.

4 – Play
Try out all the functions of your blog – if you don’t like an element delete it. Blogging sites such as www.bravenet.com have a wealth of options available to truly personalise your site, don’t overdo it and end up in the perils of tip 1 though!

5 – Enjoy!
There are people who use their blogs to dispense their misery to the web community, but blogs are a tool that can be used for much better purpose. Use it to keep in touch with family and friends, unite people with similar interests, share your opinions of the world.


Telnet

I thought I would start with something that really freaked me out and made me feel entirely ridiculous the first time I tried. This time I went straight to Hyperterminal, typed in the address, dialled directly through, located the author and the books in seconds – painless, stressfree seconds! We don’t have a printer set up on this pc and it is defaulting to offer fax instead of print, which seems to explain the reason I couldn’t get a print/email option. As a result I’m not going to be able to complete this task as requested, but at least this time I’ve got my head around why!

I was asked if I was using a VT100 or an NCSA VT100 terminal when I dialled Curtin, I took a guess and went for VT100. It worked luckily! I tried to do some further research about VT100 and found that it is a terminal emulator, but it got a bit too complex, and I’ve got a lot of work to do today – I’ll come back to it later.

A bit more reading done and now I understand that telnet can be a very useful tool for accessing libraries, but I think it is widely a forgotten application that users who have adapted to the current bright, highly graphic internet applications would struggle to adapt to.

Traceroute & Ping tasks

After completing this the first time I wrote in this blog that I thought I understood the concepts of what I had just done. I didn’t. Not by a long shot. Last week I was working near the citrix server team at work when screams of alarm rang out – they were pinging one of the bank’s servers and it wasn’t replying. After they had resolved the incident I spoke to them and got the story of traceroute and pinging in very layman terms, and I think I can now safely say – I understand! How they explained it to me…

When you ping a server (or destination computer), you’re actually saying “hello server, are you there?”, and the server responds (hopefully) with “yes, I’m here”. That’s pinging. They use it a lot in our bank where they have zillions of servers, many of whom are hidden way in parts of the country you will never find them (quite deliberately), but with all their interconnectivity they require constant love and care. An easy way to quickly check a server is to ping it, if it answers, things are looking good.

The technical description is that you send a packet or packets of information to the destination computer, and that it replies or sends an ‘echo’.

Traceroute tells you how your message (ie packet) gets to the computer/server. We ran a traceroute to a server in the bank and then went and physically saw the servers in the first few hops. The server itself was about 100km away, but we matched the server descriptions from the traceroute to the servers in the datarooms and I got to see the very real side of the traceroute idea.

So, to summarise, pinging is the phone call to check if things are ok, traceroute is the map to get there.

In my haste I hadn’t completed the initial exercises properly, so here they are completed correctly.

Traceroute task

I used the traceroute programme from www.network-tools.com to find the curtin.edu.au site. It took 19 hops and 291 milliseconds to locate to the server.

The IP address of curtin.edu.au is 134.7.179.53

Ping task

I used the www.network-tools.com site to ping the webct site, the average response time over 10 pings was 271.3ms.

Next I used the A-toolbar software downloaded from www.tucows.com . This site gave an average response time over 5 pings instead of 10, with the result of 293ms.

Then I realised I could change the numbers of pings to 10, and ran it again. This time the average response time was 311ms.

Then I decided to try the www.Centralops.net ping, and found that they gave me more information than the previous software had.



This one was really good, it told me how many packets were sent, how many were returned, the fastest and slowest response times and the average, which worked out to be 251ms.

I conclude that the different response times experienced depend on a numer of factors including how many packets of information are being sent, and their size, and where the site is based, and how many servers you need to go through to get there.

Traceroute further task

I ran a further traceroute from www.network-tools.com to the Curtin site, the result was identical to the first test, there was no change in the hops, servers or time. This figure is very likely change given the so many thousands of optional routes that could be taken to the destination site, it just so happens that not much has changed between networks-tools and Curtin in the last 40 minutes!


And that’s the end of my module 1 recap. It was so much easier the second time around, and so much more enjoyable!

Module 2 - Email Tasks

1. What information about a user's email, the origin of a message, and the path it took, can you glean from an email message?

An email message can immediately give you information on the sender in a variety of ways:

Username
Quickly allows you to recognise the sender if they are using their real name or a familiar nickname. In the work environment we often use a full name or a slightly abbreviated version so it’s pretty clear who is contacting you.

Personal usernames can be a bit different though, random nicknames are used and they can also be changed/new addresses started. As an example, I knew an angry young teenage boy, Peter, whose first email username was PeterDevil666 (or something like that) who later found religion and became PeterVerse22 (or some kind of biblical reference). Who would ever have thought that was the same person?

Domain Name
In the business world this is a great way of immediately identifying which company someone is working, this really helps to decide the speed with which you need to respond.

In personal use, it can show someone’s interests, eg I know a lot of environmentalists who use ‘wildmail’ over the commercial yahoo or hotmail options.

Small businesses and home web users might also have their own email server enabling them to personalise their domain name. Gives the impression that you really know your technical stuff!

Subject
Quick identification of the relevance and importance of your email. Particularly helpful if you are seeking a penis enlargement or get rich quick scheme.

Path…
I’m a bit stuck on this one. I’ve been searching through my hotmail inbox to see if I can find information on the route the email has taken but I can’t see any options. I’ll try my work email tomorrow where I use Outlook, I hope there will be more information there.


2. In what cases would you find it useful to use the 'cc', 'bcc' and 'reply all’ functions of email?

CC
I use this function quite often at work when I reply to a message on my boss’ behalf (I have full control of her inbox). When I cc her into the response it comes in to the top of her inbox, she can read the thread of emails that led to my response and the commitments I have made on her behalf J. I can then delete the preceding messages relating to it, reducing the traffic in her inbox.

BCC
The only time I would use this would be if I was making an announcement to a group of people, who I wanted to remain anonymous from each other. I’d put all the names into the BCC box which stops the email addresses being shown to each other. I don’t really like this feature, it’s seems secretive and sly to me and it makes my skin crawl.

Reply All
I would mostly use this when organising a lunch or dinner with work folks, when a group decision is required for the restaurant or bar. Not very professional use of business email – but it makes things easier when we are spread across 4 or 5 offices! Other than that, I rarely need to respond to more than one person.

3. In what ways can you ensure that an attachment you send will be easily opened by the receiver?

Ahh.. very relevant question in my job just now. Our bank has just gobbled up another bank (apologies, the technical term is that we are in ‘integration’), and the new bank uses a different email system to us – we use Outlook. As a result we have had a lot of trouble synchronising information such as meeting requests – our meeting requests won’t update in their diaries, their responses come back to us as an attachment that our email system can’t read. It’s not working very well so far. We have been overcoming this by following up every action with a simple text only email.

Specifically regarding attachments, I am mostly converting documents to pdf files, which seem to be the lightest attachment weight, and easy for any one to open.

Saving word documents or text only files in rtf format is an excellent way to ensure the receiver will be able to read the information.

4. What sorts of filters or rules do you have set up, and for what purpose?

I help organise large events at work. When I send out an invitation or request for information to the attendees, I set up filters on my inbox so that all the responses will go into a separate file for action at a later date. I love this function, as sometimes I have literally thousands of responses coming back in a short period.

5. How have you organised the folder structure of your email and why?

At work I have structured my folders in subjects – well subjects that make sense to me anyway, not sure if anyone else could find them! I then use sub folders to further organise. For example I have a top level folder called travel, then I create subfolders for each trip/tour taken by my boss and I put all information related to those trips in there.I also use folders for processing work. I record particular authorisations for our division. I plonk all the new requests in one folder and when I’ve dealt with them they go in the archive/dealt with folder. This way I know exactly where I’m at with my workload.

A great day...

Yay! Happy days! After managing to avoid my computer all weekend I gave the FTP task a try and was successful!

Unfortunately the download from the link in the task notes wouldn’t work and I had to have a bit of a search around to find something that my computer could deal with, but third time lucky and all is happy in the world.

I found Filezilla quite intuitive and easy to use. I’m very happy! And I also now know that CAPITALISATION MATTERS!

I didn’t include a mention about blinkenlights in my last post. I managed to find it via telnet, and whilst I was totally impressed by the patience of who ever spent the hours putting it together, unfortunately it didn’t engage my tired brain and I didn’t watch it all the way to the end. It really made me appreciate how much we have progressed with our graphics and connectivity with the reader/end user.

But… on to the next task – pinging things! I’ve really been looking forward to this. I used to sit next to a team of server technicians and they were always pinging servers to see how they were going. They used to let me ping things from time to time to keep me happy – but this is the first time I’ve ever pinged anything for genuine reason! Woohoo!

Using Traceroute from Centralops, it took me 19 hops to reach Curtin. Great news, I not only achieved the task but I also understand the point of it!

I tried to download the tucows software but it looks like it’s a bit much for our delicate internet connection and was going to take >40 minutes, so that’s another task that will have to hold on for now.

I should mention Cynthia, that I’m using ‘borrowed’ wifi (thank you neighbours) until we get our internet up and running at home, it should happen in the next 3 or 4 weeks. I wonder if that is the cause of some of my problems last week?

I’ve just hit the next button and it seems I’m on to Module 2! I thought it would be a month before I got there! I’ll do some more reading around the Discussion Boards and get started on it tomorrow!

I've got a bad feeling about this...

I saw this statement in the task and thought, everyone else has completed this fine, what could possibly go wrong?! Famous last words!

I finally managed to find telnet on my pc, typed in the address and the result was an invalid command. Then I thought I would try to download something from the internet. First choice in my google search was Putty, it sounded ok. I downloaded it and got it running and the result was a black screen with a green dot on it... didn't seem right so I got rid of that pretty quickly - I didn't wait long enough to save a picture of it.

Next on the list was something called ZOC which was successful in connecting to the library, and I found the books - great! Everything was going well until I tried to print it, and instead of being offered an option to email I was just asked to provide a fax number.

So back to the discussion board where I found some advice on how to locate telnet on my pc. I tried the command prompt idea which was not happy at all, more invalid commands.

After a little more digging around the discussion pages I tried the hyperterminal option which allowed me to successfully locate the author again, yay!

But when I asked it to print I got only the following:

I figure there are some issues with the default settings on my computer that I'll need to figure out, if anyone has any ideas on how I can cure this, please yell!

I decided at this stage that since I'd been staring into a computer screen for around 13 hours today, it was time to stop, maybe do some housework... but thought I should try the blinkenlights to brighten up a bit - but hyperterminal decided it wouldn't connect without phone connection..?? I got it to work on ZOC though, so partial success again, but there's definitely something that needs to be tweaked here.

I'd best start that housework. My partner is french and we've got some lovely french cheese here. He will tell you that cheese never dies, but trust me, when you can smell it throughout the house - it really should go. He's out for some pints tonight, I might relocate it in the skip before he notices.

Good night all!

Here we go....

I've been out of Australia for quite a while now, and while blogging would have been a really good way to keep in touch with family and friends, baring my random thoughts on the internet has never appealed (my thoughts are genuinely random, but to be honest I will share them with just about anyone over a few pints). But I digress... deep breath... here I go with my first foray into blogging.

I'm desperately trying to catch up with you all, having missed the first 9 days of the class, so I'm not going to spend too much time playing with colours or formats just yet, I figure they are things I can change when I feel a bit more comfortable with my progress.

So... back to researching all the brilliant advice given on the discussion boards. Many thanks to everyone of you, it feels a bit like cheating seeing all the work you guys have put in so far. I only hope that I can contribute as much back to you all soon when I'm up to speed.