Archive for February, 2009
Silver State Christian School Robotics Workshop
Posted by admin in BJU, Education, Robotics4Kids on February 23rd, 2009
I did my best to make it to your fine school last week, but the Lord clearly had another schedule in mind. My flight was late Wednesday night into Atlanta due to “the worse storms in 5 years” in the Atlanta area. Tornadoes, lightening, hail, wind all came together making air travel impossible. I finally got to your school at 5PM Thursday. Mr C gave me a tour, boy was I impressed! You guys have great facilities in the gorgeous mountain shadows of the Rockies.
I left my robots & workshop materials with Mr C. I hope he will be able to show you guys how to build and program robots. I’d love to hear back from you about your experience. Please post a comment to this blog so I can hear about your experience. I enjoy showing Christian young people how to build robots and to challenge them to consider how complex God’s creation is! If God has given you an interest in computer technology I want to encourage you to consider using your abilities to bring glory to your Creator. There is no greater field of study to allow you to do so than Computer Science!
Just this past week a former student of mine emailed me and said his company was looking to hire 51 software developers here in Greenville, SC and he was only able to find 10 qualified people! Don’t let all the news of the failing economy detour you from seeking a degree in math, computer science, science or engineering. There are lots of jobs available to qualified people. And BJU is a great place for you prepare for careers in these fields!! (ok, enough of the shameless plugs) 
After you have build and programmed your robot, please post a comment sharing with me what you did and what you thought of the activity. And if any of you want more information about a career in computer science, please let me know. I’d be happy to meet you next time I’m in the Denver area – I love the mountains!!
Mr Dan Wooster
professional “bit builder” and educator (ask Mr C what bits are all about)
Here are some great looking photos of some great looking students that I’m praying will someday come to BJU and let me teach you how to be a great bit builder for God’s glory!
They aren’t making any more land – not true in the bit space!
Posted by admin in BJU, Education, Internship, MBA, Worthwhile on February 18th, 2009
Here I am stuck @ the airport, bad weather in atlanta; denver bound to try and recruit the next generation of bit builders for my computer science program! I’m thankful for free wi-fi!
One of my sources for update to date technical information comes to me daily via my treo pda. Here is an article just out today which fits in perfect with the material you studied in chapter 3. Its about a new domain name extension that ICANN was planning to release, now delayed till year end; one of the challenges with release a new top level domain (.com is a top level domain) is controlling who gets access to registering them first for example. If you own coke.com and a new tld (say .tld) is created, you would expect to have the right to get coke.tld
Interesting to consider the parallel in the atom world – land; perhaps you’ve heard the old adage “they aren’t making any more land”; well the same is not true in the bit space; ICANN can create “new land” anytime they want (well, almost – read the article to find out); sort of like the US government does with money!!!! 
NEW YORK – Bids for new Internet addresses to rival “.com” and other suffixes will likely be delayed until the end of the year as a key oversight agency grapples with trademark and security issues.
Draft guidelines for the new suffixes generated so much comment that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, needs more time to sort out what it terms “overarching issues.”
Those include whether trademark owners could wind up having to register thousands of new domain names simply to protect their intellectual-property rights. For instance, the $185,000 application fee would likely deter casual bidders from seeking, say, a “.disney” Web suffix, but the Walt Disney Co. might feel pressured to register “disney.nyc,” “disney.bank” and scores of others under each of the new names, simply to keep them away from others.
Other concerns include whether new suffixes could encourage more scams involving fake Web sites that look legitimate, and whether new suffixes would even get much use.
Some of the forthcoming discussions should address concerns raised by the US. Commerce Department, which has significant sway because ICANN gets its powers through a government contract. ICANN cannot add any domain names without approval from the department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
ICANN had wanted to start taking applications for new names early this year, but the timetable proved too ambitious given the extent of the feedback. ICANN now expects to open bids around December.
“It is very important to take the time to resolve these overarching issues,” said Paul Twomey, ICANN’s chief executive.
ICANN plans to post a new draft by Thursday clarifying and expanding on some of the proposed guidelines. Among the changes, a new foundation would be set up to collect any money raised through auctions that are planned for resolving conflicts when more than one applicant seeks the same domain name. The foundation would support research and other tasks related to running the domain name system.
By ANICK JESDANUN AP Technology Writer
Proximity of Error in the Bit Business
Posted by admin in Education, Internship on February 17th, 2009
In most atom-based problems, the cause of the error is located relatively close to the observation of the error. For example if your hair dryer shorts out and blows a circuit, chances are pretty good that the problem is located in the outlet in which the dyer is plugged into. If not, it is almost certain in the breaker box located within the house. It would NOT be located miles away in the power companies electrical grid!
One of the challenges in the bit business, is that many times this proximity of error doesn’t happen when it comes to bit-based problems. Understanding this phenomenon and learning how to solve these types of problems is key to success in the bit business. Here’s an example which derailed me this morning for about an hour!
My home computer network is a little more complex than the average due to its connection to our company network. Recently my network engineer installed a special network appliance which encapsulated most of the complexity allowing him pretty much a single point of connection to resolve network problems in my home. One of the services this appliance handles is VPN (virtual private network) to allow the bits between my house and the company network to travel with “police escort” for security. Technically this is called packet encryption. Well as of yesterday packets stopped flowing freely over this VPN and it turns out the problem had been created several months ago! Why did it wait until yesterday to surface? This is an example of there being little or no proximity of error in computer networks.
A couple of months ago my network engineer was making some modifications to our company VPN. These modifications affected how my packets traveled back and forth. It turns out the configuration was incorrect, however the network devices would not start using the misconfiguration until they were rebooted. You guessed it, the reboot didn’t take place until early Monday morning! After the reboot, packets were unable to flow between my house and the company network. It took us about an hour to figure it all out and get it fixed. The fix was simple, about 5 seconds. Finding where to fix it was the challenge, due to lack of proximity of error.
So next time you replace a light bulb in your house, be thankful that it is highly unlikely that this will cause toilets to start leaking, thanks for proximity of error in the atom business!
BJU MBA 675 Chapter 4 Individual Assignment
Go to Freewebs.com or NetworkSolutions.com or CogHead.com. These sites allow you to create a simple e-tailor web site for a free trial period. Study each site and choose one in which to create your own e-commerce website. The site should feature at least four pages, including a home page, product page, shopping cart, and contact page. Extra credit will be given for additional complexity and creativity.
Post a comment which explains the details of your web site and provides a link along with any instructions needed to visit your site. Discuss why you selected the site building tool that you used. Find an available domain name which you could purchase to promote this e-commerce site. Indicate the name you found and the registrar you would use to register it and tell why you would select that registrar. Also find a place to host your new site and tell how much it would cost and why you selected it.
Here’s a bit more on CogHead, an interesting cloud computing service:
http://www.coghead.com/
This service allows users to build web-based business applications from the comfort of their browser. The idea is to empower business users to create their own web applications, instead of having to hire a programmer. Here’s a brief paper with an overview:
https://www.coghead.com/files/coghead_101_the_basics.pdf
User Interface Design Lesson – Simply Sort It!
Posted by admin in Education, Internship, Worthwhile on February 5th, 2009
Bit Building (aka software development) has become an activity which impacts virtually everyone on the planet! Many times our lives are made better by bit builders and sometimes we are more miserable. The misery is normally triggered by interface design flaws in the software. Such was the case for me this morning in my “teaching world”.
I have a “home grown” classroom management system I call RoboClass which I use to manage various details in my academic world – lecture notes, assignments, schedules, tests, grades, student roster, syllabi, attendance, etc. I was motivated to build such a system long before commercial products, such as Blackboard, Moodle, Scholar360 existed. Several of my bit builders in training (aka students) have assisted in the construction process. All of the related data (names, grades, assignments, etc) have been kept in a database and over time, as needed, I have constructed the necessary interfaces (web pages) for my students and me to gain access to this information.
Well, thanks to a user interface flaw, I successfully lost all the grades for all of my students in CpS 111 for an assignment today! Here’s how it happened.
The following is a before and after picture of the interface used to select which assignment I am entering grades in for. Click on the one on the left and you will notice the list of assignment choices is not in any order (actually it is in an order the computer understands, but who cares!). The one on the left is the new order, which came about from my painful experience of losing my grades! When I used the 1st (unsorted) interface, I had accidentally selected the wrong assignment last week when I entered my students’ grades for their lab assignment. Then today when I entered their lab quiz grades, I selected it again and the system very obediently overwrote the lab assignment grades! Solution was simple – sort the list of assignments before asking the user to select one!
I am trying to teach my bit builders to think of the user experience as they develope software that people will use. An excellent book on this topic is The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper (creator of Visual Basic). I have all my students read it!! I recommend it for anyone involved in the business of software, as builders or users.
Another interesting observation here, is that when the person using the software is the same as the person building it, the user experience doesn’t take “back seat”!