Semester 1 Reflection

Communication for IT Professtionals
Grade Avarage: approx 75%
Content:
Comment:
Information Systems
Objective
- Understand how IS are used in business to support the work that ppl do
- Apply problem identification skills to define info. requirement and analyze business processes
-Employ concepts of stakeholder participation, usability evaluation, work flow modelling and design, and collaborative work practices in IS design
-Explain basic theories of teams and work in a team to create a product
Appriciate that there are diff. system development methodologies and contrast the life-cycle and prototyping approaches
-Use report writing and presentation skills effectively
-Demonstrate continued and self-reflective learning
Topics:
The Role of ISs in Organisations
- How organisation operate and how ISs support their operation and add value
- Management and operations and their respective info. needs
- Business processes and work flows and how these can be modeled
- Technologies used in information systems
Information systems and people
-Stakeholder, users and their needs
- Usability evaluation
- Systems to support collaboration and knowledege sharing
- Theories and practices of team work
System Development
- Systems development life cycle
- Prototyping
-Analysing user needs and specifying requirements
- Design approaches
Learning and Info. Systems
- Setting and IS
-Using ISs for learning
Grade Avarage: approx 65%
Comment:
- Team Performance: Lack of communication between team member, often put off work and not plan well for assignment-> contact tutor or lecture one week before ass. due
- Presentation : not speak clearly, not planning well before giving speech
- Writing assessment: don't know how to write a report properly
- Multiple choice: not focusing on keywords.--> Improve reading and take note


Web Systems
Objective:
- Explain the role of OS, and manipulate its structure such as processes, file systems and memory management using Unix based scripting
- Describe and make use of distributed applications on the internet
- Identify and explain the role and function of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and their components
- Design and implement a website
- Identify and explain the role and function of the main components of a computers
Topic:
Operating System ( focusing on Unix)
- file systems and file manipulation
- scripting and regular expressions
- processes, threads, piping and redirections
-memory and process management
The web and Human Interaction
- web page development
- the Web, web services, Human Interface and Human interaction
- web services definition and description
The Internet and the web
- The internet infrastructure and components ( Routers and TCP/IP protocol suite)
- The web and its components( web sever, web browsers, search engines)
-Client-sever network interaction
Computing theory
-Representation og info. -binary, ASCII, Unicode
-Processing and storage of information
-Coding paradigms - assembler, complier, interpreter
Comment:
- Unix skill is still not sufficient--> practice regularly
- Web design not sufficient --> cant create my own website --> suck!

Grade Avarage: 82.5%
Content:
Comment:
Programming Fundamentals
Grade Avarage: approx: 95%
Content:
Comment:

Introduction to Collections

A collection — sometimes called a container — is simply an object that groups multiple elements into a single unit. Collections are used to store, retrieve, manipulate, and communicate aggregate data. Typically, they represent data items that form a natural group, such as a poker hand (a collection of cards), a mail folder (a collection of letters), or a telephone directory (a mapping of names to phone numbers).

If you've used the Java programming language — or just about any other programming language — you're already familiar with collections. Collection implementations in earlier (pre-1.2) versions of the Java platform included Vector, Hashtable, and array. However, those earlier versions did not contain a collections framework.

What Is a Collections Framework?

A collections framework is a unified architecture for representing and manipulating collections. All collections frameworks contain the following:

• Interfaces: These are abstract data types that represent collections. Interfaces allow collections to be manipulated independently of the details of their representation. In object-oriented languages, interfaces generally form a hierarchy.
• Implementations: These are the concrete implementations of the collection interfaces. In essence, they are reusable data structures.
• Algorithms: These are the methods that perform useful computations, such as searching and sorting, on objects that implement collection interfaces. The algorithms are said to be polymorphic: that is, the same method can be used on many different implementations of the appropriate collection interface. In essence, algorithms are reusable functionality.

Apart from the Java Collections Framework, the best-known examples of collections frameworks are the C++ Standard Template Library (STL) and Smalltalk's collection hierarchy. Historically, collections frameworks have been quite complex, which gave them a reputation for having a steep learning curve. We believe that the Java Collections Framework breaks with this tradition, as you will learn for yourself in this chapter.

Benefits of the Java Collections Framework

The Java Collections Framework provides the following benefits:

• Reduces programming effort: By providing useful data structures and algorithms, the Collections Framework frees you to concentrate on the important parts of your program rather than on the low-level "plumbing" required to make it work. By facilitating interoperability among unrelated APIs, the Java Collections Framework frees you from writing adapter objects or conversion code to connect APIs.
• Increases program speed and quality: This Collections Framework provides high-performance, high-quality implementations of useful data structures and algorithms. The various implementations of each interface are interchangeable, so programs can be easily tuned by switching collection implementations. Because you're freed from the drudgery of writing your own data structures, you'll have more time to devote to improving programs' quality and performance.
• Allows interoperability among unrelated APIs: The collection interfaces are the vernacular by which APIs pass collections back and forth. If my network administration API furnishes a collection of node names and if your GUI toolkit expects a collection of column headings, our APIs will interoperate seamlessly, even though they were written independently.
• Reduces effort to learn and to use new APIs: Many APIs naturally take collections on input and furnish them as output. In the past, each such API had a small sub-API devoted to manipulating its collections. There was little consistency among these ad hoc collections sub-APIs, so you had to learn each one from scratch, and it was easy to make mistakes when using them. With the advent of standard collection interfaces, the problem went away.
• Reduces effort to design new APIs: This is the flip side of the previous advantage. Designers and implementers don't have to reinvent the wheel each time they create an API that relies on collections; instead, they can use standard collection interfaces.
• Fosters software reuse: New data structures that conform to the standard collection interfaces are by nature reusable. The same goes for new algorithms that operate on objects that implement these interfaces.

Google, behind the screen

Call Number :338.761 Goog
A film made by SBS

Google Personels:

Vint Cerf
Marissa Mayer
Franz Josef Och
Adam Smith
Chikai Ohazama
Nikesh Aora

Other people interviewed in the film

Brewster Kahle - Internet Archieve
- Open Content Library
Google Services:
Google Moon

Issues:
- Monopoly
- Privacy - Google store users' data ( keyword, websites..., Gmail )

Anti-Technology Technologies?

"A story from the NYTimes about metering internet traffic caught my eye. I thought the exchange of information over the Internet was supposed to be a good thing? Couldn't we use technology more constructively? For example, if there is too much network traffic for video and radio channels, why don't we offset with the increased use of P2P technologies like BitTorrent? Why don't we use wireless networks to reduce the traffic on the wired infrastructure? Such technologies often have highly desirable properties. For example, BitTorrent is excellent for rapidly increasing the availability of popular files while automatically balancing the network traffic, since the faster and closer connections will automatically wind up being favored. Instead, we have an increasing trend for anti-technology technologies and twisted narrow economic solutions such as those discussed in the NYTimes article, and attempts to restrict the disruptive communications technologies. You may remember how FM radio was delayed for years; part of the security requirements of a major company includes anti-P2P software, as well as locking down the wireless communications extremely tightly — but there are still gaps for the bad guys, while the main victims are the legitimate users of these technologies. Can you think of other examples? Do you have constructive solutions?"

Just an interesting article i picked up from slashdot.net .

Podcast

I just find a new fanstatic way to study. That is learning through using podcast uploaded by famous Uni such as Stanford. With this way of learning, I hope my knowledge can be broadened to no limit.

This is the link :

http://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browsev2/itunes.stanford.edu
http://www.plus.maths.org/cloud/ptag/tag_id/342/computer+science
http://oedb.org/library/beginning-online-learning/skip-the-tuition:-100-free-podcasts-from-the-best-colleges-in-the-world
http://www.oculture.com/2007/07/freeonlinecourses.html