Task 2: Chat

Chatting is a great way to stay in touch and I've been using it for as long as I can remember. For me it started in the days of Ultima Online, (I was about 12 when I played - pre WoW and Ventrilo) and the means of effective communication was ICQ. It seems to have come a long way since those days however, with greetings, "Zlango" (pic talk), and ICQ2Go, but I can't help hold its still primitive look and feel.

I have previously used Yahoo Messenger but have never touched it since (for personal choices), but regularly use MSN messenger and Google Talk. Google Talk has it's highs and lows. It works in your email (or your Google Desktop if your computer can handle it), and so doesn't require you to download another program, but on the other hand, if you're using it through your email, then you have to have your email open during your chat, which is ok but it can be just one more annoying window open when you don't want it.
MSN messenger on the other hand works as a software program (requires downloading), but allows you to access your email from this tool. Both these programs have their benefits. I like MSN. I use it the most because most people I know use it, and that's what usually determines which dominant messenger is used today (how many people do you know who use it). And for me that MSN and Google Chat.
I should also point out that Google chat is also good because it quite frequently bypasses office firewall filters. This is what started my use of it because when offices would block all other messengers (outside designated hours), people could use their email to continue chatting (naughty but effective). Meebo also does a similar thing as it does not require downloading, but allows people access to their chat tools through a website. But back to topic.

I met with my peers in the WebCT chat rooms and we had a few difficulties. One was disconnections. Another was the Javascripts. It was an interesting experiences - but not quite as fluid and smooth as the WebCT almost seemed to be a beta version. It was nice to chat to other students in the class. We talked about chat programs and preferences, but being one of the first online I was also the first to leave after suffering from disconnections (perhaps because I was using a faulty internet connection). I think I'll stick to MSN and Google, but I will try my hand at IRC (just for the fun of it ;) )

Task 2: Newsgroup

For the Newsgroup Task I joined "BookCrazy" and I've included my first post;

#102560	From: "curtined" Date: Tue Aug 26, 2008 12:09 am Subject: Re: Question!
	Hi All, (If you don't recognise me it's because I'm new here, so Hi :D ). I'm a little embarrassed to say but I do reread, but only books that I just can't get enough of, such as the Twilight saga by Stephenie Meyer and Jane Austen. Some books I just can't read once, I have to engross myself in them. I also reread because I'm not the most attentive reader. When I get to the more exciting (or scary) parts of books I start reading quickly (unconsciously) trying to find out what happens, but in the mean time I miss the good stuff. So sad, but true. Have a fine day :) ~ Veronica

I think I'll keep up with this group just for fun :)

Task 2: Lists

An email list is a way of communicating to a large amount of people in a single email. Members choose to receive emails on certain topics. This form of communication is powerful because participation only involves checking email, and it also allows for personal ways to receive the emails, such as individually, or digest format. It also puts the information in the users face - in a busy world this ability is powerful. The negatives of this form of communication is that active participation is required to stay on top of all the information shared, the large amounts of emails can also be frustrating, and it's possible for your email to quickly fill with unwanted or irrelevant information.

A discussion board is a forum on a website which allows people to discuss common interests through group communication. It is separate from your email, and all the group can read and usually participate in messaging. The benefits of discussion boards is that the discussion board is available when it is convenient, and the forums are usually conveniently archived. The negatives are that a discussion board user can easily fall behind if they don't check the discussion board and that posters to the discussion boards often forget to proofread their work leading to confusion and misinterpretation.

Both these tools are useful in different situations. The discussion boards are helpful when a user is only interested, or a passer-by. It's a less committing way to interact with the community which holds the desired information. It also allows archiving for users, allowing researchers to recover information. Email lists on the other hand are great for users who are active, and desire to always be in the loop with little effort. This is especially helpful for smaller groups.

For this task I signed up to a few email lists. I started by looking at a few public messages on yahoo groups, but decided quite quickly that I would sign up for an account and get the messages sent to my email. I joined BookCrazy as a digest subscriber and A_N_I_M_E_ as an individual email subscriber. I soon noticed that this was a great way of communicating to a large amount of people quickly and easily, without external effort, all that was required was reading my email (which I atleast do every hour or so). One problem I've found is the lack of poofreading of users and that the messages (although I have not had a problem so far) probably can't be moderated easily (but luckily people seem to be fairly sensible and to the topic).

Task 2: Email

After doing the net.TUTOR "email basics" tutorial, I am now able to answer the task questions on email.

From an email message, you are able to find out the email messages recipients, the subject (through the subject line), any attachments which may be included in the email, and then you will also receive the text body, and the contact information/ signature of the sender.

Commonly used functions of email are Cc, Bcc and "reply to all". Cc is used to send a copy of a message to someone. Bcc is used as a 'blind copy'. A blind copy allows you to send a copy of the message but recipients are not visible. The "reply to all" function allows the sender to send to all recipients of the original message which they are replying to.

To help ensure an email attachment is received successfully by a recipient, keep it in a format that can be opened by the recipient's software (if you don't know what software the recipient has then keep it is a common format such as .rtf), compress large files, and name your attachments appropriately.

Filters work to search and divide mail. This way you can selectively read your incoming mail when it is convenient. For instance you can set up a junk filter to exclude spam messages from your inbox, or you can filter your inbox for certain words or senders. I always keep the junk filter on.

My email is sorted according to subject. This allows me to keep my inbox empty, but I can also easily find any email I am looking for by using the search mail option in my email.

Task 1: TraceRoute

I've done one of these before. I love playing WoW, but recently our switch to portable internet on what I believe is known as a USB Dongle has holted my gaming. We have discovered what the problem is (it's with the ISP), but to get to the conclusion we were asked to do a Traceroute by the gentlemen at Blizzard. Due to my little, but reasonable experience, I found this exercise quite simple. I used network-tools.com and this was a screen dump of my results:As I hope you can see (maybe just) that there are 21 hops (I think the timed out ones count). The average time from the network-tools site to Curtin is 13.9 ms. I think you can also see in this screen dump the Curtin IP address which 134.7.179.53.

Task 1: FTP

I found this task great because I often send photos in to photo labs to get prints, but they also offer an FTP, but not knowing how to use this I have usually dismissed this tool. After this exercise I will definitely use this option to get photos printed.

I used FileZilla for this exercise, but I later found out that the Mozilla Firefox browser has an FTP Client addon called FireFTP (I will try this later to see if I like it better). After connecting to curtin I found the file and read the answer as CAPITALIZATION MATTERS.
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After trying FireFTP I found it much easier to work with. There was a greater work space, and a clear 'find tool' to search your computer directory. Finding the 'Readme' file again was much easier this time being located at /Anonymous/MSC/readme.txt. I'll remember to use FireFTP next time I'm using FTP.
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This was quite a fun excerise and I hope there are more FTP experiences to come.

Task 1: Telnet (B)

TASK B
I didn't just look at the towel.blinkenlights.nl (Star Wars), but also had a look at other recommended telnet sites just for a bit of fun, but received mixed experiences. Star Wars was brilliant, and when I say that there's been a lot of work put into that presentation, it's an understatement. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to see a brilliant piece of art. Looking at other sites though (dr.nostrum.com, Marvin - Eliza like Bot), I found that most were now dead links.At first I thought it was because I was using a Mozilla Firefox browser, and so I tried them on Internet Explorer and they still didn't work. I was quite disappointed at this point as other people on Digg (http://digg.com/tech_news/Great_Sites_to_Telnet_Into_for_Fun) had been commenting on them (some newer posts having issues like me). But one helpful thing that came from this was the comments on Digg, such as "what we used to use before this fancy web stuff" (helfire), and "Brings back great memories of the internet before the web" (no2gates). These comments I think helped me to place my mind in context and understand that in its day this was the 'cream' of the computer. This was their internet, and for its day it worked really well. But as the internet has moved on many of these sites are now dead links, which is sad because some of these sites had obviously been brilliantly entertaining.

One flaw of telnet, like today is the far too easy ability to miss type your address (how frustrating), but you also couldn't cut and paste your address (perhaps using the 'start > run' you can, but as far as I'm aware not once you're in the client) so another bother for me. This has been slightly resolved with today's browsers by cut and paste. It's an interesting experience using this tool and a bit of a gimmick these days, but I really liked the feel of connecting the way the client does (perhaps because you can actually see it connecting), but perhaps it would be too slow for todays impatient age. No one really wants to wait 30 seconds every time they wanted to connect to another server.

Task 1: Telnet (A)

Part A

Step 1: My telnet client.
I hope you can see that, but my first step was to type "telnet://" into my address bar and to my surprise it worked :D (I later found that I could bypass a couple of the future steps by typing "telnet://library.deakin.edu.au" into the address bar, but I'll remember that next time I do this).

Step 2: Launch the application

As you can see from the screen dump, at this point you are presented with the option to launch the application which I did :D (I was very excited to get this far; things were happening)

Step 3: The address
As you can see here in my Microsoft Telnet Client that I typed in the address of what I was to connect to, which in this case was Deakin library. The address was "library.deakin.edu.au". Again, I now realise I could have typed this directly into my address bar in my browser, but instead I'll remember that for next time.

After this it connected to the telnet library at deakin and asked me which terminal I was using; UT100 or NCSA UT100. After a quick Google search, I decided to select the the UT100 terminal.

Step 4: Finding my way around the library
As you can see from the screen dump, as far as I'm aware I successfully found where I was meant to be; the Deakin library. Next I was to search for my author; Bennahum. I selected option A for Author at which point I was presented with two titles for books written by Bennahum, so I selected the email printer and sent it to my university email address.
Step 5: The email
Next I checked my inbox and 'lo and behold':
My email from "DEAKIN UNI LIB" was waiting for me with my selected book information.

My Thoughts: I quite enjoyed this first task as it allowed me to get my hands a little dirty, but I wonder what people would use this for? I understand that it's used to connect to computers from a distance, and that in the past this would have been very useful, but what do I use it for today? Wouldn't using a remote desktop do a similar thing? I'm not too sure. I plan to play around with this tool anyway, as there are some clever things out there which are accessible to Telnet, so hopefully I'll still find some use for it. Going through the interesting list at http://www.telnet.org/htm/places.htm will be my first goal and will hopefully help answer some of my questions.

Week One: The First Post

Hello to the world of blogging.
This is my first ever blog, so I hope you'll be patient with me this semester as I learn the ropes of this new tool I have at my finger tips. *smiles*

As I've never blogged before, I struggled with the first task. I don't have any tips from experience with blogging, and so I sought some help from other websites. I stumbled across one brilliant site "www.dailyblogtips.com", and so my 5 tips for blogging have come from this website, and common sense.

The tips:
1. Outline
Like writing an essay, or any other piece of work, an outline to kick things off helps. Even planning your outline in your head will do (but if your like me you're better off writing it down). The outline is something I use to direct my thoughts, and keep to the point. I like to think that it also helps increase the chances of actually writing something readable (one can hope).

2. Relax
It never helps to stress. You get flustered, and have a mental block. If you relax when you're finding things a little difficult, then you're probably doing your mind and body a world of good. There's nothing more frustrating than getting a stress headache when you're trying to finish your work. If times are stressful then take a break and come back to it in 10 minutes time. That break is often quite refreshing for your brain, so let it reboot and do what it needs to do.

3. Redirect your thoughts
When you're frustrated, stumped and can't think of how to write something, try to think of questions to ask yourself to provoke different answers. Going over questions which you don't know the answer to will usually increase your frustration. Take a break and re-approach your work from another angle.

4. Be Consistent
This is one I think I'll struggle with, but by being consistent you can train yourself to write and work better. Yes, breaks help, and I believe a well timed break can often be better for you than 'plugging' through but you don't want to drop the ball either.

5. Proofread
Don't you hate it when you write an essay, hand it in, and then realise all the mistakes you've made? Luckily blogging allows you to edit your work, but a good proofread before you publish is always wise if you want to avoid that embarrassment.


I hope those 5 tips help (thanks dailyblogtips.com).

~ Veronica