Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Following Protocol

FTP (File Transfer Protocol); pronounced Eff Tea Pea, is a network protocol used to exchange files over a computer network, such as the internet.
What else does FTP do?
Weeeelll....
-- it promotes the sharing of files (data or computer programs)
-- encourages indirect or implicit use of remote computers
-- shields the user from variations in file storage systems
-- transfers data reliably and efficiently :)

Sounds pretty rad you say? I guess so... however! FTP is an inherently insecure method of transferring files. This is because there is no method for transferring data in an encrypted fashion.. which THEN means that things like user names, passwords, and transferred files can be intercepted by anyone on the network using a packet sniffer/analyser (that's a piece of software or hardware which logs traffic passed over a network).
A solution to this is to use SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) or FTPS (FTP- Secure), which adds SSL or TLS encryption to FTP.


So why were we talking about FTP?
We used an FTP client called "Fetch" to upload awesome iWeb stuff to our Athene pages on the Uni server :)
You can have a look at my amazing iWeb page here. Make sure you appreciate the RSS feeds and the counter :D But thats next week's stuff heehee


xx

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Episode 5 -- Recap

MPI104 is a pretty darn cool subject :)

Lets talk about all the stuff we have covered =D

Week 1 was spent understanding the subject, making sure we had an Athene account, and reading the subject outline!

In Week 2 we signed up for a Google account. I already had a Gmail account, so I stuck with using that :). I customised my Gmail page (with the space layout!), signed up to the Australian Holidays and Phases of the Moon on Google Calendar, and learnt about Google Docs, which I had never used before. Its pretty useful for collaboration with people you can’t directly talk to. I wrote more about Google docs in the comment for the Week 2 MPI blog post... I always knew there was heaps to Google, not just a search engine/email, and this was the first time I actually did something outside of that hehe :)

Week 3 was when we started our blog using Blogger. We had a read about blogs and Blogger, but we also had a little bit of a look at HTML—making stuff bold, headings, links etc. We all wrote our first blog posts today :D

Week 4 was probably my least favourite of all. This is when we learnt all the joys of Flickr. We had a read about Web 2.0 and folksonomy; so things like tagging, wikis, collaborative stuff, then we signed up for Flickr; in which I discovered that Firefox doesn’t signing up for a Yahoo/Flickr account. After I got that sorted, I uploaded some photos from the web and stuff I had drawn. I now have a grand total of eighteen pictures! Here’s some pictures I found from the web, and here are some of my awesome drawings.

I added some favourites too from other people; you can have a look at some here, here, and here.

I can’t stand using Flickr. If you want to know more, you can check out my blog post about it.

Onwards!

Week 5 was Delicious. Or .. del.icio.us ... even though it redirects to delicious.com anyway! Bookmarking stuff was really tedious when we had to add each others’ blogs, but I now have 21 bookmarks! The majority are blog pages, but I added some of my most visited stuff to delicious as well. Here are three of my favourites: XKCD, Penny Arcade, and the Animation VFX forum. They interest me because XKCD and Penny Arcade are two of the most awesome webcomics ever, and the Animation VFX forum is pretty important to my course lol.

Week 6 was about CSS and accessibility. We had more writing to do this time L But we also had to play around with the templates for our blog. I started with a bright pink theme... but I chose a different style (green and white background) and changed some of the colours for the headings, and the font to Georgia, to make it look cleaner.

Week 7 was revision!!

And so that leaves me here, Week 8 writing my 5th blog post. I’m not sure which one of my posts is the most interesting. Perhaps you feel like reading about my Flickr rage, or check out the cool links I posted when I wrote about Delicious :D

I didn’t use many tags because my blog is pretty small, but they’re quite relevant to their respective topics :P For example, my post on CSS is tagged with: CSS, cascading style sheets, and HTML, because that’s what I talked about.

Other work I’ve done in Blogger are commenting other peoples posts (which you can have a looksee at some of the better ones here and here) as well as fix up my profile, and follow other people’s blogs.

Anyway, I’ve written a lot

I hope that covers everything!

xx


Edit :: uhmm did anyone else get any HTML errors when they tried to post their blogs?? :( !!