Seminar 2 Review

Im sorry for the delay of this post but here goes..

This seminar we talked about technology infrastructure or in other words the infrastructure of the cyber world. We learnt about how the internet came to be what it is from its humble beginings. What are the various protocols that hold it together, a bit about WiFi protocols, and finished it of with a little about various markup languages and a little bit of practice of basic html. But first....

We started off with various groups giving a presentation about Starhub and a technology called Fixed mobile convergence. From what i understood from the presentations and also the professor, the case was about Starhub entering the mobile market and the problems it faced upon entering, and Fixed mobile convergence(FMC) was a technology by which your mobile phone and your cordless landline converge into the same device, i.e. when outdoors it behaves as a mobile phone and when inside the house it acts as a cordless phone. The professor also went on to say that it was true that Starhub was miles ahead of starhub on the technology front, they seem to have goofed up on the business aspect. Apparently when they started up, they choose a billing mechanism which had little or no upgradability or expandability, and so when Starhub expanded from the mobile market and started other services, they were unable to integrate its billing into the old system, and so they have to bill it separately. Hence users, like Professor Lee Gilbert himself, who subscribe to multiple services from Starhub are sent multiple bills and hence have to pay with separate checks for each service. I can understand that this will get irritating after a while. After this the professor invited three of the students to show their blogs in front of the class, as an example of what was expected from the rest of us, as this was an important part of the in-class assessment. He also commented that these blogs could help ourselves and the other students to either review the previous class or while preparing for the exam.

Now the actual class began and we started learning about the history of the internet. How it started off as the arpanet, meant only for use by researchers and then the military. But it kept growing slowly. Then came 1972 when the email was born. Soon came along mailing groups and the Usenet(Then started by a bunch of unversity students but now better known as the google groups.) By now internet started to spread faster and more and more civilians were adopting it. Then we learnt about the emergence of the world wide web and the contribution of Tim berners-Lee and many others.

This concluded the history and we began on the actual infrastructure section.

The first topic discussed was packet switching. This is kind of a major topic encompassing most of what we learnt later. Basically when files or web pages are sent over the internet network, they are split into many tiny pieces called packets. they are then sent from the sender through the network, to the reciever where they are assembled again. The sending of the packets through the network from server to server, until it reaches the reciever is basically what packet switching is. The routing of these packets is, as you can imagine, very important, and so there are routing computers which handle routing. There are also several algorithms controlling the routing process. We were then shown a diagram which clearly shows how each lan is connected through a router into the internet network. This brought us to the topic of the protocols which control the net.

A Protocol can be defined as a set of rules by which something(here, the web) functions or works, to enable different systems to work together. The major protocols governing the net are TCP(Transfer control protocol) and IP(Internet protocol). TCP controls how big files are split into small packets for transmission over the web and viceversa, while IP controls how these packets are sent from the source to their destination. We can see clearly that thesetwo protocols are so important for the nets functioning that they inevitably create a bottle neck in that the effeciency of the net depends on the effeciency of the protocols. Hence several improvements were made over time to them. The current IP is IP v4 but this is soon going to run into its limits as the number of domains available are decreasing fast. There was an attempt to improve this in IP v5 but since it was too much work for vey less gain it was rejected. IP v6, when it comes is not only supposed to increase the number of domains but also improve various other aspects like security, etc.

Then we went on to web page delivary protocols and learnt about http, url. THen we moved to Email protocols like pop, smtp, etc. We then talked a bit about different kinds of networks, internet, extranet, private network, and so on. We then moved on to wireless connections, first a little about bluetooth connections and then about wireless ethernet or WI FI and its various standards (802.11 a/b/g/n). Prof Lee Gilbert told us that where he stays , out of the families staying near, he could detect six WI FI netowrks. This maybe normal here in singapore, but it is about 6 more than i would expect back where im from.

We then moved on to markup languages, and learnt about the main ones like SGML, HTML, XML and XHTML, and brief details about each. After this we had a small lab session in which Prof Lee Gilbert showed us the basics of html coding done in notepad. We all tried using a few tags and opened the files in IE to view the results. This concluded the class for today.

My first impressions..

I must confess the first thing i saw when i entered the seminar room, were all the laptops oon the tables, i had never expected that. Each student had one for himself. I was kind of encouraged by this. However .....
The course stared off on a bad foot( ;-) ). The professor started talking about how the class looked so empty and that he must have scared most of them off, i cant say i was too thrilled about the word 'scared'. However the class picked up after that and it looked fun, seems like i get to learn a lot about stuff which i have upto now just given a passing glance or even ignored. This includes things like Wikis, blogging, podcasts, etc. Then i learnt we had to pay $30 to stay in the course but then i figured it seems a quite interesting course and the professor seems a great speaker and ofcourse we all get laptops, so it seemed kinda fair! Anyway thats all for this post, the next will all be mostly summaries of the weeks seminars.

my first blog post

here goes my first blog post ever!! (hope it is not too surprising !) This one isnt going to be long though, as i didnt attend the first class, having added the course only this week, so i really dont know what to write here. I expect the next few one to be much longer though.. so i think i will be closing here for now, will be posting again real soon so watch out!