Disable Java in your Browser (US-CERT)

IT News

The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) tells users to disable Java in browsers.  http://bit.ly/VR5uJT

How to disable Java in your web browser:

http://www.java.com/en/download/help/disable_browser.xml

Google Search

Improve your Google Search skills:

• Basic Search Help (Google)
• More Search Help (Google)
• Learn about Image search
• Complete List of Google Search features
• A Google a Day is a new daily puzzle that can be solved using your creativity and search skills on Google. Overview (from Google's official blog)
• 12 Ways To Be More Search Savvy (by Google’s “search anthropologist”)
• 18 Ways to Power Search Google

Google Miscellany

Google URL shortener.

Six Google Games to Keep you Entertained

Google Labs, 106 Things

Web Field Trip

Google on the Gorge: Web 2.0 Field Trip

CIS 110 Help Sessions Week 2

For students who missed their week 1 lab or just want extra help, you are welcome to attend one of more Help Sessions.

110 Help Sessions Week 2 (10/1 - 10/5)

4-5pm MTWRF B90CD Onyx Bridge (Science Library)

Note that if no one shows up during the first 10 minutes the session is cancelled.

Getting to B90CD Ony.

Flying Math: Bees Solve Traveling Salesman Problem

From Wired Science, 09-21-2012. Bumblebees foraging in flowers for nectar are like salesmen traveling between towns: Both seek the optimal route to minimize their travel costs.

Mathematicians call this the “traveling salesman problem,” in which scientists try to calculate the shortest possible route given a theoretical arrangement of cities. Bumblebees, however, take the brute-force approach:

For them, it’s simply a matter of experience, plus trial and error, scientists report.

Apollo Guidance Computer

This is the type of computer that went to the moon in the Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972.

There was one computer in the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) and one the mothership (CM) circling above. It was the first use of integrated circuits [chips]. It's cycle time was 1 Mhz, 11 instructions. It had 1K of 16 bit words of erasable (RAM) core memory and 12K of read-only memory (ROM). The ROM held the "Colossus 249" flight control software. There were no disks or tapes in the flight system.

How to build one in your basement, with many useful references.

Visualizing Data: The Data Journalism Handbook

The Data Journalism Handbook

"The Data Journalism Handbook is a free, open-source reference for anyone interested in the field of data journalism. It features contributions from over 70 of the leading global voices of authority and has now been released, remarkably only 6 months after its conception. It is a joint initiative between the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation and is published by O’Reilly Media."

Everything You Never Knew About CSS Floats

What do floats really do anyway? How do they affect the box model of the elements involved? How do floated elements differ from inline elements? What are the specific rules governing the position of floated elements? How does the clear property work and what is it for?

Find out in this article from Design Shack.

Internet security: Keys to the Cloud Castle

Dropbox's service is more than adequate for most purposes, but it is not an appropriate place for CIT students to store RSA keys.

Read why in this May 2011 post on a blog at The Economist.

Survey of Software Developers, re: Tools

InfoGraphic: A survey of former Berkeley students now in the software industry concerning programming languages, etc.

Note that the leading development platform is cloud computing.

How is Publishing Changing in the Digital Age?

Interview w/ Clay Shirky, Professor of Interactive Telecommunications, NYU.

Excerpt:

"Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done."

"In ye olden times of 1997, it was difficult and expensive to make things public, and it was easy and cheap to keep things private. Privacy was the default setting. We had a class of people called publishers because it took special professional skill to make words and images visible to the public. Now it doesn’t take professional skills. It doesn’t take any skills. It takes a Wordpress install."

Do you agree with this definition of publishing? Which professional skills do you think are "no longer required"?

H.L. Mencken said “freedom of the press is limited to those who own one”. How would you update this?

What do Facebook and Budweiser have in Common?

Neither has a woman on their Board of Directors:

• Antisocial Social Media Stocks – Are Women In The Boardroom?
  
• Does Your Company Lack This Valuable Asset?

Consumer Data Privacy Bill of Rights: A U.S. data privacy framework

The Obama administration announced what it calls its “Privacy Bill of Rights” on 2/23/2012, a long-awaited framework suggesting how companies should protect consumer information online.

FAQ: What’s in the ‘Privacy Bill of Rights?’ (Washington Post).

White House Fact Sheet.

eBusiness Club Idea Jam, Feb. 24-26, 2012

The Idea Jam brings together students from different academic disciplines to collaborate in a FREE “start-up weekend” type of event.

Read the details.

Careers: Women in High-Tech

"Susan Carreon considers herself artistic and finds math boring. So how did she become a Canadian innovator, leading the development of a world-first deposit solution for the ATMs being used by the largest banks in the United States?"

Read this Financial Post article for details.

The article mentions the CareerMash website, which shows you how to identify IT careers that combine ('mash') your primary interests with technology.

The Secret Life of Your Personal Data, Animated

The average user has 736 pieces of personal data collected by internet and cell service providers every day, and different service providers retain this information for anywhere between 12 and 60 months. See how you are creating a Digital Identity and a Digital History every day in this animated video.

The hot tech gig of 2022: Data Scientist

By the end of the decade 50 billion devices will be emitting information nonstop. Data scientists will help manage it all.

IBM's Watson is changing careers

Watson, the  Jeopardy-playing supercomputer is interesting in doing more than sparring with Alex Trebek. So it's going into business.

"Data analytics is nothing new. But the terabytes upon terabytes of unstructured data in the world (including Tweets, Facebook updates and Amazon reviews) is unprecedented. According to IBM's Saxena, 90% of the world's information was generated in the last two years. Producing data is much easier than making sense of it. That's where Watson and other next-generation analytics tools come in."

Amazon's Case For Enterprise Cloud Computing

• Slideshow: Amazon's Case For Enterprise Cloud Computing. A presentation dated 6/26/2010, but still mostly current.


• Netflix Opens Door to Leaving Amazon Web Services.

Amazon's Oregon Data Center

Amazon's New Data Center Could Save You Money

"West Coast customers who don't want the latency of sending data to Northern Virginia (region US East/Virginia) can shift to a newly opened facility in Boardman, OR, (region US West/Oregon) and no longer have to pay a premium to use the Amazon EC2 cloud data center in Silicon Valley (region US West/N. California)."

Data Centers: a growth industry in Oregon

"Data centers have become a growth industry in Oregon. Google kicked off the trend by building a large data center along the Columbia at The Dalles, five years ago. Microsoft and Yahoo both built data centers at different points on the opposite side of the river in Washington State."

"Facebook chose Prineville, Oregon's high desert country where nights are cool even in the summer to build a model data center."

And now Apple has Confirmed Plans for Another Large Data Center in Prineville.

Amazon has a newly opened facility in Boardman, OR, and "has two other data centers in the region -- an adjoining backup facility at the Port of Morrow and another modular backup at the Port of Umatilla. Port of Morrow officials say Amazon has enough land to build five more data centers at the main site."

See Also:

Amazon's New Data Center Could Save You Money

Rackspace is scouting possible locations in OR

Toughest Exam Question: What Is the Best Way to Study?

Testing yourself repeatedly before an exam teaches the brain to retrieve and apply knowledge from memory, according to an article in the WSJ.

Scale of the Universe (Flash)

..., Exometers, Petameters, Terameters, . . ., Meters, ...,  Picometers, Femtometers, Attometers, ...

"This is an interactive flash animation that lets you zoom in and out on objects in the universe to get a sense for their relative sizes.  Who knew that a giant earthworm could grow to be 7 meters long!"

How do I get into the 111 lab I want if it is full?

Image by wsh1266 via Flickr

If you are unable to enroll in the course or any lab because the course is full, your only option is to wait until someone drops the course.

Since some students are "shopping for courses" during week 1, you should see spots start to open up at the end of the first week.


If you are already enrolled in the course and a lab, but would like to switch to a different lab that is already full, here's what to do:

Go to the lab you want and ask the GTF if there's room for you. If your GTF says Yes, make sure that s/he has your name removed from your original lab and added to the new one. If the GTF says No, you will have to attend a different lab.

For labs that are full, two names may be added beyond the max on the condition that the added students bring a notebook computer or watch over someone's shoulder on days when the lab is full.

Students actually registered for the lab are guaranteed a workstation if they need one.

The K Computer: PetaScale Computing

The K Computer is the Top500's current (6/11) supercomputer, executing 8.25 quadrillion floating-point operations per second (8.25 PetaFLOPS).

"K" stands for "10-PetaFLOPS" and the machine is almost there.

While the K computer consumes 9.89 MW (think one lightning bolt, or the energy to power 10,000 suburban homes), the computer is relatively efficient and executes 825 MFlops/watt.

Annual power bill: 10 Mega$$.

IBM's BlueGene (eh, Watson?) tops the Green500 list at 1680 MFlops/watt.

The Tilde (~): Unix and URLs

Image via Wikipedia

UNIX

In a Unix pathname, the tilde (~) is an abbreviation for the "path to your home directory".

Example (not using ~): 

/home4/susanQ/public_html/110/ is the Unix path to Susan Queue's 110 folder on shell.uoregon.edu.

Example (using ~): 

~/public_html/110/ is the Unix path to Suzie's folder on shell.uoregon.edu

URLs

In a URL, the tilde (~) has a related but different meaning: it stands for the path to your public_html folder on the web server.

Example: 

http://ix.cs.uoregon.edu/~susanQ/ is the URL that corresponds to the Unix path /home4/susanQ/public_html/

Example: 

http://ix.cs.uoregon.edu/~susanQ/110/ is the URL that corresponds to the Unix path /home4/susanQ/public_html/110/

NYC Mayor Bloomberg Will Learn JavaScript In 2012

Code Year 

"250,108 people have decided to learn to code in 2012. Why not you?"

The mayors of NYC and London are among them:
Mayor Bloomberg Will Learn How To Write Code In 2012

Codeacademy website

Setting Up your Computer for CIS/CIT

• DIY: Set Up your Windows PC
  
  
• DIY: Set Up your Mac
  
  
• DIY: DuckWare CD. Many of the software applications we use in the lab (SSH, FireFox, CyberDuck, ...) are also available on the DuckWare CD (available from the Help Desk, 151 McKenzie), and can be installed on your home computer.