Category Archives: Computing

Computing and Information Technology.

Finally succeeding?

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I read an article by James Somers at The Atlantic called “How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code“. I’d encourage anyone with an interest in learning to code to read it – he discusses how computer programming is an excellent learning experience but that his own experiences have been tempered by poor instruction, particularly from books. He goes on to discuss how Project Euler became the titular success.

Euler provides a series of programming challenges of increasing difficulty, as the student solves each in turn they gain experience of what does and does not work as well as confidence in their abilities. Importantly, the student is also applying programming to practical problems (if you’re a mathematics student) from the outset.

I’ll post my solutions here as I go. I’m aiming to do one a day but I’ll see how I get on. Not sure what language is best to get on with, Python is popular in open source circles but most of my courses are based around Java.

 

Completing BSc (Honours) Computing and IT

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With ten years remaining in my contract and the government’s intentions unclear, I’ve decided to get my finger out and focus on completing the BSc (Honours) Computing and IT (B62). It can use 120 points from four completed modules - M150, T175, MST121 and M255 as well as 30 points from MS221, which I have already started.

At level two I’m taking two courses on top of MS221 which I intend to study concurrently, so as to be half way through by the end of next year:

  • T215 - Communication and information technologies (60)
  • MT264 - Designing applications with Visual Basic (30)

Leaving 120 points at level 3:

  • M359 - Relational databases: theory and practice (30)
  • M364 – Fundamentals of interaction design (30)
  • M366 – Natural and artificial intelligence (30)
  • TM470 – The computing and IT project (30)

Black Ops “Strict”

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Odd solution to an irritating problem – Black Ops say “Strict” in multi-player, even with “Open” NAT. Load Modern Warfare 2, go to multi-player on-line up to the point where you choose the game type and eject the disc using the button on the front of the PS3. Insert Black Ops and load it, go to multi-player and you will be open.

I have no idea why this works, I got it off a forum post. I have tried putting the PS3 in a DMZ but it doesn’t work, so it’s not as if the game uses non-standard ports – it’s just bugged. It only needs to be done once each session – you can play something else and reload Black Ops as long as you don’t reboot.

Black Ops is an OK game, it’s not the best FPS and the single player is woefully short (with a very poor story) – its multi-player where the fun is to be had. With the latest DLC out on the 10th June, it’s a shame that Activision and Treyarch can’t get it together enough to sort this out. The truth is though that until we stop buying DLC, there’s no incentive for the publishers to fix bugs.

TU100 Café

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I’ve submitted T175‘s EMA and I don’t mind saying its a relief. Although not a difficult module, the OU changed the Computing degree structure introducing TU100, replacing T175 and M150 (which I did several years ago). Along with MST121 I had thought that I had my level one courses out of the way but with the changes, I needed to take T175.

This course used Moodle forums rather than FirstClass. This seems to have been a lot more accessible to new students and the Café in particular has proved popular. The Open University have kindly asked me to be one of the moderators in the Café on TU100. It came as quite a surprise – I hope I make a good job of it!

Twitter vulnerabilities, using Windows, studying and new WordPress themes.

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Graham Cluley, a Senior Technology Consultant at Sophos, has a nice blog piece on the Twitter worm from earlier this week. To cut a long story short, he reminds us of the importance of sanitizing inputs.

Still, it was more productive than my week with my Open University module that starts in October – T175 (Networked living: exploring information and communication technologies). The OU can be very Windows dependent but this course seems to be pretty much delivered in Virtual Learning Environment (what the OU calls Moodle). I ran the course DVD, which is a Windows Flash standalone thing which got me to revive the OU Ubuntu Users group, sending out emails, starting a mailing list and trying to get things going again.

So why was it unproductive? Well, I haven’t booted Windows in ages – there were a million updates, one of which was for the wireless driver. Update completely borked the wireless and I wound up restoring the drive. That aside, one thing I really like about Ubuntu (and most distributions) is a centralised update manager – Windows has Adobe, Java, Windows Update, Firefox and McAfee all trying to pull updates at the same time. It makes the system completely unusable for the first ten minutes it’s on!

Any way, I decided to build a new WordPress theme. Same colour scheme, more rounded edges – should be available in the next few days.

Bash

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Two things that improve my bash productivity – stopping the cursor keys inserting characters in vim and history search in bash.

Edit ~/.vimrc or /etc/vim/vimrc (for system wide) and add turn off vi compatibility:

set nocompatible

The latter can be improved by editing ~/.inputrc (or /etc/inputrc for everyone). Pressing the up key scrolls through all the commands you’ve typed but by adding:

"\e[A":history-search-backward
"\e[B":history-search-forward

You can type the first letter or two and get the command you need, so if you typed “mysql -u root -p” last Tuesday but can’t remember the options, typing “my” and pressing the up key will find it.

Install web applications locally on Ubuntu

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I was talking with someone yesterday who is hacking a WordPress theme together. If you work with web sites, being able to run a site locally allows testing, experimentation, developing new themes and even just checking that a software update isn’t going to break your site. You might want to keep a web application on a local network and away from the Internet – such as StatusNet, a Wiki or a project management application. All we need is to install a LAMP stack – Linux Apache MySQL and PHP. We’ve already got the “L”! So let’s walk through installing WordPress. Continue reading →

Advocacy by not advocating

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We have Ubuntu installed on two of the machines at home and recently, after losing a Windows restore disc, I suggested installing Ubuntu 10.04 on her Dell 1545 after my suggestion.

As installations go, it was relatively painless – certainly better than reinstalling Windows. Don’t get me wrong, Dell is better than most in this respect as they gave us OEM install discs for Windows Vista, bundled software and the drivers.  As strait forward as this is with Dell’s resource CD (it mostly tells you what you need), it doesn’t know any more than what model you own. This is problematic with the wireless card for example as there are two revision states and the drivers are incompatible with each other – one crashes Windows.

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Blogging platforms

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Has anyone else noticed a large amount of ping backs to link farms from Planet Ubuntu feeds over the last few days? I’m getting a fair few. I’d give an example but if I link to a site that takes my posts from a syndicated site and creates posts that are syndicated on other sites I might create some sort of perpetual motion blog post and consume the Internet (it might seem far fetched but what if Robert Morris had stopped to think).

I find these objectionable though – they appear to be WordPress and I guess are using a plugin to pull feeds in and publish as articles. They’re not as bad as flat out plagiarism – which I’ve experienced. Mind you even that isn’t the worst, I once wrote a howto which was CC licensed and I realised it had been ripped off when someone posted a comment on it suggesting (quite strongly) that I had taken it from the thief!

So it occurs to me that maybe this is a WordPress thing. Then again maybe not. Like so many of us I get stuck in my ways and WordPress is like a pair of comfy shoes. Maybe I should try a new platform, so I wondered what was popular out there in Ubuntu-land.

I’ve tried Drupal (I don’t like it, sorry Emma), Serendipity and Pixie (I quite liked that but baulked at the theming system). Mind you I also have quite a lot of time to myself over the next four months, maybe I should roll my own, I’ve hacked around in PHP but have never developed a large project using it.

So let me know, suggestions on a postcard. Maybe just a comment here will suffice.