Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing

This 1972 documentary entitled "Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing" covers the early years of ARPAnet, the precursor of the Internet, through interviews with the heroes of the internetworking revolution. Tightly wound internetworking geeks like the legendary JCR Licklider intensely recite the benefits that internetworking will shortly deliver, sliding in digs at the telecoms industry, the Bellheads who have no desire to see this future realized. This is a fantastic 30 minutes of paleo-nerd memorabilia.

ref: documentary
ref: BoingBoing

OOP Concept explained: Polymorphism (NSFW)

Warning: The linked article is NSFW and if you are easily offended do not follow the link.

If you do not fully understand the concept of polymorphism or interested in a different way of explaining it, then this article that I came across (excuse the pun) might help.

Weird

If you want to see something really weird take a look at the trailer for a forth coming film called "Drawing Restraint 9" featuring Bjork. Apparently some people call it Art!

The core idea of Drawing Restraint 9 is the relationship between self-imposed resistance and creativity, a theme it symbolically tracks through the construction and transformation of a vast sculpture of liquid Vaseline, called “The Field”, which is molded, poured, bisected and reformed on the deck of the ship over the course of the film.

M301: TMA01 - Results

Got my results back for TMA01. Dropped a couple of marks for...

1. Not going into enough detail about "Composition".
2. Forgetting to check that the passed argument was of the correct type for my equals method.

M301: TMA02

TMA02 for M301 is now available. It comprises of 5 questions with each question worth 20 marks and corresponding to an associated unit within block 2.

Q1 (6 sub-questions) - U2.1 "Describing Concurrent Systems"
Q2 (6 sub-questions) - U2.2 "Processes"
Q3 (5 sub-questions) - U2.3 "Distributed Systems and Management"
Q4 (6 sub-questions) - U2.4 "IPC in Shared Memory: Low-Level Primitives"
Q5 (7 sub-questions) - U2.5 "IPC in Shared Memory: Classical Problems and Language Primitives"

Questions 2 and 5 involve some Java coding.

Bargains

Had to go shopping on Saturday, much to my horror, but managed to pick up a couple of bargains.

Java Network Programming for £4.99 and Battlestar Galactica (2003): Complete Season 1: 4dvd: Box Set for £24.99

NetBeans Meets BlueJ

Read the whole story here. Ok, I know, this is a press release... :) So to explain what we are doing: we are building together with authors of BlueJ from the University of Kent a special version of NetBeans. It will support BlueJ projects and thus make it easier for people who use BlueJ to open their projects in NetBeans. This is quite easy to do because as you know everything in NetBeans is a module - thus we will choose a subset of NetBeans functionality (including Matisse) and add several features e.g. to show files in the project in the BlueJ way.

Why should you care? Well, BlueJ is great for learning Java - no surprise it is so widely popular on universities. Once you learn enough you become ready for a full-blown IDE such as NetBeans to work on bigger Java projects. Then the transition will be easy - you will be able to try the BlueJ edition of NetBeans on your BlueJ projects and start to learn all the advanced features (refactorings, CVS, etc.).

ref: Roumen's Weblog

CrunchTV

John Draper aka Captain Crunch has launched a video project.

John Draper was an original member of the now famous "Homebrew Computer Club", but he first became infamous for learning how to penetrate phone networks to make free long distance calls.

Now he’s hacking away at it again, so to speak.
...

CrunchTV will tell you the latest security threats and provide helpful instructions in dealing with any security issue you may face. If you use a computer, CrunchTV is compulsory viewing.

ref: CrunchTV

Vint Cerf on the future of the web

The BBC has a short 2 1/2 min interview with Vint Cerf.

In an interview for the BBC, Vinton Cerf began by explaining how he thought the internet would develop.

ref: news.bbc.co.uk

The BBC also has a text based interview.

System Administrator Song

For all you sysadmin's out there here is a song dedicated to you.

Professor assigns hacking homework to students

Now this is the sort of assignment I wouldn't mind doing, wonder if the OU has anything similiar in the pipeline?

According to the SANS Institute a professor at an undisclosed university recently assigned a practical for his computer-security class.

The practical, which is worth 15 percent of the students final grade, requires students to perform reconnaissance on an internet server using open source security tools.

ref: http://www.securitydump.com/content141.html
ref: http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=1155