We have now finished all of the networking topic and set a date for the first NAB (22nd of September) once I remembered Monday 21st was a holiday. So, just in case you missed it yesterday these are the topics in the NAB:
Have a read through the slide below about peer to peer networks, it is one of the harder parts of the networking topic….
And here is a slamball poster.
Today we went through everything that happens when you take a digital picture (on a phone, camera, web cam etc). We started by having a look two people that came up with the all important device, a CCD (charge-coupled device, see wikipedia here for a good explanation). You don’t need to remember who invented it, but you do need to know what a CCD does. Hopefully the slide below goes some way to explaining that.
Today we tried to look at some examples of multimedia appplications created using authoring software. Unfortunately they seemed to be a bit much for the network connection in school but you could have a look now if you are so inclined. They were catapults, car maintenance, and furniture assembly. The point about of all of them was that they are on the whole more complicated pieces of multimedia than you could create using presentation software (like Powerpoint).
These are the notes from today.
This is my first post in ages, but I have to post as today I forced all of the higher class to set up their own blogs and write something about what we have been doing. Which is …. multimedia
We had a quick look today at the difference between using a WYSIWYG editor and a text editor to make multimedia applications. The reason the class created blogs was to try and demonstrate that WYSIWYG editors are easy to use and don’t require any prior knowledge of code, unlike typing in HTML into a text editor. I am hoping the blogs will come in useful elsewhere too though….
Here are the notes the class received today.
Also, I had to clear up the fact that a common design process used for multimedia applications is known as a storyboard (a graphical representation of the layout of a multimedia application showing navigational links), as demonstrated here by this not particularly helpful, yogi bear episode storyboard.
Sorry there have not been many posts for a while, but then there have not been many Higher Computing lessons for a while. The prelim was yesterday morning and is now in the process of being marked.
If you took advantage of the chat room support the night before you would have realised that calculation questions would be important (along with a lot of other topics!).
If you want extra practice try this question:
A stereo audio file has been recorded at CD quality and is 3 minutes 12 seconds long. It is to be stored on a solid state flash drive. How much space will it take up in an uncompressed format?
Answers as comments please…..
Wow. I asked Simon, Scott and Dara to come up with a post for the blog about something in IT that they thought was interesting and this is what I got back…..
I am a visual learner so I particularly like the diagram 
. Clearly we want flow (being so absorbed in something that time disappears) in our lessons!
Well done guys. 
To see Simon’s post read on, Scott’s is here -> 
“Flow” and DDA in games
DDA: The Basics
DDA (Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment) is becoming increasingly popular in games. The idea of it is to alter the difficulty of a game in accordance to the apparent skill level of the player. This is all done to attempt to access the player’s “Flow”
Flow: What is it?
Flow is the name given to that feeling of total immersion and time not existing when partaking in an activity. This could be reading, watching a film, going for a jog or playing a video game. There is ongoing thorough research into this idea, how to initiate it and how it can be applied to the world.
Today was an explanation in formal terms of things that, mostly, you already knew. You already knew them because you have been writing programs in visual basc that use variables, data types and (in the future) arrays.
I ran an example program called agein2020 which had one variable called age of type integer (the picture below shows what the code turns into when run).
We then looked at the different types you could set up:
Integer - positive and negative numbers (e.g. -56, 100, 45)
Single - numbers with a point (e.g. 3.14, 1.4)
String – any combination of words and letters (e.g. “EH10″, “Jamie”)
An array is a set of variables of the same type e.g. dim names(5) as string will create an array with 5 spaces in it.
Today we did some revision questions on viruses and talked a bit more in depth about a particular virus, “I love you”. This virus sent itself to everyone in your address book as an attachment to an email with the subject “I Love you”. As it reproduced itself it is classified as a worm.
We also did the revision questions below. They cover what utilities are, a detailed question about defragmenter and a question to work out what anti virus techniques may have been successful against the I love you worm.
You lot also went and made powerpoints showing the difference between GIF, JPEG, TIFF and BMP. Here is some of your work (see if you can recognise your own….)
Just to be clear JPEG supports true colour (i.e. 24 bits per pixel)
Today we did utility programs. There are 4:
Remember the key word about the defragmenter is contiguous. This describes how the files should be next to each other on your hard drive, which is basically what the defragmenter is trying to achieve. If you are looking for another mark then I said you could mention that defragmenting should increase system performance
 | someone from Lenzie … on The Prelim. |
 | Mike Bruce on Back to blogging… |
| Mike Bruce on Authoring Software v.s. Presen… |
| Mike Bruce on Capturing a digital image |
 | Ross on Standard Algorithm 1 – C… |
