Archive for the ‘Computer software’ Category

Networking + the pain of a NAB

September 10, 2009

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:

  • Data representation
  • Computer Structure
  • Peripherals
  • Computer networks
  • Computer Software (we haven’t done this yet)

Have a read through the slide below about peer to peer networks, it is one of the harder parts of the networking topic….

p2p

And here is a slamball poster.

slamball poster

Bitmapped graphics flowgram

April 5, 2009

Bitmapped graphics flowgram

more about "untitled", posted with vodpod

Capturing a digital image

January 19, 2009

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.

ccd

Authoring Software v.s. Presentation software

January 8, 2009

catapult-authoring-sw

 

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.

authoring-software

Back to blogging…

January 7, 2009

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.


wysiwig2

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.

yogi

The Prelim.

February 27, 2008

examsinprogress.jpg

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…..

Simon, Scott and Dara

December 18, 2007

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 flow.jpg. 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 ->  scott-blog-post.jpg


“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.

(more…)

Language Constructs – Variables, Data Types and Arrays

November 16, 2007

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).

data-type.jpg

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.

arrays.jpgvariables.jpg

Friday 28th September

September 28, 2007

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.

utilities-questions-higher.JPG

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….)

scott-jpeg.JPGabbey-jpeg.JPGnatalie.JPGdara-tiff.JPG

Just to be clear JPEG supports true colour (i.e. 24 bits per pixel)

Utility Programs

September 27, 2007

Today we did utility programs. There are 4:

  1. Virus checker (think Peter Norton)
  2. Disk Editor (cleaning up things like downloaded internet pages )
  3. Recovery (we had a discussion about whether you would get a mark for calling this restore or not)
  4. Disk defragmenter (shown below)

defragmenter.JPG

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