Class Recordings will Stop Soon

Making recordings of classes is becoming increasingly difficult and time consuming with the hardware I have. My machine is so slow that I'm not able to record to classes back to back anymore. My ability to properly record sound is starting to fail.

It's a pity that my experiments in putting classes online should end for money reasons. A lot of potential value is added to my teaching by making classes available online. It's hard to put a precise money value on it. But given how much I cost the taxpayers in a year, even a 1% increase in added value would justify the price of a new laptop every year.

The saddest part though is that it makes me feel like my efforts are not valued.

I'll continue to muddle through. But students should expect fewer classes to be available online from now on. Recordings from previous years will still be available. So they may be useful in filling in any gaps.

COMP6021 Classes 14 & 15

Today's classes are canceled.

I'm not feeling well so I'm going home.

COMP6023 DCOM1b Classes 15 & 16

I met with each student and discussed any language issues in the blog posts that needed to be addressed. Students are free to make corrections until the posts are actually assessed. (That will probably be at the end of Week 05)

COMP6023 ITM1 Class 15 & 16

Photoshop is working in C134x now, so students worked on the JPEG images for Assessment 2.

I met with each student and discussed any language issues in the blog posts that needed to be addressed. Students are free to make corrections until the posts are actually assessed. (That will probably be at the end of Week 05)

COMP6023 DNET1 Classes 15 & 16

Students worked on their blogs. Some took the NewsU course today. 

I met with each student and identified some issues with grammar and spelling that needed to be addressed. 

COMP6023 DNET1/COM1c Class 14

I asked student to discuss in group what 5 or 6 categories privacy concerns might fall into.

It didn't really go well.

COMP6021 Class 13

the one with the 日本語

[sound recording failed half way though. so video not posted]

We concluded our look at representing text. I explained how writing works in Japanese and we looked very briefly at HTML.

Aside:
Students who found this interesting might enjoy this radio programme on the story of written Cherokee.
http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2012/12/lexicon_valley_on_sequoyah_a_native_american_who_invented_an_alphabet_for.html

COMP6023 DWEB1/ITM1 Class 14

I asked students to work on groups on figuring out headings of themes for privacy concerns.

I felt like students didn't really get into it. Perhaps I didn't make it clear what I was asking.

We put come ideas on the whiteboard.

COMP6023 DWEB1/ITM1 Class 13

We looked some more at how search engines work.

I asked students to consider and discuss what Google might now about them.

We looked at advanced searches using Google's syntax

COMP6023 DCOM1 Class 13

We looked a bit more at how search engines work.

I asked students to discuss for a few minutes the kinds of things Google might know about them. But of course many of those things are not things that one shares in class.

We looked at advanced searches using Google's syntax.

COMP6023 DNET1/COM1c Class 13

We continued our look at how search engines index sites.

I asked students to discuss for a few minutes the kinds of things Google might know about them. But of course many of those things are not things that one shares in class.

We looked at advanced searches using Google's syntax.

[No recording of today's class]

COMP6023 Week 03 Summary

The plan to do an olde school FTP session to a UNIX machine didn't work. The Windows security systems thought we were trying to bypass the local firewalls. We might try again another time.

Students got the images they needed for Assignment 2. Some were able to make a start on gather the data using Photoshop. Others had problems with Photoshop. Those issues should be resolved in those labs by next week.

Students should write a movie review for the blog this week.

Some students have completed the NewsU course. I have marked those students with a 1 on the blog list. I'm aware that the links to the student blogs are acting strange. I haven't been able figure out what's up with the PDF. In the source document they are fine.

The most popular essay choices are booked up now. Students shouldn't take too long to decide. I may have to consider a deadline soon to move that along.

COMP6023 DCOM1 Class 10

We looked at Internet Directories and began our exploration of how search engines work.

[Stopped at Slide 42]

COMP6021 Class 12

the one with the UTF-8

We reviewed the data from our experiments in the lab when we saved English & Japanese text using different formats.

I reviewed the UTF-8 variable length coding system. (screen capture failed)

Exercise
I gave students a UTF-8 message to decode. 49 E2 99 A5 E6 97 A5 E6 9C AC
Students were given copies of the relevant areas of the Unicode code points.
http://www.rikai.com/library/kanjitables/kanji_codes.unicode.shtml
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/miscellaneous_symbols.html


Although they got off to a slow start, I was very pleased that by the student all students had figured it out. This is the kind of thing that would make for a good exam question.

Solution
01001001 11100010:10011001:10100101 11100110:10010111:10100101  11100110:10011100:10101100

I  11100010:10011001:10100101 11100110:10010111:10100101  11100110:10011100:10101100
remove markers for leading and continuation bytes

I  0010011001100101 0110010111100101  0110011100101100

I 2665 65E5 672C

I ♥日本

COMP6023 DWEB1 Classes 11 & 12

Students got the images they needed for Assignment 2. I showed them how to save the images in Photoshop using the different JPEG quality settings. I recommended to students that they just gather the data for now.

When they were done student worked on their blogs or took the NewsU course.

COMP6021 Class 11 Unicode Lab

the one with the text files

I asked students to download a English-language book, paste it into Notepad, and save it using each of the four formats available: ANSI, Unicode, Unicode big endian, UTF-8.

I then asked them to do the same with a Japanese book. But some students' machines lost the plot.

I asked students to generate a 1000 character English-language document and save it with the four formats.

I then asked them to replace 200 of the characters with Japanese and do the same. Again some machines freaked out.




The values Colin got are shown in the table below. What conclusions can we draw? In particular, consider what happened in the mixed English & Japanese text.

If you have another text editor on your own machine try the same experiments with different formats.

Document	ANSI	Unicode	Unicode BE	UTF-8
Hounds of the Baskervilles	320,692	641,386	641,386	326,691
Rashomon	6,315*	12,632	12,632	18,222
Thousand English	1,080	2,162	2,162	1,083
Thousand Mixed	1,080*	2,124	2,124	1,274

* Japanese text not preserved. Displayed jibberish


Feel free to leave comments below


At the end of class I got each student to download the three images needed for the assignment. More about that another time.

COMP6021 Class 10 Unicode

the one with the Unicode

We looked at standard tables for storing text. We started with ASCII and then saw some of the various extensions, DOS Code Pages, and various ISO formats before arriving at Unicode. We started to look at some of the ways Unicode code points can be represented with bits. UTF-7, UTF-23 were easy. We ignored UTF-16. UFT-8 started easy but got more complicated. We will continue with UTF-8 in the next class.

COMP6021 Characters, Symbols and the Unicode Miracle - Computerphile

COMP6023 DCOM1 B Class 11 & 12 labs

We looked at Save for Web in Photoshop. Each student downloaded the three images needed for Assigment 2 and began work on saving JPEGs with different quality settings.

COMP6023 ITM1 Class 11 & 12 Labs

The lab didn't cooperate. Photoshop wouldn't work. So students worked on their blogs and sme took the NewsU online course.

I asked student to read the blogs of the other students in the group and advise the author of any issues they identified.