Traceroute Task

I had been thinking about trying to do part of these posts using video so I produced this video today. The result is incredably boring but the process was useful and interesting for me.

I learned a couple of things:

1. I won't be vlogging much more in the future for this unit because it is incredably time consuming not to mention the boredom factor for my readers. (tell me if I'm wrong)
   
2. Talking through the procedures and the questions seemed to assist me to come up with answers to my own questions by thinking logically. Not entirely sure if they were the correct assumptions though.....
3. put 1 and 2 together and the result is, though I might not publish the videos, I still may produce them for the learning value.
   

After I completed that section, I went back in and decided to download Visual Route for the next Traceroute task.

I took some screenshots of the results of the Visual Route traceroute and they can be found here if you are interested.

To summize the photos:

• traceroute to curtin.edu.au from my computer as compared to from the web hosted tool; this comparison showed 19 hops versus 21 and 100ms versus 123 which I guess is no surprise because the webtool is hosted in the States.
• traceroute from my computer to webct.edu.au versus curtin.edu.au; to webct was almost twice as long at 193ms but the same number of hops. Grrrr webCT!

Time to go over to the forums I think and mine the knowledge there......

FTP

CAPITALIZATION MATTERS!

This task was easy for me with no hassles because I already had Filezilla and have used it quite a bit over the last few months.

I was interested to see Fetch as a recommended FTP client for Mac users. I used to use Fetch on my old Clamshell iBook back when I was building my first website. I still have that old Grey Clamshell and the kids use it for games! It still works a treat too : )

Telnet Task B

Let's face it, I am a geek at heart. The blinkenlights telnet site warms the cockles of that geeky heart.

Creativity is an amazing thing and innovation even more so. IMHO Innovation is the driving force behind the blinkenlights telnet as opposed to creativity. The guy "(a "whacked out geek called Sten)" according to the blinkenlights site /) obviously had plenty of innovation in his soul (not to mention a hell of a lot of patience) to be able to put telnet to this wonderful use.

Innovation drives technology to the brink and creativity takes technologists to their next new invention. Sten took a well known and well loved movie and used technology to show it in a new light. He used the technology to the brink.

When innovation is stifled by the limits of technology there is a need for someone who is creative to develop new technology. This cycle is never ending and sometimes quite rapid.

The explosion of WEB2.0 is evidence of this as is the current discussion of the semantic web (web3.0). The innovators have taken the technology and beat it to within an inch of its life and soon they will need to invent new tools to embrace this growing need.

Am I thinking this too deep?

Telnet Task A

My initial experience using telnet as an information searching tool is not a happy one. I used the Windows Vista help page as advised and followed the steps there with no problems. I found the connectivity to be sketchy. I wonder if this is a problem with my telnet browser choice and perhaps I should try some other browsers. I found this great list of telnet applications http://www.telnet.org/htm/applications.htm and should check some of these out.... I imagine a few folks will read this and say "ahh you're using Vista, there's your problem".

This screen capture from my vista telnet client says "what kind of terminal are you using?" and gives two options: V for VT1oo and W for NCSA VT100. I have no idea idea what these options are refering to and will try to resarch this more but would be happy if anyone wanted to add there ideas here in the form of a comment!

The email function of the Deakin Library telnet server was nice and is certainly useful but I hated not being able to cut and paste in the telnet client window! Drag and drop and cut and past are some of the features I would miss if I was using telnet often. Makes you wonder how we did it back then and how long it must have taken us.

I believe telnet, on first impressions to be a clunky and outdated tool/protocol and I will be interested to see the next site we are directed to for Task B. I can see that it must have had it's uses in it's days so I will research this a little before I discount it.