Derek's Tech Talk

In Chapters 7 and 8 of Computing Technology for All, we learned about privacy and security.  In today’s day and age, where any information is available at your fingertips via laptop, tablet, or smartphone, that means your personal information is also available.  Information can be stolen or compromised more easily today than ever before.   Last week we executed and wrote about ping and traceroute commands.  These commands are helpful to see how our networks are running and if there are any errors.  But we can also expose ourselves to hackers this way.  By executing a ping command, we can see data about the packets sent out from our device along with the range of round trip times-echo replies received.  If you are connected to a public network, you may not be the only person finding out this information.   Hackers could be connected to that same network and wait for a ping command to be executed.  Once that ping is executed, the ...

The industry I will be discussing is the healthcare industry. In recent years, the healthcare industry has been working towards dropping paper charts altogether and pivoting towards electronic charts. This has been a significant talking point amongst nurses and doctors, especially those working in the industry for 20-plus years.             The healthcare industry becoming more reliant on technology makes charting, among other tasks, more manageable. I train clinical hospital staff on how to use the new EMR (electronic medical record) system rolling out to hospitals. Most staff is open to change and sees the benefits of a universal design and workflows throughout the hospital system. A couple of the more veteran staff will push back as they feel they are trying to be squeezed out. They see the new staff who just graduated and have grown up on computers and iPads and feel their time is running out. This is not the case, as it does not replace how to care for...

I had some interesting results from Google.com, along with every other site I pinged.  I followed the instructions on how to ping on a Mac, and when I executed the command, it would just continue to run and never stop on its own.  I would have to stop the command manually each time it ran.  By using the ping and traceroute commands, we get an idea of how long it takes packets to travel from one computer to another until they reach their destination.  Through these exercises, the closer an IP address is located, the less time it will take to return.  I also ran these during a thunderstorm while the power was going off and on, so that may have had some effect on times and speeds. Packets sent- 6 Packets received- 6 Packets lost- 0 Range of approximate round-trip time- ~10.5ms     Yahoo.ca ping Packets sent- 21 Packets received- 21 Packets lost- 0 Range of approximate round-trip time- ~75.8ms     Yahoo.jp ping Packets sent- 14 Packets received- ...

In our Role of Applications Reflection assignment, we performed the same task multiple times across 3 separate platforms.  We started with the most commonly used in Microsoft Word and then ventured out to the less frequently used Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint.  Each of these platforms has their pros and cons.  There is no right or wrong choice for which was picked, but each has different characteristics that allow it to differentiate itself from the others. Starting with Word has been the most common platform for writing an essay for the last 20 years.  There are different ways that someone can use Word and have it tell a story.  There is the option to write sentences and paragraphs and also the option to use bullet points.  The latter was used for my journal entry.  Word is best for telling a story through text.  A disadvantage of Word can be too much text given to an individual.  The most important arguments in the essay could get lost i...

A mobile app that I use frequently is the Funimation app. This app is a streaming service that is used solely for streaming anime. Like other streaming services, there are different levels of monthly memberships. The basic membership also has fewer titles available, and the available titles are only available with subtitles. The most basic include multiple ads per episode. The premium membership not only has more titles but also those that have also been dubbed over into English from Japanese.             The Funimation app is very similar to the Hulu or Netflix apps regarding usability and design (see Figure 1). The navigation buttons are on the bottom of the screen and include Home, My Anime, Search, and Account. Hulu, for example, has Home, My Stuff, Downloads, Search, and Profile. Navigation through the app is very seamless from one page to the next. There is no back button for navigation, but there aren’t many complex pathways that get more profound th...

For our assignment this week, we were tasked with creating our own program on Scratch.  My experience with Scratch involved much trial and error.  I tested just about every block to learn what action it related to and how it ran.  For my program, there was a significant amount of trial and error.  I always found that my best process of learning is by being hands-on. My experience with Scratch was mildly frustrating.  Since I don’t have much experience with the program, I was not familiar with where some of the actions that I wanted to perform were located.  This lead me to test many of the blocks, along with the trial and error portion of my learning process.  Due to all of the different backdrops and sprites that were available to use, I was overwhelmed at first.  We had all the options, but it was difficult to find out what I wanted to animate.  I found it easiest to select the backdrop and sprite and work off that rather than picking a s...