Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Ethics in Information Technology

One of the articles I found is about the security regarding the technological singularity. As I understand it, this is the point when "artificial intelligence" of machines becomes almost sentient and could possibly surpass humanity's capacity for general intelligence and decision-making. My teammates and I are trying to figure out at the moment, which one we will choose for the group portion of the project.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Chapter 8

I have looked over Chapter 8 and find it quite interesting. There is so much you can do with computers if you have the appropriate knowledge. For example, I have limited previous knowledge of bits, bytes and binary. You can digitize almost anything with extensive knowledge on the use of binary coding, far more than you could with simple HTML codes.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Debugging & Lab 2.1

Before getting started, I downloaded the .zip file and opened it in my browser window. I then located and opened the source view and copied the code. After doing so I pasted it into a new page on the TextEdit program. Once this had been done I identified the problems, then began to rewrite the code in specific areas, noting where I had edited the source material. I noticed that there were several places with pieces missing or mis-labeled. For example, one part read: <img src=blue">, when it should have read: <img src="blue">. Another portion wasn't capitalized when it should have been, since that is how the file name reads, and placed a space between a and href to activate the link. I also fixed the quote around silver as well as a few other minor corrections here and there. In the end, the photos showed up, the link became active, the word blue appeared in the color blue. The row in the table which had been obscured by a black area on my Mac was reverted to its intended form, in sync with the other rows in the table. I went to the Save As . . . option in the File menu and named the document Hines-butterflies.html and despite the system wanting to save it as a .txt file, I opted for .html instead. I essentially followed the course that is outlined in Chapter 7 of the book. Although the page did not work correctly on my Mac when i had done this, it worked on a PC with no problem after the corrections had been made.

Post-Lab Answers:
1. - It is valuable to have a clearly documented procedure for reproducing bugs so if it happens again, you can save valuable time and energy from having to start again from scratch. this way you can go back again if you meet a dead end so you can reassess and ask yourself where you may have gone wrong.

2. - The problem is that we do not have access to the program coding for these types of softwares.

3. - Black box testing for the VCR, because of the system testing, was done without seeing the "inside" of the VCR, so we used external observation behavior.
We used white box testing for the HTML because we were able to get a look "inside" and see why and how the system executed its programming and what caused the glitches, by viewing its programming code.

4. - Since my toaster isn't digital, I would first unplug it and then plug it back in somewhere else, because it may have simply been a problem with the outlet I was using. I could also take the cover off and look to see if all the parts were properly connected, due to the possibility of a design flaw or inconsistency with mechanical operation of the toaster.

Part 2
A - pass
B - fail: It gave points to opposing player even though it said the correct player won.
I repeated it numerous times with both players winning in different combinations of three in a row.
C - pass
D - pass
E - fail: The game ended when someone won at all times except when the three in a row was from the top left/middle/bottom right with both player X and player O.
I repeated it with both players winning three in a row in this same top left/ middle/ bottom right pattern and got the same results.
F - pass
G - pass
H - pass