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My experiences in this class have helped me to piece together information that I have known for a long time, but had not made a connection between.  After reading my blog posts and others I realized that we have covered a lot of different subjects that all boil down to one area “technology”.  Various subjects like binary, hardware, and the ALS have given me the puzzle pieces that I didn’t know I was missing as far as computers.  The concepts we covered for those first few weeks have allowed me to feel as if I completed one circuit of information about computers.  I feel as if I understand the basis of computer technology or the core of knowledge from which modern computer technology springs.  I’ve played games and bought and assembled hardware for years all without a basic understanding of some of the core concepts that we have covered this semester.  I can comfortably say that I’ve gone another step toward greater competence with computers than I had before this class.

The great thing about this course was that we covered information about many different subjects and programs.  The concepts we’ve covered have helped to get a better understanding of things I’ve learned previously and taken some of the magic out of things I’ve not tried with a computer.  Making an HTML webpage was a great way to get me to do something I’ve not had an interest in.  I have always felt that making a webpage was something that had some magical qualities to it.  My friends that have blogs all use some other program to make their blogs.  My other friends that have webpages are all highly paid programmers, and some make websites for others, so I felt that it would take me a long time and a lot of research to even think about making my own website.  I felt after making my site that I had a done a pretty good job and that it was reasonable easy to make a basic website.  I also found that making a website got my creative juices flowing as I am already a graphic designer for signs, it was just another outlet for creativity.  I learned that making a website requires a different perspective than making a sign.  I bump heads with customers all the time that have a different perspective of signage than I do.  Usually our customers have made many presentations and reports and seen many letterheads and feel that the information and layout for those items will work for signage and it does not.  Signs serve a purpose that is not the same as that of a business card, letterhead, or power point presentation and must be looked at from a different perspective.  This is a tough concept for me to convey to someone that has spent a lot of time training their eyes and minds to make things look right within the context of an 8.5″x11″ sheet of paper.  I must also translate not only this concept to the customer, but that what I design for them must function in the proper fashion.  The sign must showcase the information that needs to be seen, the most pertinent thing must be highlighted for a sign to work correctly.  Signage that requires reading more than a few words needs to be concise or be made in a such a way that draws the eye down towards the rest of the verbiage.  Fool the eye and you can fool the mind…When I made my website I could tell that I had screwed up.  I liked the look, but I needed to change lenses.  I was looking unconsciously at the website as a billboard and not a website.  So, I spent a lot of time looking on the internet for sites I thought were well designed.  You don’t have to go very far to find good looking sites with well thought out layouts.  In conclusion, I realized that I had been making the website too wordy without having something to draw the eye to the subjects on the page (and consequently the content) and made everything entirely too large.  I was working within the confines of a sign panel and needed much more white space to make the website look less constrained and cleaner.  I thought I could design a good website, but making one showed me that practice makes perfect (again).  After creating our website started Scratch.

Making a Scratch program and a website showed me that I needed to upload anything I programmed before thinking it was finished.  The text links on my website worked fine in Mozilla until I uploaded everything to Pelissippi.  The Scratch program when uploaded to the website worked fine up to the minigames portion of the program and then the player wouldn’t move.  Any program is not finished until someone else can open it up and play it or use it.  Also, I should expect that a program will need more work even when it seems finished.  Programs that seem simple are not necessarily easy to program.

The security lecture, comic, and links got me interested in hacking and in my free time I’ve been working on the hackthissite.org exercises.  I’ve spent time working on the various exercises and learning more about html to do them.  These exercises have given me an opportunity to see how hackers begin to look at a website to compromise it.

One of the most interesting parts of the class were the concepts that were in the robotics, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality parts of the class.  What we’ve covered in these areas has gotten me thinking about technology in a way that I have not thought about.  The ideas that humanity tries to create robots in it’s image, research into how people think can allow computers to learn how to solve dynamic problems, and that people can have out of body experiences in a virtual reality realm.  These ideas are blurring the lines between reality, man versus machine, and our belief systems and have gotten me thinking about technology in a different way.

Overall this class has helped me to learn things about myself and create things I would not have created.  I have been able to use course concepts to learn more about computers, their parts, and how they work.  My scope of thought about technology has widened considerably.  Overall this class has been damned fun!

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I thoroughly enjoyed messing around with the iGod chatbot.  Some of the responses were pretty funny and it did a good job of changing course when it was queried with a question it could not respond to.  The AI vs AI chatbot video was interesting as well.  I wonder how long it will take us to get to the point where the Turing test will finally be passed.  The strange part about AI is that it seems we as humans are trying to make something that not only emulates us but “is” us as well.  We will eventually make the robot that is so close to us that we will have trouble identifying it, but will it have the soul that we are looking to replicate?  Can we make a robot that thinks, acts, and interacts like us?  I don’t know if that will ever be possible.  I do believe that the future will have many technologies that will benefit from AI.  Imagine that someone were trying to hack a computer system that was made as with a neural network.  If it were trained correctly it might recognize types of attacks to the system not seen before.  For example, if it were trained that it was to keep the security programming the same at all times for its scope of operation and try to maintain that it never changed, then it might see changes that were unanticipated by any programmer and correct them (i.e. stop the attack).  There are many possibilities for AI technology, but I don’t think we’ll be sitting on the couch while our robot stand-ins are working for us anytime soon.

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Kaisersoze

My experience with virtual worlds is almost exclusively in World of Warcraft. I spent a significant amount of time when WoW was released playing with my friends. I probably spent everyday after work and all day long every day of the weekend playing for about 3 years. I joined a few guilds that I participated in regularly and had a few real life friends I played with most of the time. My friends and I got so involved that we even met a few online players in real life that lived out of state. For a time we had a few tightly knit people that came to visit us here in Tennessee if they were on this side of the country. People seem to believe that if you contact a person from an online game or website that they will inevitably be a serial killer. However, most people that have not played online games that are as immersive as WoW do not understand how well you can know people you play with. I’m not saying that playing online can show you the true nature of a person, but it gives you a significant amount of insight into a person’s character. The reason you can tell things about a person’s nature online is that your true nature will show through your actions in the game. If you see a character that wants to help you out while in game and you help them out you can tell what kind of person they are in real life. The internet has a way of cleansing off the vestiges of social graces in a way no other situation can. A person that is bad in real life will probably be a terror to deal with in a game or online. If a person that is depraved and selfish in real life plays with you online you can see that as they will be much worse in game. People think that you might know more about a person when you meet them, but I believe that meeting someone in a game and spending a significant amount of time playing with them will tell you more about them. A date with someone might last a few hours maybe, but play a 5 hour long raid with them that finishes at 3 a.m. and you’ll know enough about them to determine whether you want to know them any further.  I have a few avatars, but one of my mains was Kaisersoze (a reference to The Usual Suspects ).

I enjoyed my time in WoW, but you end up spending so much time in game at a certain point that your only real life friends you hang out with are ones you play with.  I spent many nights playing and ordering pizza and getting fatter.  It was a great time as it taught me a bit about myself and I knew that even though I enjoyed playing it was not the only thing I needed.  So, you lose social interaction in person, but you feel like you are a part of a living breathing world with infinite possibilities.  The friends I’ve made in game are now real friends or business contacts for future opportunities.  They know me and I know them.  Some of the cons are the lack of sleep, the need to do “just one more quest” before you are done for the day, and if you push yourself in the game to excel you might not have the same drive to do so at work anymore.  So, playing games is a great social experience and for some can be a great way to meet some very cool people (usually intelligent people as well-geeks are great), but are usually best when played in moderation.

You should be proud of me as I’ve been MMORPG sober for about 3 years now and have only recently felt the need to try another game like WoW.  As a recovering WoW addict I’ve turned to another drug to take its place…..Rift.  Like WoW lite it does the job without getting too deep into it.  I’ve been playing it lately, in moderation.

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In looking at the various ways I could go with this post I got interested in nanobots.  After looking at all manners of robots and the philosophical implications in creating certain types of robots I felt that nanobots have the greatest potential to be used for good or evil.  This niche of robotics is concerned with very very small robots that could have very very large implications for life as we know it.  Nanobots are robots that are so small they are made at the molecular level.  Due to their size nanobots could do things that are simply not possible in today’s world.  Nanobots could be tailor made for any type of industry and have the potential to change our everyday lives.  Today’s technological advancements enrich our lives and even though we do not currently have the technology that can make the nanobots of the future scientists have been able to make some advancements in this field of robotics.

The same types of philosophical arguments about other fields of robotics can be applied to nano-robotics as well.  Nanobots have the potential to be used for good or evil.  You can see some of the implications of nanobots when you look at the concept of the fog.  Fog is an idea fleshed out by J. Storrs Hall.

Foglet

You can read more about it at http://www.kurzweilai.net/utility-fog-the-stuff-that-dreams-are-made-of.  The fog is a swarm of nanobots that are made to do multiple types of operations like making structures where there were none, making retention devices for passengers of vehicles that materialize out of thin air when needed, and allow you to fly on an invisible layer of foglets.  Foglets, individual nanobots that make up the fog, communicate and coordinate with each other in intricate ways and can connect together to form solid objects.

Foglets Connected to Form a Solid Object

In speaking about some of the implications of foglets, Hall even talks about our cars and roads being made of billions of foglets.  Communicating foglets would allow your vehicle, made of foglets, to drive itself and communicate between other vehicles also made of foglets and the road.  The foglets on command could protect you from harm, add lanes to the road when needed, or add different levels to the roads to get you to your destination without the fear of hitting another vehicle.  Nanobots of this type could be an enabling technology for humanity and be used to do things that we could only dream of.  Nanobots like this also have a great capacity for destruction.  A requirement for these foglets to function correctly is having strong processing abilities and communication and that requires power.  Imagine if the overpass you are driving on is made of foglets and they suddenly lose communication, power, or get a signal telling them to disperse.   A situation like this could be catastrophic.  No matter how good your programming is computers have errors all the time and think about the level of perfection you would have to attain and maintain to keep a group of trillions of foglets working.  The potential for hacking foglets is also a problem.  Also imagine if you can design foglets you can also design deconstructing nanobots that could potentially deconstruct more than just a building for demolition, but humans or animals.  The military implications are even more horrific.  Instead of having to face your enemy in battle, you simple deconstruct the entire opposing army with a few keystrokes.  Nanobots can be used to do wonderful things for society as a whole, but they can also be used in ways that could result in the end of the world.

XKCD about Nanobots

Technology has not advanced to the point where foglets can be made, but there have been some primitive nano-machines that have been produced.  You can read about one of the coolest nano-machines here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanocar.

Nanocar

You can read more about the man heading the group that designed this experiment here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Zettl.  This is not like a traditional car as it doesn’t have a motor, but the concept is very cool.  The experiment that produced this car was not done to make a very small vehicle, but it did give the researchers a “vehicle” to answer the questions they were asking.   Even though this nanocar has no motor there have been researchers looking at making nano-sized motors that could be used to power future nanobots.  There are a few designs of nanomotors that are being researched and one of the cooler designs is the one with the flagellar clutch.

Flagellar Clutch

This motor uses the idea that bacteria use flagella to move and that could power a nanomotor.  The flagella could allow both power to move and stop movement within the motor.  There is more about this motor at http://www.scientistlive.com/European-Science-News/Biotechnology/Stopping_flagella_movement/20613/.  You can see the single molecule motor in action here Worlds Smallest Motor.  These are both advances in nano-technology that could be the basis for later nano technologies resulting in fully realized nanobots.

There are many applications that nanobots could be used for and if used for good could usher in a new world of possibilities for mankind.  Current nanotechnology might be the basis for later advances that could make powered, coordinated, and intelligent nanobots.   Nanobots potential for good or evil or simply destruction must be paramount in our thoughts as technology advances.

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Robotics has always been an interesting subject to me. I have always felt that robotics is the ultimate in mastery for people working on those systems. Not only do you need to be skilled in manipulating software and hardware you have to have the skills it takes to manufacture the parts from scratch for your robot and have a good understanding of physics. These are the kinds of projects I’d like to ultimately be a part of in the future.  Checking out the links page I ended up looking at various other videos about robotics online.    This subject is so cool!

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The security lecture was interesting information. I remember the mac virus you spoke about and I fully understand your comment on keeping hackers physically away from your computer. Some of my friends are gray hackers to one degree or the other. Not that they have done any harm to systems they’ve messed with as it was just to see if they could do it. They seem to have the ability to effortlessly get into systems by going around security software. So fast in fact that it seems that all the normal password protections at least up to windows xp seem superfluous. This includes systems with various types of security software. I’m astounded by how well some people can get into personal computers. The types of attacks that scare me the most at home are trojans and takeover attacks. I truly do not want to be giving away my bandwidth and computer processing to anyone with nefarious plans. I do want to learn more about hacking and will be spending some time looking more in depth at the topics covered this week.

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Now that I’ve spent some days working with Scratch it shows that even small programs with Scratch can be deceptively tough to get all the bugs out. I do enjoy the fact that I have combined two mini games with a small storyline within the program.   I have some issues though.  Everything worked until I uploaded it and have found that my arrow keys aren’t working on the first game so I still have issues to contend with. Hopefully I’ll be in better shape later on tonight or at least find out what is going on.  I believe that my issues probably stem from the use of velocities in my movements for the first minigame and hopefully these issues won’t carry over to my other minigame at the end of the program as I used velocities there as well.  So far I have enjoyed this experience and I think after working with Scratch I’ll play around with what I can do in Scratch after this.

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I like Scratch. Scratch is so open ended it makes it fun to work in. I quickly found myself liking the quirky ugly graphics that you can make within it. I’m so used to the wonderfully sharp graphics available in today’s games that sometimes I get too serious for my own good. Scratch does not make those types of games, so it is good for me. I started out with no idea of what I was going to do and did some very simple things. I looked at more examples and added some more things to what I had. The story grew as I played around with it and became the basis for the game portion of the program. I have enjoyed working with Scratch, it is user friendly and if I do find changes I need to work on it is fairly easy to make it happen. Scratch helped me to get some ideas on paper so to speak and form the initial basis of the program. After that I formed a plan of what I wanted to do and began to implement that. I’m not finished, but I like what I’ve done so far.

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Randy Pausch’s last lecture was an interesting look into the world of virtual reality during that time. In the beginning of the lecture he said something that resonated with me about how tough it was to create a virtual world compared to a computer animated movie. He said something about it being orders of magnitude tougher to create a world where everything could be interacted with as in virtual reality. I knew before watching this video the large amount of time it takes to render a frame for a typical Pixar film and was astounded by the monstrous amount of time to render a frame for virtual reality. At the time, with the hardware they were using I could see that kind of rendering time. Today though I could see the times drop with the current hardware but if the ratio of rendering time remains the same as before it must be outrageously costly to make a virtual reality environment.  I would like to see what Randy Pausch would say about the current off the shelf technology available to the public that we have now and what he could have done with it.

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This has been a good learning experience for me. Every time I changed something it would work in one browser and not in the other or vice versa. It goes to show that programming for any reason must be specific or it will not work correctly. I’ve been poking and prodding for days getting things the way that I wanted it to look and I was in for a surprise when I uploaded the files to the ftp. Once the files were uploaded and the website was being hosted by Pellissippi the website’s appearance changed. My background files are less classy now with a more pronounced texture than I wanted, however most things worked out just fine. After a little tweaking I was able to get it looking almost as good as it had. However, my code is lacking. I was not able to fix the link issues with Mozilla. My links work just fine in IE, but the only link to work at all in Mozilla was the picture link. It works exactly as it should have. I could have made all the pictures work like that, but I wanted to get the text links working right and was not able to do it. I have determined that I am a sloppy HTML programmer at this junction, however I can only get better from here considering this is my first attempt.

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