Grey's Introduction to the Web
Intentionally terrible since 2010.
Monday, 29 November 2010

  More stuff about how the Internet works

It's something to do with how the Internet works. Built on telephone networks, copper wires and all that fancy-pants stuff.

Queuing theory helps telephone networks handle situations where more people can make more calls than there are physical connections.

Packet switching is a digital network communications method that groups all transmitted data into blocks (aka, packets). Packet switching is the fancier version of circuit switching, where there is a physical path between the two nodes (just like an old fashioned phone operator, which moved switches around to connect phone calls).

Packet switching is the delivery of variable bit-rate data streams over a shared network, by traversing network adaptors, switches, routers, etc. Packets are like packets (the mail kind), they have the contents (data), a destination address (the address), and delivery information (or administrative information, such as the packet number).

Packets are sent individually between nodes, taking the route defined by a routing algorithm. Not all packets will necessarily follow the same route. The packets arrive in different orders than they're sent, the destination computer reassembles them into their appropriate sequence.

Protocols are the rules which allow controlled communication, which provide standards for data formats and error handling.

An IP address is like a phone number. IP addresses are referred to by domain names through DNS.

HTTP is a stateless protocol, it doesn't remember anything it did before what it did just now.

And that's about it.






Monday, 22 November 2010

  Internetworks structures and topology

With Hulbert, Paul Hulbert. Visibly shaken, but not yet stirred.
I did a lot of this stuff at A-Level, so yeah, stuff.

Topology is the shape! Like a star, or a line, with switches and routers and terminals and stuff.
Ring topology: Nodes in a serially closed loop. Messages are sent (in one direction) around the ring until it reaches the destination node.
Bus: Nodes connected into a single backbone cable. Any node can go straight to any other node, but only one message can go through the bus at once.
Star: Nodes connected to a central hub (e.g. a server). All computers are connected to the hub, hubs can be connected together, if a hub fails then all connections are lost.

Shannon-Weaver model of communication:
INFORMATION SOURCE ->(message)-> TRANSMITTER ->(signal)-> NOISE SOURCE ->(received signal)-> RECEIVER ->(message)-> DESTINATION

LAN: Local Area Network (local network)
WAN: Wide Area Network (heterogeneous infrastructure network - a mishmash of different kinds of networks and topologies)
BAN/PAN: Body Area Network/Personal Area Network (networks over one's person - e.g. phone and Bluetooth headset, RFID)
MAN: Metropolitan Area Network (city-wide or university-wide networks)
VAN: Value Added Network (provided by a network provider which adds email, EDI, etc in addition to basic network services; tends to be used by multiple organisations at once)
AN: Academic Network (university networks, such as JANET)

Backbone local networks support a number of LANs within an enterprise and/or geographically large area.

Back end networks interconnect large systems such as mainframes, super computers and mass storage devices. They're the kind of things that connect backbone local networks (which connect a number of LANs). They need high speed interfaces, but can support massive amounts of data transfer.






Thursday, 18 November 2010

  This blog in a nutshell.







Tuesday, 16 November 2010

  Workin' on charities







Monday, 15 November 2010

  Background and development of the web liveblog

I'm actually in the lesson for once, so I'm going to blog about it WHILE DOING IT. Yeah baby, this is so Web 2.0.

Computers used to be a people job. A person who did maths for a living, I guess that's just a mathematician or a maths teacher or something. There was no computer programming, as there were no computers, aside from people who did maths for a living - but you couldn't program them.

Totally had automated machines though - hell yeah, weaving.

1866: They laid a cable across the Atlantic. Everyone thought it was cool, but it didn't work very well and died in a few days. Kind of like Windows Vista.

1936 - 1938: Some dude called Konrad (great name) creates a binary computer.

1940 - 1943: Bombe and Colossus in Bletchley Park break the Enigma and Lorenz codes, helping win World War II for Allied forces. Eventually leads to chemical castration and suicide of Alan Turing. I've sat next to him, there's a statue in the gay village in Manchester.

1945: Vannevar Bush (what a weird name) proposes a photo-electrical-mechanical device called Memex, which can follow links between documents on a microfiche (small fish?). This is the beginning of hypertext and the Steampunk Internet.

1946: ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator). 30 tons; 30 units; 19,000 vacuum tubes and used 200 kilowatts of power. The Large Hadron Collider of the day, although much less likely to destroy the universe.

1950s: Computer networks come about. Mainframe computers, terminals all linked together (using a star topology!) within institutions (creating Intranets).

1957: The Soviet Union launch Sputnik 1.

1960s: Computer networks start linking into each other, creating Internets.

1962: Dr JCR Licklider heads ARPA's research into use of computers for military purposes.

1965: Ted Nelson coins the word "hypertext".

1969: ARPANET starts being made.

1970s: Mainframes became unpopular, people didn't want dumb terminals, smaller groups start to buy "minicomputers", separate from the mainframe. WANs start to appear.

1972: ARPANET creates email. Nigerian scammers rejoice.

1980s: Local Area Networks become invented. Many more computers are used, computers become affordable (and popular) for normal people thanks to Clive Sinclair and other genius nutters like that.

1980: Tim Berners-Lee begins thinking about creating the Web. Creates the notebook program, which links "nodes" of information.

1989: Tim Berners-Lee submits "Information Management: A Proposal", pretty much creating the theoretical WWW in the process.

1990s: PC's grow significantly more powerful, and significantly more popular. Internet commerce booms, Internet commerce busts.

1991: February 13th, Tim-Berners Lee sends an email.

1993: Marc Annderson create Mosaic, the first web browser.

2000: 7.4% of the world is on the Internet. Over 30% of UK households are online.

2009: 70% of UK households are online.

When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the World Wide Web... Now even my cat has its own page. Bill Clinton






Tuesday, 9 November 2010

  Email form thing

Been there, done that.






Monday, 8 November 2010

  See-Ess-Ess

I already know all about CSS. Separation of content and layout/style. All that jazz. Thus I don't want to write about it, because it's not new or interesting to me.

(Box models are pretty interesting though, especially when they're a pain in the ass - lookin' at you Internet Explorer.)

Ladies and gentlemen, Louis Armstrong.








Thursday, 4 November 2010

  OMG THIS IS SO AWESOME

THIS VIDEO IS AWESOME :)))))






Monday, 1 November 2010

  Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language

DHTML is just Javascript messing about with the DOM. JS does this all the time nowadays thanks to jQuery, Mootools, script.aculo.us and those ilk.

DHTML alters the Document Object Model, which is what defines the layout of the page. It reacts to events and inputs (like clicking, or what people type into an input), which makes it object-orientated (I guess).

I just use jQuery. It's much more powerful than standard Javascript, and significantly easier to use.
It's advertised as Javascript for designers for a reason. It even has a theme song.







Monday, 25 October 2010

  Structures with HTML

DOCTYPES annoy me. Thank goodness for <!DOCTYPE html>. It's sad that XHTML is now obsolete, I quite liked the strict formatting rules provided by it. It made things so much more consistent and pretty.

Styles, scripts and meta information go in the head, although the only element it requires is title.

Everything that is to be displayed goes into the body. Styles and scripts can also be put into the body, it's not recommended to do it with styles, but it is with scripts.

Large Javascript files can slow down a page load immensely, even though they aren't going to start running until the whole page is loaded anyway. It's typically recommended that scripts go at the bottom of the page, above the closing body tag, so that the important parts of the page can load before the fancypants scripty parts.

CSS is awesome. Separation of layout and content FTW.
(In high school, whenever I mentioned CSS people thought I was talking about Counter Strike: Source...)

The i tag (for italics) is being phased out, as it's a tag used for formatting text, and not to denote it's content.

Quirks mode is funny. Also a good blog.






Saturday, 23 October 2010

  Test entry

GOD, Blogger is so confusing!!!! Can't we use LiveJournal or MySpace??????????
http://www.uwe.ac.uk/ is so uncool!?!!!






Monday, 11 October 2010

  Intro to HTML (at the speed of light)

I'll be honest, I already know all about HTML (hypertext markup language). So I wasn't paying attention.






Monday, 4 October 2010

  What is the Interweb?

According to United States Senator Ted Stevens, "the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes."

The Internet is hardware - servers, routers, switches, cables and tubes.
The big ol' WWW is software - it runs on top of the Internet through server applications (like Apache, PHP, SQL, etc.) and protocols (like HTTP).

The Internet was a military invention, starting off as ARPANET; a system for army peeps to stay in contact even if one of their routing computers died, because of war or faulty cabling - usually the latter.

The Web came from the mind of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, some pretty cool guy at CERN who wanted to share documents with scientists and wasn't afraid of anything. He also made the first version of HTML, which was pretty much just a rip off of SGML.

The first web server was a NeXTcube computer - created by Steve Jobs after he was kicked out of Apple (but before he was hired by them again). If Apple executives never fired Steve, the Wub may never have existed.

God praise the Apple.






Web Counter
Web Counter
Archives

October 2010   November 2010  
Site Reference RSS Parser
Your Source for Internet Marketing Articles

© and ® to GREY HARGREAVES. All riughts reserved.