Saturday, October 24, 2009

Week 7 Muddiest Point

I heard from the NPR news/quiz show Wait Wait Don't Tell Me that the "://" part of the URL is arbitrary and does not really serve any purpose. Are there other parts of HTTP that are superfluous or perhaps redundant?

Friday, October 16, 2009

Week 7 Comments

Instead of commenting on classmate's readings, I decided to watch their Jing videos.

Comment on Casey C.'s video:
http://cac160.blogspot.com/2009/10/assignment-4.html

Comment on Sara C.'s video
http://lis2600infotechnology.blogspot.com/2009/10/jing-assignment.html

Week 7 Reading

Howstuff Works "How Internet Infrastructure Works"
I was surprise when the article mentioned redundancy. In our past classes, we have been talking about technology, like databases, work to reduce redundancy. However, in the case of DNS, redundancy is a good thing. If one DNS fails at any given level, another one is there to take its place. I feel this can also be applied to routers. There seems to be an infinite number of paths through the internet by which routers can send information packets. They of course try for the simplest of fastest path, but there are likely to be countless others.

Dismantling Integrated Library Systems
This article made me think back to Christina Borgman's Scholarship in the Digital Age, which we had to read for LIS 2000. Her main point is that digital scholarship is still in its infancy and is still missing some key aspects. She also advises that libraries, scholars and publishers need to communicate with one another to form a system of scholarship that suites everyone. I would ILS creators and vendors to that list. It seems to be some miscommunication between libraries and the ILS vendors. Libraries expect their ILS to work a certain way or work with certain other technology and it ends up not being so. If ILS vendors are kept in mind while digital scholarship is being formed, libraries would be better able to organize and access all the information digital scholarship can offer.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page on Google
I knew I liked these guys. Their wish to do good (as in good deeds, not in "well") is sincere and evident in their work. I think a major part of Google's success is that they are never satisfied with what they have accomplished. They never say "What we have is good enough. We don't need to think of any more improvements." They are not even close to running out of ideas, and I doubt they ever will be.

Week 6 Muddiest Point

I don't have a muddiest point for week 6. It was so long ago. Simply Ages.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Assignment 4: Tutorial

For my assignment, I demonstrated on of my favorite websites, Cake Wrecks.

Here is the video.
Here are the 5 images: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Poke around Cake Wrecks and thank me later.

Friday, October 2, 2009

Assignment 3: CiteULike Library

I chose 3 of my favorite books as my topics. They are...
*Orlando by Virginia Woolf (a novel about a man who transforms into a woman)
*In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (the first "true crime" novel about a 1959 homicide)
*The Jeeves and Wooster Series by P.G. Wodehouse (a collection of short stories about and Englishman and his valet).

My CiteULike Library:
http://www.citeulike.org/user/jpm82