Routing: 1st week

The previous week has been the introduction of our new"ish" topic, routing. Till now, the stuff we're learning in Chapter 1 is basically a lot of review from the Networking Fundamentals from last semester. The biggest change, however, is the learning style we're trying out. The powerpoints I believe is a whole lot better in the sense that the creator has already been through the course, and is highlighting the potentially important facts. On top of that, the worksheet that we're doing is a nice addition to test whether we're getting this stuff. The website was more of a learn-this-through-memorization, while the powerpoint has a couple of main topics and is also very organized. What I really found helpful was that the powerpoint pretty much told us exactly how to configure a router. We had kind of learned this last semester too, but I definitely understand way better because of the way the powerpoint layered it out.

Final Post

Greenfoot, I believe, was a good choice of a final. First of all, I've had experience with it, both this year and last year. I’ve done multiple projects last year in Castillo’s class, and this year, in the second semester I remember making a couple of games. However, this new Greeps project was foreign to me. I’ve been working on it a lot, even the weekend, only looking at youtube videos for inspiration. I kind of think, other groups are directly using code, because they’re using code which they are unable to explain to me when I ask them how they did it. It seems suspicious, but at least I know that I’m working on it fair and square. Out of this class, I’ve gotten a lot more familiar with JAVA. Especially going to those computer science competitions. Those competitions have forced me to get my JAVA refamiliared and coding straight on the computer a bit better. Even though software programming is what this class is all about, I was kind of hoping it learn more about the hardware parts. My dad is actually a hardware engineer, and he doesn’t program programs directly but he fixes problems in the hardware and things like that. That is actually I’m a bit interested in internetworking next year too. So by the end of next year, I can see what I enjoy more, software or more hardware. I might have liked to learn more languages. Even though I attempted to at the end, I just got caught up with other things like website building for a cricket club. So my computer language knowledge is still in the JAVA range. It would be helpful to colleges and other organizations that I would apply to say that I can program in blank, blank and blank. But I guess it’ll still be just JAVA. A lot of my family members are hardware computer engineers and this hopefully may be passed onto me. Software is something my family or I wasn’t ever familiar with it before high school, but when I saw that the Comp Sci AP was available to me, I figured that it would be very interesting to try out. I ended up enjoying it, and I still do today. But I have realized that when in competitions with people in your or above your skill level, things can get very pressurized and tense. Especially when a code doesn’t work. That is why it would have been better if I became one of those better coders.

15th week

As seen in the picture below there is a website called wix.com which allows very cool websites to be built, but the URL is on their domain, but atleast it's accessible by everybody. This previous week has been dedicated to working on this website, and it's coming along pretty well actually. Wix gives you so much freedom and so many better features than Microsoft's website builder, but then again Microsoft is more heavily dependent on the programming part. Where as wix.com is much more user friendly. The website below is supposed to be about Cricket Club as seen in the website's title. We have a club at LASA, and we don't have any website for it right now. We have a blogpost and a facebook page, but this should be the one source for all the information, and the others' should be for more recent up to date information.

14th week

I've kept adding more and more to my website and have figured out how to make more items on the tab menu. So now I can navigate through the home page, about Ashvin, etc. But what isn't working is that whenever I click on those it redirects me to some page that has an error on it. I've been trying to look up how the correct way of doing it is but haven't gotten much success. So next week, that'll be one of my priorities. Another neat feature I found out about the program is that you can switch from programming mode to design mode with a click of a button. In the design mode, you're pretty much dragging items from the toolbox into the layout of the website. It's a bit easier because it's more visual and you can see what you're doing. It's also a bit faster, because you're not typing out the code individually. However, one would think that it would allow them to have much more freedom, but so far from what I've learned is that there's not much more freedom. It's pretty restricting the way it is because it only allows you to put stuff from the toolbox into the layout, and some of the items don't even work when you just place them into the website, you still need programming in code.

13th week

I continued to work on the website adding a bit of the toolbox options. This week, I had missed one of the day's to make up a DBQ taking the whole class period. This week I even figured out something very open. That I am better than Matt on typeracer and winner vs loser. This was a very important discovery on my part, which now gives me bragging rights over him. Also finally, Micah paid his $2 to me. Also, I finally decided on taking Internetworking instead of Independent Study.

12th week

I only had one class once this entire week due to all the TAKS testing. But on Monday, we continued to work. Its a bit hard to remember since it was so long ago, but I've decided to be making a website, or atleast attempting to learn how to make one. It has come along pretty good until now, and I can change all the text on the screen/page title/etc, but adding buttons/tables/calendars seems easy, but I still have to achieve being able to do those. Hopefully next week, I'll get more time to work on it so atleast by the end of the year I can look back at it.

11th week

For the first 2 days, my race in Kodu Lab has greatly increased, with new terrains and functionality. This week was a combination of a lot of interesting things. Pizza on Wednesday was a nice little surprise and Micah still owes me $2 (reminder to self). On Friday, the new computer science competition was pretty good, since Chance, Skylar, and I have already had experience with these kind of problems. It was pretty unfair how some teams apparently found the solutions online and were pretty much done with all problems and got time in class to chill, while my group worked the whole time and still weren't able to complete nearly as many problems. All I wish for is that in the end, the grades are fair, and we don't get a failing grade because we actually tried to do all of the problems.