Friday Probe Surgery Led By Jovial John...

Hey all, today the CEO of Develop main HQ came in.. a powerful boss we cannot defeat yet.. anyway...

Before we start today's blog, I will answer the questions we were (not) forced to:

Questions:
Name the two top level protocols on TCP/IP? [HTTP/HTTPS].
How many layers does the OSI model have? [7 Layers].
How many layers does the TCP/IP model have? [4 Layers].
What does IP stand for? [Internet Protocol].

Now I will begin the explanation of my journey. At the start of the day before the storm took place, I noticed that "Zoetic Zoe" sent back U22A4 as I had some spelling and grammar mistakes on my game manuals. I spent a quick five minutes updating the older versions.

Then the day began, we firstly had the "Amazing Adam" where he recapped with us with what wer had learnt yesterday by labeling different parts of the physical network infrastructure. Next, he then showed a video of Bletchely Park where different historical pioneers got together and invented/innovated technology to the next level, this was because it was urgent at the time due to wall so therefore advancements has been progressively produced.

Afterwards, the "Amazing Adam" allowed us to get into pairs. The first partner had to build a lego structure whilst the second pair was sent away elsewhere for the time being. A short while after, the second partner (me) had to recreate what the first partner created with the five pieces of lego blocks (Ben R) - we found that it was impossible to recreate it without communication in the form of verbal or visual. This meant that we should communicate and be much more proactive than before, which was good. I have also noticed the group work activities has increased recently.

Correspondingly, we were then put into four teams of roughly give random people including myself. I was in team 1 with Ben C, Sami H, Connor P, and Liam B. We were assigned to find the definition, benefits, limitations, purpose of use and by who for four different unique key terminologies about Network Services. The four key words were:

Packet Switches: Is the mechanism which sends network traffic in small manageable data units across the system.
ISDN (Integrated services digital network): An old circuit switched system for simultaneous digital transmission of video, voice, and data.
ADSL Broadband (Asymmetric digital subscriber line): High speed data transmission in which a single line or cable is capable of carrying  large amounts of data across the system.
Wireless Access Protocol: Will be filled in later. (Everyone did Wireless Access Point accidentally).

In the end of this activity, we spent quite a while on this task (relevant for the Scheme of Learning U10A1T2 - part 3). We all eventually shared our pieces of work with other teams to identify good constructive points as well as criticism for improvements. We had fully Harvard reference all of the information we have found and we have typed all of the information in our own words to the best ability possible. However, the other team thought we had copied and pasted our work as the size of the text was slightly different, this was because we all worked on different computers and I pasted the final texts into my document without editing everything. After the discussions, we all went back to our groups and made the improvements: we added more benefits and limitations, we added diagrams to enhance our explanations of the terminologies, and we also structured and laid out our document more clearly.

Consequently, we finished lunch and we were then led by "Jovial John". We were firstly told to watch a video about Binary calculation taught simply in 60 seconds. This was for a starter activity for us to calculate the amount of binary needed (I now remember that it involves the square roots of 2)..
We were challenged to create the specifically stated numbers on the sheet (now recycled R.I.P) and the first winner (Joe B) won a small cute device that moves when you speak to it (I believe so). Despite congratulating him, I almost won this but I made a mistake by not reading the last binary question properly, resulting to an incorrect answer. However, this starter was to get us thinking into binary overall. Then for the next hour or so, "Jovial John" went through a detailed power point presentation with us about:

Network Software:

• Network OS (NOS): Operating system for the network server, controls and operations.
• Connection Software: Referred to as clients, allows a system to connect to a server and access the materials and resources provided by the NOS, server.

Access Methods:

• CSMA/CD: Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Detection: Detects data collision and attempts to resend data if there is no traffic and the node's line is acknowledged. If data not sent/received, it will wait for a random amount of time (1/100th of a second) and resend.
• CSMA/CA: Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance: Attempts to avoid data collision and the procedure takes place before CSMA/CD. CD will only take place if avoidance fails or misses.
• Token Passing: (Access Control Protocols) - A ring topology network that passes around the token to each node in turn. If the node has the token access, then it will be allowed to communicate/access a resource from the server.

Communications Models and Protocols:
- Models -

• OSI (Open Systems Interconnection Model): Contains 7 different layers, starting from the bottom where the data is sent and encoded to binary all the way to the top at layer 7 where the application displays to the user (closest to us) such as webpages, browsers, and emails.
• TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol): Has 4 layers instead, based on internet as each computer is assigned to an unique identifier internet protocol address.

(End of, for now).

Overall I found the presentation really complex but I believe I understand quite a bit. I will attempt to read up a bit more about this to improve my overall knowledge and to let the information sink up successfully. During self study, I continued my assignments, made the improvements and corrected any mistakes. I then submitted the work for Adam. Today was challenging but as a result, I believe i have learnt something new as the learning methods was a fun way to partake it! We will recap all of this on Monday morning therefore some preparation should be taken place.