Week 12

Filtring lists was a new function taught in the course. I think it is a very useful function as one can now easily take out some particular parts of a list to make a new list. Initially it seemed a bit complicated because a predicate had to be made first to filter a list. But once I looked into designing the predicate properly and talked about it with professor Heap, things became much simpler and now I feel very confident about filtering lists. Because of this, my quiz was very good too.

The issue of privacy was further looked into during this week. I found the idea of protecting intellectual property, trade secrets and ideas through copyrights, patents and trademarks pretty interesting and important. I look to go into the biotechnology industry in the future so the concept of patents is crucial to me.

The idea of downloading music online applies to almost everyone these days and it was addressed during the lecture but what I found very surprising was that lock breakers are pursued by the government more strictly than sharers.

Week 11

This week takes on yet another outlook related to computers- privacy. It is surprising yet interesting how our privacy is being reduced with the development computers and the internet. Bleeding out of information can occur but with the internet, there is an increase in speed, persistence and distance of this bleed out. Even simple things like credit card information, surveys and cookies on the internet can be privacy leaks so in the world of today, it is very hard to have complete privacy and keep things to oneself.

I had no idea that USA had been closely monitoring so many other countries and so that was pretty shocking for me. I think it is insane that ISP is required to give up all data on a person if requested by the government without giving the slightest hint to the person.

It was pretty helpful to learn about the things we could do increase privacy and security-encryption, passwords and pins, updating security software and most important of all, speaking up! We should speak up to have more privacy as our lives and details about it should not be available to anyone on request!

My quiz was pretty good because as I mentioned in the earlier blog, I had been practising recursion a lot. The flatten recursion was a complex yet fascinating and fun recursion and it was great playing around with it. It also greatly enhanced my understanding of recursions and how comfortable I was with them.

Week 10

The educational part of this course takes a turn from this week. Its not about the history and functioning of computers anymore but more about the effect of computers and their development on the lives of human beings. This was a different yet intriguing insight into computers.

I found it very interesting to learn how working for long hours affects a persons productivity. This very strongly correlates to student life where we often pull all-nighters and long hours of work just to deal with the immense pressure and quantity of work we get being U of T students. I initially thought that long hours might affect your productivity a bit but this week I learned that regularly doing that can lead to significant and serious damage to a persons productivity and more importantly health. It was great to learn that working 8 hours a day is optimal and that a significant amount of sleep and rest in crucial to good performance and productivity. Now I have proof for not pulling all-nighters or studying for a crazy number of hours. I was surprised to learn that prolonged sleeplessness affects motor skills and judgement.

My test 2 was pretty good. I found the programming part very easy and the history of computing part was not too hard either. You were good as long as you could connect a few of the concepts taught in class. I feel like practising the previous test was very helpful.

Week 9

It was interesting to learn about the different ways in which computers can be connected such as ring topology and star and bus configuration. Each has its own way of functioning and its own problems. Their different ways of functioning are crucial to the understanding and formation of gateways which interconnect local networks. I found the details of medieval internet and the formation of the world wide web pretty confusing and challenging. But later I discussed it with properly with professor Heap and he cleared out all my doubts. However I still find the way the internet works (antipodal clicking etc) a bit confusing and will look it up online for better understand or talk to prof Heap again if necessary.

I had no idea that the world wide web would not be possible without open protocols and that it is owned jointly by the government, corporations and individuals. This was pretty new and fascinating to learn.

Professor Heap further led us into recursive functions this week. I really like recursive functions although I do find them pretty complex to construct. Therefore I have been really looking into them and practising on dr racket and I feel much more confident about creating them now.

Week 8

It was great to learn about operating systems, their origins and how they worked. They are very important to the functioning of computers today and are one of the milestones in computing history that separate old computer machines having very few functions and slowly running very few programs from  the computers of today performing numerous functions and running various programs at the same time and at lightning speed.

My tutorial quiz went very well as usual because I find everything in this course very interesting, especially the programming part of dr racket. The introduction of the 'apply' function gives us more to play around with images and lists. It increases our ability to make more complicated functions and also widens the range of the functions we can code for. I think it is very useful to "apply beside" or "apply above" for a bunch of images together. Prof Heap also introduced us to recursive functions which are mind-blowing for me. I find it very interesting how it is possible to use the result from the last value in the function to produce the next result of the function.

Overall I feel pretty confident about the material covered this week.

Week 7

It was new and very interesting to learn how very frequently used things like hard drives, compact discs, flash (USB) drives work. On the other hand though, their actual mechanism was pretty complicated. One thing I really liked during this week was the change in computer machines from being able to run only one program at a time with one user only to crude multi tasking including task-switching and time-splitting between various programs. It was also fascinating how the machine actually performs the multi tasking.

My tutorial quiz went very well and that was because I found the tutorial material for this week highly interesting. Its fun to play around with images deconstructing them into each pixel that makes them, and constructing them with different dimensions (height and width). In a similar vein, it is highly useful to make functions pertaining to images and then map them onto images, to every pixel in the image (actually). You can play around with images so much in this way.

Hey this is Akshit Sahanis new blog! :D