Discussion 5: Blog drafts

Programming Languages

    Programming language can be difficult to learn, at its base, machines understand what is known as machine and assembly language which is often recognized as binary code or 1's and 0's, ones basically meaning on and the 0's meaning off in terms of electrical currents needed to execute a command.  While this type of language is very well understood by a machine, a human mind can't comprehend or decipher this type of language because of the constant translation of each letter, word, number or command consists of multiple 1's and 0's where you and I would recognize the letter, word, number or command as it's spelled but could not at any reasonable fashion or pace do the math involved to make any sense of it the way a machine can.

    Because of the time it took to program in assembly language, it was neither reasonable nor efficient enough to keep up with programming with a patch panel and an encyclopedia of code to input, programmers invented what we mainly use today which is known as high level language.  High level language is found in all of the major languages we use today, including Python, Java, and C++ where we can use software that accepts a series of human language commands including "if's, "and's", and "or" statements to create software executions, for example "if" A happens then B happens, "if" A or B happen then C happens, "if" A and B happen then D happens, this is much easier for humans to understand because we may then think of it in terms of cause and effect rather than 10001011011010101110.

Web Mobile App Critique

    This week we critiqued a mobile sports score and betting application called The Score.  The score is a really nice, intuitive app that allows you to check the news and scores of any sports you are following including the ability to highlight your favorite teams to avoid sorting through page after page to find the one game you want.  The Score has traditionally posted betting lines of each game but has now teamed up with a mobile betting platform called Barstool Sports where you can link your Score account with Barstool Sports and bet right through The Score app, while keeping an eye on the betting lines, stat lines, and scores without having to open a second app or webpage.

    There is a chat feature within each games page, allowing fans and bettors to talk about the game, talk about the betting lines, or just plain talk smack.  The chat feature I found to be the greatest downside to this wonderful app because while there were some having meaningful discourse on the games or betting, there were a greater number of trolls in the chat threads, often-times spamming the same rude statement over and over to make the chat unreadable, to those who would shout racial slurs over and over just to get a reaction or disrupt the conversation.  A couple other issues with the app are the widget which can sometimes make other applications act up on your phone, and the calendar feature which synchs a chosen teams schedule with Google calendar but does not recognize the app sending push notifications about the games and news and will send a duplicate notification.

    All in all The Score is a very well made and intuitive app that has to the minute updates on all things sports including news, scores and betting information, as well as being a one stop shop for stat watching and bet placing.  The Score appears to make its revenue on unintrusive ad placement as well as a partnership with Barstool Sports, which is good for them to make some money while keeping the user coming back by not bombarding them with constant 5-30 second ads we that we can't wait for the magical "X" to appear.

   

Documenting a Day

    Friday is a day that I would like to think is the most exciting day of the week for me.  I’m not as young as I once was and have children to take care of, but at my age it’s the little things that I find matter more, where hanging out on the couch is a bit more enjoyable than going out to a rager with my buddies or spending all my money at the bar waiting to hopefully meet women to fall in love with.

            The hardest part of the day begins first thing in the morning which is of course waking up and getting out of bed (Yuck!).  After snoozing my alarm for a good hour, I finally muster up the courage to roll up onto my feet, get my teeth brushed so my breath doesn’t smell, and put my contacts in so I can see, followed by a quick shower to wake up and make sure the rest of my body doesn’t smell as well. 

            After getting ready, it’s time to get the kids ready for school by making them an egg or cereal, then arguing with one about eating.  Secondly, we will send them up to brush their teeth and put some clothes on, then argue about why they must brush their teeth.  Thirdly, time to put shoes on, (argue about why they have to wear shoes).  Then finally it’s time to go to school, as we say with a kiss “love you, have fun at school… LEARN STUFF”!!!

Now that the kids are at school it’s time to head to work (ugh...traffic), but as I mentioned before, Friday is the most exciting day in large part because I worked so much early in the week that I only have to work half of the day!  Since most of the work has been done, and most of the employees who use technology leave by noon, there is not a whole lot to do so I have time to catch up on schoolwork or talk with my colleagues about their weekend plans or about the upcoming football season.  As soon as 1 o’clock rolls around, the laptop shuts and I’m out the door, and of course, inevitably one of the few people still working has an issue with their computer as I’m driving home, so I drive home, get my laptop out, fix their problem, close the ticket and bam, I’m off work again!

After a few minutes of winding down, my wife and I will go for a quick bite, often nachos from Qdoba to hold us over until dinner before we pick the kids up from school.  Once the kids are out and we get home we spend an hour or two quietly staring at our phones or perhaps doing homework before the weekend, then we head out to Buffalo Wild Wings, our traditional Friday night hangout spot, for chicken and beer.  While we’re at the restaurant, we like playing a few rounds of Uno, but since we never finish the last game before the food is served the first to proclaim “I win” is the winner of the final bout. 

Once we are home and stuffed full of beer and chicken, we let the kids watch a television show or play on their phones until bedtime, then we send them up to brush their teeth and put on their pajamas’ before reading them a bedtime story (there’s usually less arguing at this point).  After reading the books we will put the kids to bed, and head downstairs to watch a show and have a nightcap cocktail before hitting the rack ourselves, head up to bed, turn on the tv, hit the pillow, then the next thing you know… it’s Saturday morning.

-          A day in the life

o   Snooze

§  Wake up

§  Brush teeth

§  Shower

o   Prepare kids for school

§  Feed

·         Argue

§  Brush teeth

·         Argue

§  Get dressed

·         Argue

§  School dropoff

o   Drive to work

§  Work

·         Drive home from work

o   Light lunch

o   School pickup

o   Homework downtime

o   Dinner

o   Bedtime

§  Shows

§  Brush teeth/pajamas

§  Story time

o   Adult TV/nightcap

Traveling Through a Network

    Information is created by you, the "computor", but what happens to that information when you send it to someone, or when you interact with a website or application?  Well, it's simple, or is it?  Once you hit send information is condense themselves into smaller bits of information called packets, which are then sent in pieces as electrical pulses over your ethernet cable or radio waves via wi-fi, where it is sent through your network equipment such as switches, firewalls, and finally a router or modem.  From your router the packets are sent to the address of the receiver's server or router where they decide whether the information is proper and, in some equipment, safe.  Once the router determines that it accepts the files being sent it will shake hands with the sender's network and send a response back to the sender telling it that it's okay to send the data thus completing the file transfer.

    There are times when your data may not be sending or network equipment may be down or flapping.  Two wonderful tools for troubleshooting these issues are pings and traceroutes:

Pings

    A ping is an easy way to send packets to a device or website which will be returned by showing the success or failure of the completion of the ping and the speed or latency in which the device responds in milliseconds.  The ping command is very simple, simply hold windows button and press R, then type cmd and hit enter, which will open a command window, type ping (space) then your ip address or DNS name associated with it.  In the example below we pinged 8.8.8.8 which is the address for Google and is a popular ping to troubleshoot internet connectivity on a computer.

    If a ping comes back successful, then your connection to the internet or device is likely to be successful, if it comes back with request timed out or destination host unreachable, then there is some troubleshooting left to do.  Also, when troubleshooting a network device such as a wireless access point, you may choose to do a constant ping by adding a space after the ip or DNS and type -t, which will keep the ping going indefinitely until you type control C to end it.

Traceroute (tracert)

    A traceroute is similar to a ping but is more in depth, while a ping sends and receives packets to incite a response from its destination, a traceroute measures where the packets are being sent, including switches, firewalls, routers, and servers on both ends to map where the packets are going through their destination.  Traceroute is a helpful tool if you are troubleshooting failure to a specific website or within your own network to find where the packets are being lost on their path, which will often lead you to which device is not sending the information through giving you a place to start your troubleshooting.  I recently used this method to find out why my Verizon cellular extenders were not connecting to our network or working.

    To run a traceroute you will simply follow the same path to your command window then instead of typing ping you will type tracert followed by a space and your desired ip address or DNS, you will then see all of the stops your packets make on their destiny.  Don't let the request timeouts discourage you though as they are common in a tracert and can often be explained by your internet service provider dropping packets, or your packets being blocked in one place then redirected to another for a successful route

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Computers in the Workplace

    If you read the about page on this blog, you'll know that my career path to information technology started in the low voltage voice/data cabling, and network infrastructure hardware installation based in construction.  Being one who dealt with telephony and internet circuits, and switch/router configuration, I did more computing than most in the trades where computers are not widely used in the trade field by anyone higher than each trades foreman.  Although, many of the trade "grunts are not using laptops in the field, they are incorporating smartphones more especially the cameras where they will take pictures of a blueprint allowing them to refer to their phone for locations and measurements of builds rather than taking constant trips back to the blueprint to refresh themselves or see the next task saving time, and potentially money on a job that was bid as a flat rate.

    The first person in a trade project that may be using a computer is of course, the architect who will need a high-powered computer and high bandwidth inter/intranet to design, create and share the building designs that they create.  After the architect, the main place where a computer will be used is in the process of creating and submitting bids by the contractors competing for the job where they will use word processing and spreadsheet skills to create financial documents such as bids, receipts, and invoices to send to the customer to compete for and document the agreements of the job.  Once the job is in production, you will often find the general contractor with a computer to document the jobs progress and communicate with the customer, trade companies and the logistics of a job, otherwise you may only sometimes see a handful of trade foremen on a laptop while the "grunts" under them will only be using a smartphone as we mentioned before. 

There are other areas where tradesmen will use computers, mostly in form of smartphones where the tradesman will often log into web portals to check into a job site to document time and materials, and to take pictures and fill out work orders as deliverables for a job that they do which is common practice, especially for repair calls.  

    In future I think computers will be more widely used in the trades, but increasing more in the job titles we've described.  While blueprint mapping technology may improve and be more widely used, the use by those doing the physical labor will still only be using a smartphone or tablet while those above and before them will stay about the same because the steps in the process will not change, and the manual labor will always remain that, reading the map and building the structure where the map says.

Network Security

    In the world of exponentially growing dependance on technology, the need for internet security is crucial, not only keeping up with hackers, and other digital criminals, but also educating the common computer user to recognize marketing and phishing scams which many fall victim to every day.

    Of course, hacking, and digital espionage is a major concern in today's corporate and political environment, but one of the greatest threats to us as a common user is in education.  There are so many phishing scams out there that cosr a scammer virtually nothing to perform to steal thousands of dollars from one in 100,000 people it's worth it, and the bad news is they're not going away.  There are many types of scams but two what you may want to keep an eye out for which are phishing for everyone using a computer or even a phone and social engineering for those especially in the work environment.

Phishing

    Phishing is a tactic that even when being done legally by a company to promote their business is seen by many to be unethical, but as we all know, it is often used in a criminal way by sending emails to entice an user to click a link which will trick the user into giving up personal information or to install malicious malware to steal passwords, credit card and bank information, and even your identity.  As we all know the old addage, "if it's too good to be true, it probably is," if we think of it in this way phishing is easy to spot right?  However, phishing is often very clever, because scammers can get a hold of information of people or businesses you know and send emails with seemingly familiar information that would lead you to trust what is attached to the message encouraging you to open it.  Here are some key things to look out for to protect yourself from phishing scams:

-          You may recognize the sender, but the tone of speech is not quite right.

o    I’ve seen this on Facebook recently with posts that read “look who died” with a link attached.

§  If you weren’t expecting a document or attachment from someone, even a colleague, be sure to verify that they sent it and do not open anything until you have.

-          You may see slight variances in the email address or web link.

o   Instead of JCPenney.com you may only have one n JCPeney, or the end of your standard company email ends with JCPenney.com it may be from someone@JCP.com.

-          Misspellings or poor language can be common in phishing attempts.

o   Look for mistakes in spelling and grammar as many cyber criminals may be from a different country where English is likely not their first language.

§  A professional company would generally not send a professional email with poor grammar, especially a large corporation would have a very buttoned up and professional message.

Social Engineering

    Social engineering is another form of security threat that is often difficult to detect, whereas this sort of threat is executed in person or over the phone by those who are well practiced in the art and very personable people and may be very good actors who prey on those who may be very gullible to charm or afraid to lose their jobs and will react negatively to name drops and other threats of going above their heads.  To a social engineer any information will do as they are often looking for small pieces to a puzzle that they can put together or even just sell small bits of information to those with bad intentions.  Social engineers may also be looking for small bits of company information as a buyer to put themselves at an advantage as a customer to try and stick it to the company for their own personal gain, we see this quite often with car dealers in the automotive energy, any penny they can stick to the seller they will and sleep like a baby at night.  Here are some tips to handle social engineering in a professional environment.

-        -   An employee should always use discretion when they are deciding what information they are divulging 

o   Immediately and calmly approach a superior to handle the situation better to protect themselves and their jobs.

o   Contact security if it is an available option to be sure any confrontation may be held without escalation.

o   Notify a superior if they suspect that information may have unintentionally been apprehended by the perpetrator.