I love FMC1202

I still need 1 point to meet the requirement to pass FMC1202. The visual computing seminar again let me know the wizard of the computer technology. I felt so amazed that I want to write a blog post about it. However, I realize that I should do something more meaningful for the last blog post. Thus, I changed my mind and I will write my feeling of taking the FMC1202 module.
When I select the modules through the CORS, my friend told me that there was a new module only open for freshmen. I thought that I shouldn’t lose this chance, otherwise I will lose it forever. Then my friend told me that this module got no exam and it was not related to the CAP. Great! If I didn’t take this module, I should be crazy. I like the feeling without stress and I thought that this module would not stress me and I can enjoy myself. However, I found that this was not the truth. Though FMC1202 haven’t taken me too much time and I like the content of it, I still suffered when I did the presentations. I am always nervous when deliver speeches in the public and I can’t do it well. However, Damith said that we had to do at least two presentations (In fact, I did three presentations this semester for this module). I felt scared at first, but after some practice, I do a good one out of the three presentations. From this, I learn a lot. I heard that in the following years of study, I will get many projects and presentations. This module helps me to improve my skills at this aspect and I get more chance to survive from the university study.
For the following part, I will write something about the whole seminars. The first seminar is A Brief History of Computing (by Micheal Brown). It is a good start for this module. It is interesting and easy to be understood as it didn’t have too much odd theory. The change of the definition of computer is interesting, it is really amazing that the definition in Oxford English Dictionary (1955) is “A person who makes calculations or computations; a calculator, a reckoner; spec. a person employed to make calculations in an observatory, in surveying, etc”. in addition, I like the what Prof. Edsger W. Dijkstra said, “Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes”. Having invented much of the technology of software, Dijkstra eschewed the use of computers in his own work for many decades. Almost all EWDs appearing after 1972 were hand-written. When lecturing, he would write proofs in chalk on a blackboard rather than using overhead foils, let alone Powerpoint slides. Even after he succumbed to his UT colleagues’ encouragement and acquired a Macintosh computer, he used it only for e-mail and for browsing the World Wide Web. Really amazing! How come a computer scientist avoided using computer?
The second seminar is A First Look at Second Life. The seminar brought us to a virtual world, but it almost contains everything: the Mysterious underwater world, the Da Vinci’s museum the beautiful NUS campus and other famous university, etc. This gave us the idea about what the new world would be. We also experience to dress ourselves in the Second Life. Some of us dressed sexy, some of us dressed like an animals and some boys dressed like a girl. Another amazing thing is that we can own our cars. The car is cool and we get it freely.
The third seminar is How Youtube Works. After the seminar, I know more about the principle of how Youtube works and the problems the Youtube met and how they solve them. One thing is the Youtube spent a lot of money on buying the bandwidth. Because of this, the Youtube came up with a compression algorithm without little sacrifice of the quality. Another thing is the copyright issue. As some people may upload videos that violate the copyright of others’, Youtube has to take the risks to be charged. For this, they came up with video fingerprint so that they can find the videos which violate the others’ copyright and remove them.
The forth seminar is the Viruses R us. This seminar is quite interesting and except showing me how the viruses work, it showed me the power of virtual machine. The viruses Mr. Liang showed us are interesting and from that we knew the origin of viruses. A so called hacker nowadays coded a virus just to show his talent, not to destroy and filch information. To some extent, the hacker at that time is cute and is helpful for the development of computer technology. Besides, Mr. Liang also gave us suggestions on how to protect our computers. I think the most simple but quite useful idea is “Don’t log in as administrator unless necessary”. Another useful method is using the virtual machine. This method works well because even your virtual machine is destroyed, it will not affect your host operating system and you can back up to the state when your virtual machine can work well easily.
The fifth seminar is Search engines. The seminar mainly covered three things: Web phenomenon, Web statistics and Search engines. The web phenomenon showed the websites and information increased in such a rapid speed that there is need for search engines to search and get the useful information. The web statistics part showed us the search engines developed very fast and now they are the most popular websites. The Search engines part showed how search engines work. The use web crawlers to collect information on the page and they came up with an algorithm to rank the page so that user and get useful information.
The sixth seminar is invisible software. This seminar broad my knowledge and let me realize that idea is too narrow. Mrs Tulika Mitra showed a smartshirt which can sends an alarm when a child stops breathing. From this I know the invisible software is everywhere. In addition, the invisible software is really powerful. It can be used to design automotive elctronics, like cars and it is an important part in the F1 team’s vehicle.
The seventh seminar is Wizards of Os. This topic contains two parts. In the first part, we played with different OS, like Windows 7, Mac OS X, Linux and OpenSolaris. It is really interesting and I found that the Linux really good. In the second part, we know the detail about the OS. I really like this seminar. I must say I just treat as a tool and I never try to know more about the computer itself. However, this seminar helped me a lot. From the seminar, I know what the OS really is and how it works. As I already write a blog post for it, I won’t discuss it a lot here.
The eighth seminar is Google AND AMAZON - How does it work under the hood? As I didn’t following the lecturer and it seemed hard to be understood, I hadn’t got an idea of the lecture.
The ninth lecture is visual computing. I must say this is really amazing seminar. How can using software to do such a real office. The seminar mainly talked about four good ideas, models, collecting lots of data, bringing more knowledge to bear and machine learning, and two bad ideas, imitating human vision and pushing math too far. These ideas are really helpful and brought me to an amazing world.
The last seminar is Weird Math behind JavaScript Programming. It is really amazing that programming language can be so simple. The fact is shown again that computer scientists are a group of strange guys. The lecturer kept making the programming simpler. He successfully proved that just use the function definition and application can solve everything. Lambda Calculus is really amazing and simple. The simplest is the most beautiful.
This is the whole seminar. I hope that it will be more modules like this so that I can broad my knowledge and know more about the whole computer technology.