Mark's IT Blog

Grid computing hit its stride in week 9 😀 haha, had to happen sooner or later.
Distributed Pattern Recognition was put forth as a prime application for computing grids. Purposes could include data mining, medical research and an array of scientific and engineering pursuits. Asad Khan proposed the use of the Distributed Pattern Recognition Architecture in conjunction with distributed pattern recognition algorithms to enable recognition computation on scales far greater than current solutions permit.
In the modern world where data held by the human race is growing exponentially, the ability to draw valuable information from the mass of data is quite exciting.

Internet Application Development’s 9th week expanded on the previous lectures introduction to dynamic ASP.NET pages and moved into DataControls, specifically the GridView.

Grid views have a number of column types:

• BoundField – (default)
• ButtonField – Enables Add and Delete buttons
• CheckBox Field – good for booleans
• CommandField – Predefined command buttons (Select, Edit, Delete)
• HyperLinkField – self explanatory
• ImageField – self explanatory
• TemplateField – Custom data views

See how simple dynamic pages in ASP.NET are

Week 9 of case study had no seminar. The tutorial was focused on assessing group progress thus far.

We are doing OK but still have some major hurdles. Upon review of our work thus far some major floor stand out and issues with moving to a working prototype. I imagine over the mid-semester break a full work over of the project will be required before moving to a working prototype which represents 30% of the final mark for the subject.

Data communications week 8 brought a focus on wireless communications.

In the tutorial we worked with some wireless network sniffers to get a deeper understanding of wireless networking. As I was running ubunutu on my laptop I was unable to use the software prescribed (http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider) which is a replacement for NetStumbler.

Instead I had to use Kismet which is an Ubuntu option that was not very user friendly as it ran in the terminal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kismet_(software).

Week 8 of grid computing encompassed a completion the previous lecture on Grid Resource management (specifically distributed resource management [DRM]). The week 8 lecture was then a detailed introduction to sensor grid networks which I imagine is one of the most likely futures for grid computing.

In sensor network Data filtering and security were the main issues discussed.

Internet Application Development’s eighth week began discussion on data stores. The topics covered included:

• Introduction to data stores
• DataSource Controls
• User Interaction with data sources

Some common data stores include:

• RDBMS (SQL server, Oracle, MySQL etc)
• XML
• Access 🙁

Case study’s week 8 lecture looked at documentation. This feature has been recognized as a critical factor for IS success and as a major separator between professional and amateur work.

Some key documentation includes:

• User Manuals (End User, Staff, Administrator)
• Installation Guide
• Integration Guide
• Troubleshooting Procedures
• Operational Procedures
• Test Plan + Test Results

For complex Information system completing all of the above documents in full detail would be very costly and time consuming which is a major reason why documentation is rarely complete.

For our Web Application we are required to complete the documents with a lite version test plan.

Another missed lecture and tutorial for Data Communications which I definitely regret as the subject is very interesting.

Week 7 focused on Local Area Networks, the reasons for them, how they work and how to implement them.

I am still struggling to follow the lecture material in Grid Computing, but none-the-less learning a lot and finding my feet in the more practical tutorials.

Week 7’s lecture discussed:

• Grid Resources
• Resource Specification
• Grid Processing
• Grid Application Hosting

Internet application development continued the style matching lecture material to assignment requirements. This seems like a very effective way to make the knowledge stick.

The topics this week were:

• Validation Controls
• Master Pages
• Themes and Skins
• Navigation Controls

All of these were required on our assignment which ensured we revised it in detail.

After working with ASP.NET I was really impressed and wondered how many large companies used it. The chart above is the web server market share for Fortune 1000 companies from mid 2007.