June 2016

Graduate from first year, stop doing the work for the computer
Computers are really good at doing repetitive tasks so lets address some of the time saving and more professional ways of writing code

Some of the people in our department will disagree with some of my decisions here but I'm choosing these based on platform independence, wide spread use, and potential. The idea of this section is to get you into self learning in computer science. Self learning is probably one of the fundamental concepts in industry. With the competition among top performers in industry if you do not learn to self learn but still get good grades you will probably do well, but if you really want to be the best of the best you need to self learn.

As an introduction I would like to assert that nothing said in this post covers all situations and view points that are present. The topics presented are what advice I can draw from personal experience as a Helpdesk TA and with discussions with other upper year students. The list is ordered in my order of importance.

These courses are very important to pay special attention to as the knowledge gained in these courses are used in future years and you may have to spend extra study time in future years in order to catch up if you forget key concepts from these courses. I am not including any first year courses as they give a background into computer science but I expect that you are already past those courses if you are reading this.

Math 1P98 Statistics - The concepts in this course will give you background in statistical reports that you will write in later years.

The Brock Press website appears to include scripts from Facebook which allow Facebook to track the users from Facebook who have active cookies there. (Or just about anyone who has been on Facebook) This may have been done unknowingly by the developer of the site or The Brock Press. This allows Facebook to understand which sites, including The Brock Press, users of Facebook are visiting and target ads to them when they are on Facebook. Another use of tracking cookies is to potentially sell their browsing history to other companies.

With regards to free apps or web services it become commonly known that `if you are not the customer you are product` but in recent years the sale and collection of personal information has become more aggressive. The topic of discussion for this article is Snapchat and the ramification of the gathering of personal information and it's affect on not only your privacy but others privacy you are in contact with.

I ran into a problem that on my Arch Linux install with Teamviewer (for which I use for non lan remote access). I am able to use systemctl to start the teamviewerd on startup but this doesn't make the desktop environment accessible automatically on startup. In order to start the teamviewer user interface. Normally this would be simple, just run the command from a systemd user script that runs theteamviewer program on startup. The problem with this is teamviewer starts with the GUI open and there is no way to change this. This is a personal pet-peeve of mine.

After this guide you should be able to boot from USB on an old IBM Thinkpad T40 or equivalent. This assumes there is a problem with the boot menu not containing your bootable USB drive; or just not understanding how to boot from USB on these devices.

It was quite difficult, support was AMAZING but they were having issues with their FTP server not accepting some of the ports that Filezilla were expecting, they were very knowledgeable and willing to work with me on something they could pass off as a client issue. Beyond that I was surprised how simple it was for some things and how laborious it was for others.

The weirdest thing I experienced was the difference in settings. For instance, namecheap appears to run in php developers mode by default. So, error messages are reported to the client.

HTTPS is important for a lot of reasons, first of all it prevents snooping in on your browsing allowing for privacy between you and the destination. Another thing it prevents is the potential for people to modify content before it gets to you. The biggest case for this was seen with the recent attack on github.com by The great firewall of china. The aforementioned link was a serious problem that could have been mitigated by the use of HTTPS.