Tutorial 3

Hey hey. how much stuff did we have to do for this weeks tutorial task! I don't even the internet at home at the moment so here i am devoting my spare time to writing this blog in the library. hehe.

So with the library search i found around five books which i think are relevant to my topic - which is technologies of war. I found books on hitler, the enigma and on cryptology. I had a little bit of a hard time finding any journal articles in the database but when i got the hang of how to use it i did find one on 'The Science of Secret Codes and Ciphers'. The article talks about how to decipher the codes on the enigma and other devices. It discsses how we can use a pen and paper to break the codes of the machines.... which i don't think i could ever do. It then goes on to talk about the introduction of the computer - how they can make or break more complex codes. This information might come in handy when i'm discussing the enigma in my assignment but it might not.... we shall see.

I found the weirdest sites in the scavenger hunt! for that pumpkin question i found a great recipe for pumpkin pie.. lol the biggest pumpkin weighed like 1337.60 pound which is like around 6ookg i think??? That's crazy! I also discovered Grant Hackett has a live journal and email WOW so if any of you guys want to go to that it's at granthackettonline.com lol... and did you know that stephen stockwell played for a brisbane punk band called "The Black"? you do now! I didn't find answers to questions 8 and 9 did you guys????...

Okay last part! We had to discuss what a search engine is. I found that it is an information retreival system designed to help us find information stored on a computer system - such as the world wide web... Just like we had to use a search engine to find all the answers to our scavenger hunt by using key words and phrases. The contents of a web page is anaylyzed to determine how it should be indexed with words, headings, titles or specific fields. The order in which the web page comes up can highly depend on how much money it has payed to be in a certain position otherwise it's usually based on relevance. Google, yahoo and wikapedia are usually what i use - google mostly because i usually find whatever i'm looking for straight away. There are news articles you can find on www.topix.net which tell you all the latest goss like how google is the biggest web spammer and how wikapedia is losing credibility.

I also found a mailing list that keeps you up to date on new technologies - couriermail.com.au has a mailing list and a section on new technology ranging from computers to cameras. I wasn't really sure what a mailing list was so i had trouble finding more but if i do i will let ya kno! cya