Level Me Up

  Many software developers are intimidated by working with backend code, most explicitly working with databases. Understanding how information flows is a crucial part of software development. For this week’s topic, the discussion will focus on the concept of data modeling. They are specifically understanding first, second, and third normal forms. The question answered is why the third normal form is an excellent basis for modeling the real world and application development. Vahid states, “ A  relational database  stores information in tables composed of rows and columns.” The concept of an entity relationship diagram (ERD) captures how this information is stored. From Jajodia, we learn, " An entity is an object of interest which can be distinctly identified; a specific person or place or event is an example of an entity.” Entities will be things like a person, a car, a product order, or items sold on the order. Relationships are used to establish the number and manner of ...

       Three common methods of attacking computer systems are denial of service attacks, phishing, and social engineering. According to Deris, “ Denial of service (DoS) is the most popular method used to attack IoT networks, either by flooding services or crashing services. Intrusion detection system (IDS) is one of the countermeasures for DoS attack. “(Deris, 2021). Another common method is turning off responses to ping requests when a network is at high risk. By allowing these types of attacks to continue, network administrators risk the business usability of their systems. Often, this is discovered by slowness in response. Customers will complain that systems are unusable. In their testing of the impact of DDoS attacks, Yihunie found that “The attacked server stopped responding after 45 minutes because of the severe impact of the DDoS attack on that server.“(Yihunie, 2018). This is not very long in the scale of things, and identifying it is essential to keepi...

            One of the interesting domains I worked in was state government hunting and fishing licensing. The company I worked for was owned by a bank, and the bank owner would say, "I don't get why this is hard. Someone comes in, gives someone money, we give them a license." In our most complicated system, the license sales were configured for distribution to the state accounting system. Meaning a specified amount or percentage of each sale was credited to various accounts based on how state staff configured the sale. Because they desired to have all of a hunter's data, it also involved importing millions of rows of information to build the historical licensing information. Websites were developed for online sales and administration of the system. Additionally, point-of-sale terminal sales systems were created for sales in Walmart and licensed stores throughout the state. A thermal printer was attached to printout on special paper that was designed t...

Network connectivity is established by identifying a destination server. Domain Name Resolution or IP Addresses are used to determine the destination. Our networks are configured to pass our requests up to the next stage in connection, which determines where/how to address the request. It passes from my PC to my work network, to the work network provider, then to various hub servers, and finally flows back to the destination provider and destination server. The geographical location can have several intermediaries between my provider and the provider of my destination, all of which can impact the speed of the request. The internet was designed for fault tolerance. There are multiple paths data can take to get from the destination back to your machine. The protocols used do not even guarantee the data comes back as one answer. Instead, it is chunked with headers that allow the receiving device to reorder the parts before presenting them to the user.  Ping and traceroute are two grea...

In this post, we will examine events of a day from different Office Application tools. The first step was accomplished with a word processing tool to document the tasks and details of the tasks. The second step was to capture the information in a spreadsheet, allowing the sorting of information and presentation of it in a pie chart. The final step was capturing the events of the day in a presentation. For the three steps that were performed, the word processor was best suited for capturing more details of the day's events. The spreadsheet was better for analyzing the events, and the presentation was better for giving an impression of what the day was like.  A word processor is perfect for organizing textual information and presenting it in an easy-to-consume manner. According to Vahid (Vahid et al., 2019), “ A word processor creates a file that stores text plus formatting information, typically using a special filename extension like myfile.docx for Microsoft Word.” Font si...

For this post, we will examine a mobile application and provide some recommendations for improving it.   Dr. Jim Stoppani is a Ph.D. bodybuilder who has worked for Men's Health and spent years developing nutrition and exercise programs. He sells supplements and exercise programs through his website,   www.jimstoppani.com Links to an external site. ... A subscription to the website for $15 a month gives access to a mobile application that complements the exercise programs provided. One of the critical components of a strength training program is variety. Staying with the same program continuously will lead to your body adapting and growing slowly. The Jim Stoppani web app allows you to select from various programs and schedule the workouts to complement your needs. There are programs designed for working out 4 to 7 days a week. When you choose your program, you specify which days of the week you want to do the workout, and a customized workout is set up for each day. Programs u...

     For this week’s assignment, the class was asked to use Scratch to develop a program with at least 30 blocks.  The experience of developing with Scratch will be described as well as any difficulties and remedies applied to overcome them. The request is to compare this experience with the experience of working through textbook exercises in machine, assembly, and high-level programming languages. The differences between the languages will be described, along with when each type of language is most effective. Finally, the author’s personal opinion on which language is most popular and why is requested. The project for this paper can be found at SuperCat on Scratch (mit.edu) .      This was the author’s first exposure to using the Scratch platform. The tool had some unexpected surprises. Replaying the project did not reset the state to the initial defaults, so all objects were assigned positions as the default start action. Initially, the starting ca...