This week we took the mid-term and well ... I feel like I let myself down a little bit. I made a bunch of carless errors in unit conversion, and intimated having more time per problem like the practice mid-term, but it ended up actually having more problems. So for the final, I'll be sure to make sure answers are in proper expected standards, and to better pace myself. As for the work this past week, we're getting started on our next team programming assignment. We learned a bit about having secret conversations between Alice and Bob. And we examined a Wireshark trace of some TLS packets.
Monday, September 23, 2024
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Intro to Computer Networks - Week 3
Well it's hard to believe it's already time for the mid-term this next week. This past week has been spent learning about the transport layer, which I think is a lot closer to what I had imagined a networking class to be about (not that the application layer wasn't insightful, but seems, as the name implies, much closer to application interaction/programming). We spent a lot of time earning more about TCP and UDP this week. Specifically around learning how TCP makes reliable data transfers possible and the techniques it uses to accomplish that. We completed our first group programming assignment, which I think our team handled well and worked well together. Our leader for this assignment, Zuhra, did a great job taking on the leadership role. She worked with all of us to make sure we knew our parts and coordinated all the results in the end.
Tuesday, September 10, 2024
Intro to Computer Networks - Week 2
This week we started exploring the outer most layer of the onion, the application layer. Protocols like HTTP, SMTP, FTP all live here, allowing the programs on one computer to interact with the programs on another computer (or server). How computers are able to lookup the address of one another in a friendly, easy rememberable manner with DNS. Looked at how there aren't just servers and clients out there over the network, but there are peer-to-peer protocols allowing peers to not need a centralized server at all. And we started to examine socket programming, how a program can use a socket to read or write data over a network connection to a remote computer.
This week was also the start of our first group project, so it's been fun getting the ball rolling on the first group project, figuring out the best way for all of us to work together, figuring out who's going to be the lead, etc. Overall going well though.
Tuesday, September 3, 2024
Intro to Computer Networks - Week 1
This first week of the Intro to Computer Networks course saw us jumping into learning about all different aspects about network at high level. For example, different types of networks, network edge vs network core, or the different delays a packet can encounter along the way, queuing delay, processing delay, transition delay, propagation delay, and how to calculate them. We also completed our first lab, an introduction to both Python and how a UDP server and client work. Overall it was a busy first week, with lots of ground covered. I predict we'll start diving down deep on certain topics which will be very interesting.