Tutorial 4: Installing Kubuntu on VirtualBox

After watching the lectures of virtualization i got interested in trying out what the professor said. In this tutorial i will guide you in the process of installing kubuntu as a virtual machine using VirtualBox.

First of all, you will need to download the kubuntu ISO and the virtualbox installer.

You can go to this webpage: http://www.kubuntu.org/getkubuntu
You will need to download the x86 version because we will use VirtualBox and i already tried the x64 version and didnt worked out well.

Next, you need to download VirtualBox. Do this by going to: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

After this you need to install VirtualBox, just click on the exe file and go through it.\

After installing it, you will either have to burn in a cd the ISO that you downloaded of kubuntu, OR a easier way(which i did) is to download DAEMON TOOLS LITE and use it to emulate as if you had inserted the disk. For this go to : http://www.daemon-tools.cc/eng/downloads

When you already have it installed, open it and right click its icon in the bottom right part of the screen, go to virtual devices, select the device you are using, and then click mount image. Search for the kubuntu image where you downloaded it and open it.


Next, open VirtualBox and in the top part click on New, select in this case Linux and ubuntu(not the x64 version), then select the memory( the more is better but don't exceed till you pass the red line, usually with just 500mb its fine but if you can put more its better), after that leave the boot hard disk in 8gb as recommmended.

Afer this you can choose either dynamically or fixed size. This is for choosing if you want the assigned space of the hard drive to get bigger if you are using more space in the virtual machine or to just have a fixed space so you cant pass it. If you are not planning on using it for too much stuff just leave it fixed.

When you finish all this you will have this summary :

After this, you will have to START the virtual machine. When started it will prompt you a message to select the media device where you will load the operating system(in this case the iso that will install kubuntu), if it doesnt promp anything just go to the top part of the virtual machine window and click on devices, then click on cd dvd devices and click on the letter of the drive you are using with daemon tools.

Now the kubuntu iso will run in the virtual machine, its very slow so have patience (you are using a virtual cd on a virtual machine, so yes it gets kind of slow but dont worry after the installation is done the kubuntu runs pretty past). Just click on run kubuntu at first, after that it will take a while while loading all the things in the ISO, then click on install kubuntu and follow all the steps selecting time, keyboard and name and password.

I repeat it have patience because it will take like half an hour for the installation to finish!

When the installation is done you can restart the virtual machine and kubuntu will start.

ALL SCREENSHOTS WERE TAKEN BY FRANCISCO GALAZ. THE SOFTWARE USED  IS VIRTUALBOX, PROPERTY OF SUN MICROSYSTEMS. THE OPERATING SYSTEM IS WINDOWS VISTA AND THE OPERATING SYSTEM INSTALLED IS KUBUNTU AN OPEN SOURCE OPERATING SYSTEM BASED ON LINUX.

Enjoy!

Project: Secure Email

 Link: http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles%2Fp3017%2F13p17%2F13p17.asp

The Boston Medical Center in Boston Massachusetts needed to secure the emails that were sent out for being compliant with HIPAA regulations. The usability of the new system was the main concern. Many people worked there that weren't tech savvy or were too busy to learn a new system. They wanted to secure the emails that were sent out because they contained very personal information and they were not encrypted.
They ended up hiring Voltage security SecureMail because it didn't need training, infrastructure changes or help desk support.

Tutorial 3: Understanding the Internet

In this tutorial i will try to explain in simple way how the internet works.
You might wonder what happens in the background when everyday you use your browser to see your favorite web pages. What does it exactly happen when you press the enter button after writting the web page in the address bar?

First lets start with a little of terminology. It's easier to understand when we separate the components.
We have the hardware, this includes cables, routers, servers, satellites, etc..
The internet is always changing, it might add new members every day and disappear others, the backbone of the internet is usually this members that remain fairly static during time. We as users serve as end points of the internet, the term for this end points is clients. Machines that store the information we seek on the internet are called servers.

All this hardware would be useless without the second component: protocols. Protocols are like set of rules that computers follow to complete tasks. It is necessary for the internet that all machines have a common set of protocols, so that communication can happen. So the protocols provide a method and a common language for machines to interact and transfer data.

The protocol that we use the most is the http wich stands for hypertext transfer protocol. This is the one that we use when we use our web browser searching for web pages.

Moreover, the two most used protocols are TCP and IP. These two protocols set the rules on how information passes through the internet. Thanks to them, you don't need a direct connection with another computer to "talk" to it.

Furthermore, all machines connected to the internet have an IP address which follow the IP protocol.
As logical as it may sound this IP address helps you find other computers in the internet and makes you discoverable.

Going back to our example, when you press enter in the web browser, your computer sends this data that you typed using TCP/IP protocols to a DNS (Domain name server). The domain name server, as the name implies, is a server where it is stored the address of thousands or millions of web pages. When you type a name into the address bar, your computer don't know what that piece of text is, remember that machines have an IP address. So when your piece of text gets to the DNS, this server will find the IP address of the web page you typed, and then will request directly the data to the found IP address.

 Another important information i would like to talk in briefly is  packets. When your web browser requests a web page, the server of the web page won't send all the information at once, the data is divided in packets. This packets are little pieces of the whole. They will be send to you, traveling across the internet, packets might even take different paths to reach the destination. Each packets has a header and a footer, and when arrived to the destination all the data will be put together in the right order, like doing a puzzle, in this case it would make you see the web page you requested.

Your computer does the same when you send a file to a friend over MSN, the data is divided in packets and send separately.


Finally i want to talk a bit about VOIP. When you talk with someone over skype, your also sending packets of information which will contain a piece of the video or voice. Conversations don't need a perfect transmition. What i mean is that when your talking with someone over skype you don't mind if you see for a moment a distorted picture or you see a missing pixel, what you care is that the conversation is done effectively. The TCP protocol talked before is a connection oriented protocol, what this means is that it will try to send all the packets without missing any of them. If one gets damaged it will request it again till it arrives its destination. This is useful when downloading a game, you need all the data or it just wont get installed. But when doing conversations you dont care if a packet get lost in the way. That why Skype uses UDP which is a connectionless protocol. With this protocol you don't know if the data will arrive to the destination, its like fire and forget.

I hope that with this tutorial you got to understand the basic terms and somehow understand how the internet works!

 I would like to recommend you to watch this lecture of a Harvard course that helped me understand all this !

Lecture



Sources:


Source 1


Source 2

Source 3



Thanks to skullbox.net for the picture of UDP!

Database Project

Thanks to this project i learned many things about databases. This was my first experience ever with databases. I learned some features of Microsoft Access, like creating queries, reports and forms! Maybe this was just basic stuff, but it's really useful if we want to start learning it now by ourselves!

For extending this database we could add more information to the Members Table. Also we could create a query in which we extract only the members who has not resigned, and then create a Report in which we show them by city so we could appreciate the situation TODAY.

Here i show you a little of what i did:

Good Bye!

Presentation Project

For this Presentation Project we had to choose a topic from the following:
-Entrepreneurial Idea
-A case from the Times100
-Non-Profit Organization
-Own Adventure

I chose the non profit organization topic, and decided to talk about a project i did with some friends in Chile for our Entrepreneurship class.
We had to help a city of Chile that was affected by the earthquake of February 27th, 2010.
For the presentation i tried to show the importance of this project and the impact it had( we involved more than 600 people).
My main problem with the presentation was my lack of english proficiency on speaking, but i still tried to do my best.
This presentation project was good for making me practice to speak more well in English and to practice on doing effective presentations.
Before this, i used to fill the slides with a lot of information, thinking that that was better, but now i know that not everyone is like me and many prefer more simple slides and just want to listen to the person who is speaking, and the text distracts them.

I must admit though that i dont like too much presentations, but its something that i will have to confront sooner or later, so it was better to deal with this now.

I used CamStudio for recording the video and audio of the presentation. Also i used Powerpoint, the most common presentation tool around the Windows environment.

I enojoyed watching the presentations of other people, some where really good i must say! From using the rubric i could focus on a topic and watch the presentation again, and you could realize some very itneresting things! For example when you just watch it for pleasure you arent as critique as if you are thinking how is he doing in a certain aspect. When i watched for the third time a presentation i could notice the stuttering and before i never noticed it!!
Criticizing the presentation of another peer helped me notice how superficial i watch lectures or presentations, never putting attention on the HOW they do it, its like before i was just a receiver now I'm an Analyzer.

All this will come handy if you get to work in an area where you need to do presentations. I hope when i get to work that i don't have to do so many presentations, they are tough!


Now i look forward for the Database Project!! I always wanted to learn about databases. Now im in programming courses ISM3254 and ISM3255. In ISM3255 we will also see something about databases so it will be a lot of fun.

GO GATORS!

My Presentation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJPKVR7FLs

Tutorial 2: Vector Graphics

In this tutorial i will talk to you about vector graphics.

What we see in our everyday lives in our computer is a mix of vector graphics and raster graphics, although raster is much more used.

Raster graphics, or also called bit maps, displays the images with patterns of dots. If you enlarge a raster graphic image you will be able to see squares of different colors, this are called pixels.

In the other side Vector Graphics are displayed using a mathematical formula and are composed of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, shapes and polygons.

The nice thing about vector graphics is that, if you zoom in, there's no distortion in it, you wont get a pixelated image. Every time you zoom in, the mathematical formula fixes the image to be displayed appropriately to a specific screen resolution. That's why vector graphics are more flexible than bit maps, they can be resized all the times you want never losing quality and the file size will stay the same.

The quality of a vector image is only limited by the resolution of the output display.

Here's a video i recorded resizing a typical RASTER graphic image using paint!

Its important to note that almost all output devices are raster based, so even if you have a vector graphic image, this will have to be converted to be showed in your screen, the thing is you wont see the pixelated image when you re size it because the mathematical formula will work in the background.


Moreover the graphic systems we know of such as CADD, work with vector graphics!

Just for you to know, programs that deal which vector graphics are called drawing programs , meanwhile programs that use raster graphics are called painting programs!

Some famous vector graphics file formats are:

-CGM (Computer Graphics Metafile)

-SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic)


Other formats associated with their vendors:

-CDR (CorelDraw)
-AI (Adobe Illustrator)
-ODG (Open Document Graphics)

And Many more...



Thank You for Reading!

Excel Project

This was the first Project i had to do for my ISM3004 Class. After watching several lectures introducing me to Excel and some of its advanced features i had to get my feet wet and experience a practical project. This project was about a Gymnasium that had measured and gathered information about its clients, specifically their age, gender and their heart rate. The owner of this Fitness Center hired us for helping her analyze the data mentioned.
The first part of this project was purely visual and very simple, we had to organize the data , bold some texts, center them and reshape them.
Later on we had to start using certain in built functions of Excel to do the task we were told to do. For example we were asked to search for the Highest Heart Rate of every customer. To do so, we used a very simple but powerful function named LARGE.
Moreover, we also had to use conditional statements in this project, the same that you use in programming. We had to use them for Printing out Yes or No in a cell depending if the client had accomplished the Target Heart Rate.
Furthermore, we could experience with relative and absolut addresing and mixing them both. We used this when we had to calculate the target Heart Rate using a constant percentage value of the Maximum Heart Rate.

Finally after gathering all that information we had to use the famous pivot tables to help us analize the data and count it all up. We had to do two pivot tables one which counted all the people by gender who could accomplish the target heart rate and the ones who did not. The other pivot table had to calculate the average heart rate increase from the beginning of the workout and when it finishes.


Here is a screen capture of my "AvgIncrease" Pivot Table:

GO GATORS!!

Tutorial 1 : The Command Line

In this tutorial i will introduce you to the Command Line, a very powerful tool  that is relatively unknown for many PC users.

Nowadays people interact with the computer mainly graphically pointing and clicking, never using the "old" Command Line which has very useful functions for an everyday user.

Also the CL is sometimes named incorrectly as DOS window, which actually disappeared back in the days of Windows XP( XP had CL).

Now lets open our Command Prompt Windows by clicking START >All Programs> Accessories>Command Prompt

OR you can also go to START> Run> write cmd and press enter.

Now with our Command Prompt open we will experiment a little bit with it.

Some people when they want know their IP Address they go to sites like www.whatismyip.com

But you can also use the Command Prompt to find it, just open it and type:   ipconfig /all

Doing this it will show you a lot of information about your network settings and connections. If your behind a router with firewall then its better to just use the webpage given to search for your IP.

Another interesting command is: tracert, wich stands for trace route.With this command you can check the route that your packets take to reach a specific address in this case the server of webpages.

If you want to know more about this command i invite you to see this webpage with excellent explanations: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/781576

Moreover, we have the shutdown.exe -i command, with this you can select a computer in your network and remotely shut it down or just restart it. 

Depending on the network you are on the discovery of other computers may be blocked. Try it yourself!! 

Furthermore, i want to show you a very interesting command. Sometimes i want to know how many mp3 files or pdf files i have in my pc and i want a list of them, with this simple command the PC will do that for you.

Follow these simple steps:

1) Open Command Prompt

2) Go to the directory where you want to search and list all the files in it( it will list also the files located in the folders of subfolders...) In my case because i want to know all the files in the entire Hard Drive i go to the C directory. If you want to move ONE directory up just type in the Commmand Line : cd..

3) Write this command:

dir *.pdf /s /b >files.txt

You can change pdf for any file extension you want, name it mp3, wma, etc..

This command will save a file named files.txt inside the C directory, just go there and find it.

It may take a while for the computer to create the list, you will know its ready when in the Command Prompt you can see again the directory where you are positioned.

I leave you with these useful sites for your journey on mastering the Command Line Prompt:

Link Uno
Link Dos
Link Tres

Go Gators!!