Chat

I used to chat online regularly but rarely do so anymore, most of that was using an IRC client and sometimes using ICQ. Although I have MSN already installed I decided to try ICQ again, which I have not used for many years. I was unable to find my old ICQ number so after installing the program I created a new account.

A lot has changed with ICQ since I last used it and it seems very similar to the other instant messaging programs. I found it quite easy to use and it didn’t take me long to find the settings to turn off the annoying notification sounds.

I added several students using the ICQ numbers they had posted on the WebCT discussion. I had a brief chat with another student, Tony Cosentino.

Several students had organised to have a group chat the following day. I was able to chat to the students and add several others to the chat. I was unable to add one of the students, Michelle to the group and I was unable to discover why. Instead Michelle joined a chat room on the ICQ website and invited me to join. I joined this and so did Tony.

The chat room on the website was a java IRC client which was interesting as it it allowed me to compare the two chat programs at once. The ICQ client, at least for text chat, was probably no better than the IRC chat. However if you wanted to start to use the extra features like contact lists, voice chat and web cam then it would be far superior.

During the chat we discussed when chat would be useful and which chat clients we prefer. I think that text chat isn’t really that useful for business but for entertainment as it allows some anonymity and group interaction that speaking in public doesn’t. It is possible to chat respond to several chat windows from friends that several people talking to you at once.

I can see voice and video conferencing being especial useful for businesses to discuss matters that are more immediate than can be achieve by email correspondence. I also think the advantage of chatting is it allow communication over vast distances for very little cost compared to normal telephone calls.

Newsgroups

I have not used Newgroups for many years. My email client Thunderbird also has the ability to access Newsgroups but I had not yet set this up. I know that Google allows you to view Usenet group via the web but I wanted to try newsgroups with Thunderbird.

After searching the support pages of my ISP I found out that they now longer have a news server so I have used freenews.netfront.net for the server. I’m not expecting newsgroups to be as active as they used to be before web based discussion boards became popular.

I was able to set up a news server in Thunderbird but I have had problems posting a messag. I believe it required me to register with the server. I have decided to you the web based newsgroups on Google and have made my first post to a group dedicated to the Amstrad CPC computer. I am requesting some information about purchasing some hardware and about connecting a hard drive. Click on the thumbnail for a screenshot:

Lists

For this task I have joined a Yahoo group called “The Amstrad CPC Club”, it is dedicated to the Amstrad CPC computer which was popular in the 1980s. The group only has 76 members and doesn’t seem to be very active. I think this group would be very suitable for an email list rather than a discussion board because it wouldn’t result in an unmanageable amount of emails. I chose to receive emails of any posts to this group.

I also joined a Yahoo group from the online game Runescape. This group has 1625 members and receives several posts each day. I have chosen not to receive these posts as emails and I will simply view posts I am interested in via the discussion board.

What are the pros and cons of email lists versus discussion boards? 

Email lists can be useful for distributing information for large groups of recipients on a regular basis however they rely on the recipients to organise the emails themselves. The advantage of a discussion board is that the structure is already there to organise the posts into threads of topics.

Are there certain kinds of communication or purposes more suited to one than the other?

I believe that email lists are very well suited to newsletters and group notifications that required only limited interaction from the recipients.  Several people may contribute to the email but it is sent from one source and any communication is back to that one source. The advantage over a discussion board is that as long as the list is up to date everyone should receive the same information.

Discussion boards are much more interactive and information is posted so that all may view it and reply. In this case it is up to the reader to find the information that is important to them.

Email Tasks

1. What information about a user’s email, the origin of a message, and the path it took, can you glean from an email message?

If you are using an email client, such as Outlook or Thunderbird you can find detailed information about an email by looking at the source. This usually isn’t possible if using a webmail service. With webmail the only information you will get, beside the content of the email itself, is the email address, the time it was sent and received. The email address will provide some indication of the origin by looking at the domain in the email (eg: bobsmith@bbc.co.uk came from BBC in the United Kingdom).

I use Thunderbird for my email client at home, to view the source of an email I am reading I can go to the menu “View” then “Message Source”. This provides information about the mail servers sending and receiving the email and the HTML code of the body of the email. As in this example:

From - Thu Mar 20 15:56:02 2008
X-Account-Key: account3
X-UIDL: 8119
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 10000000
X-Mozilla-Keys:
Return-Path: <weekendweather@weatherchannel.com.au>
Received: by cpms01.int.iprimus.net.au (7.3.130.1)
        id 47A33B1B019D307E for ahrens@iprimus.com.au; Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:25:35 +1100
Received: from mx04.syd.iprimus.net.au (210.50.76.228) by mx03spool.syd.iprimus.net.au (7.3.130.1)
        id 47B8FDBA011868F6 for ahrens@iprimus.com.au; Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:25:35 +1100
Received: from mail.weatherchannel.com.au ([218.185.80.226])
  by mx04.syd.iprimus.net.au with ESMTP; 20 Mar 2008 16:23:18 +1100
Received: from weatherchannel.com.au ([10.0.0.3])
        by mail.weatherchannel.com.au (Merak 7.4.5) with SMTP id MYA38218
        for <......@iprimus.com.au>; Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:23:19 +1100
Message-ID: <2263517780-22008342052319937@weatherchannel.com.au>
From: weekendweather@weatherchannel.com.au
To: "Steve Ahrens" <.......@iprimus.com.au>
Subject: Your personal weekend weather forecast from The Weather Channel - Live By It
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:23:19 +1100
X-Antivirus: AVG for E-mail 7.5.519 [269.21.7/1335]
Mime-Version: 1.0.... <body of email removed from example>...

Often if the email is spam these details will be false, know as spoofing.

2. In what cases would you find it useful to use the ‘cc’, ‘bcc’ and ‘reply all functions of email?

These functions are useful to avoid having to create multiple emails with the same information to several recipients. If there is a report that needs to be sent to several staff members I use the “cc” function.  Also, if I want to reply to all the recipients of an email that I have been sent as part of the “cc” field I would use the “reply all” function if I want all the recipients to see my response.

Blind carbon copy is a good idea when sending group emails to sources that you don’t want to have the email addresses of others. An example of this is joke emails, and chain letters, as these emails are often forward all around the world it is best to use “bcc” or you may accidentally spread the email addresses to sources that will harvest them and use them for spam.

Using “cc” creates a carbon copy. Everyone in the “cc” field gets a copy of the email and all the recipients can see each others address. However using “bcc” creates a blind carbon copy, all the recipients receive the email but they cant see any other email addresses. If an email is sent using “cc” if you reply using “reply all” the response will be sent to everyone else in the “cc” field as well as the original sender.

3. In what ways can you ensure that an attachment you send will be easily opened by the receiver?

If the attachment is a document to be viewed but not edited then I would suggest converting it to a PDF file. There is free PDF viewers for all operating systems.

However if the recipient needs to be able to open and edit the attachment I would suggest including details about the version of software the document was created with in the text of the email. Also, if possible, when saving the document try to save it in the oldest reasonable format. For example, try to save a Word document in the “Word 97″ format. Therefore if the recipient doesn’t have a recent version of Word they might still be able to open it.

4. What sorts of filters or rules do you have set up, and for what purpose?

I have filters set up in Thunderbird to move some emails from the Inbox to separate folders as they are received. I have done this to avoid my Inbox being cluttered with emails that don’t required immediate attention and I can then find them all in one folder dedicated to particular type of email.

I have several of these filters set up but the best example is a filter for Facebook notifications. When something is posted to my Facebook page I’m sent a notification via email. I receive many of these each day but I’m not a regular user of Facebook however I do like to still receive these notifications so I can stay in touch with friends and relatives who do use it often. The filter checks if the “From” field of the email contains the text Facebook and if so it moves the email to a folder I have created called “Facebook”. When I have spare time I can look through this folder rather than search through all my messages in my Inbox.

5. How have you organised the folder structure of your email and why?

I have organised the folder structure of my email to group together emails of a similar type. Some of these folders were created so that filters could move emails to them from the Inbox automatically. Other folders were created so I can manually move emails once I have read them if I want to keep them.

I have created these folders to allow me to find emails faster than searching through the unstructured Inbox. I can separate emails for work from personal emails. I have folders for study, jokes, email receipts, ebay and many more.

Creating these structured folders is similar to organising files in a filing cabinet rather than just dumping the files into one big box. It allows much more efficient retrieval of information.

Internet Tools

I used the Central Ops.net website to perform the Traceroute to curtin.edu.au required for this task. Here is the results:

Tracing route to curtin.edu.au [134.7.179.53]…

File Transer Protocol (FTP)

For this task I didn’t use a dedicated FTP client, instead I did it through my Firefox browsers by typing “ftp://recall.curtin.edu.au” into the address bar. As this would be an anonymous connection I didn’t need a user name or password. If a username and password is required I would just use the following in the address bar:
ftp://username:password@ftpaddress

I found the “readme.txt” file and found the answer to the question for this task:

This server runs on a unix platform, so CAPITALIZATION MATTERS!

For a task such as this I don’t think a FTP client is required doing it by the browser is adequate, but if you need to upload and download a lot of files then a client would be helpful.

Task B

For this task I connected via telnet to “towel.blinkenlights.nl” and was delighted to see a text based version of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope! This is a dream come true for a geek like me Although it did end just after they rescue Princes Leia, I’ll have to check back to see if they finish it.

Technically this is very impressive. My first experiences of multi-player games was playing text based MUD (Multi User Dungeon) games via a BBS in the earlier 90s. The skillful and artistic use of a limited number of characters to produce something that visually looked like a picture in the MUD was very similar to what has been done at “towel.blinkenlights.nl”

Sometimes creativity is limited only by technology, but I also believe that today technology advances so fast that it never gets used to it’s full potential before it is obsolete. If the world wide web had not been created and the net had remained a text based medium it may not have seemed as accessible as it is today.

Task A

My first task was to telnet to the Deakin library database. I’m already quite familiar with using telnet as I use it at work where our national database is on a Unix system that staff access using a Telnet client called “PowerTerm”, however at work it is already configured to connect, all staff have to do is log in.

For this task I first tried “telnet://library.deakin.edu.au” in the address bar of Firefox. I got a message that Firefox couldn’t open the address because no program was associated with the telnet protocol. I’m using Windows XP so I knew I should have HyperTerminal, I found the program and opened it. It’s the first time I had used HyperTerminal on this PC so it asked me if I wanted to set it as the default program for telnet connections, to which I said “yes”. I went back to Firefox and tried “telnet://library.deakin.edu.au”, Hyperterminal opened and connected me to the Deaken library database.

I search for authors by the name of “Bennahum” and I found the following:

You searched for the AUTHOR: bennahum Deakin/Gordon:All Locations
 2 AUTHORS found, with 2 entries; AUTHORS 1-2 are: 

1 Bennahum David A 1936 …………………………… 1 entry
2 Bennahum Ninotchka ……………………………… 1 entry

As the results are in text I have just cut and paste the text rather than provide a screen shot. I then used the option to print the output to email. I think this is great feature and one that the database I use a work also allows me to do, it saves lots of paper and also allows the output to be imported into other programs.

Here is the email I got:

From	DEAKIN UNI LIB <ftsmail@deakin.edu.au>
Sent	Sunday, March 9, 2008 0:39 am
To	stephen.ahrens@student.curtin.edu.au
Cc
Bcc
Subject	Email from DEAKIN UNI LIB

You searched for the AUTHOR: bennahum 2 AUTHORS found, with 2 entries; AUTHORS 1-2 are: 1 Bennahum David A 1936 …………………………… 1 entry 2 Bennahum Ninotchka ……………………………… 1 entry

Using telnet for tasks such as this is simple and efficient. I know there can be some initial difficulty with setting up the client software for some users (I’m glad I haven’t upgraded to Vista yet). Many companies still use databases and billing systems running on old technology because upgrading would be too expensive or disruptive, so telnet allows their PCs to act like a the old “dumb terminal” computers that connected to mainframes. Over time a lot of these will probably be updated with nicer web-based front end clients rather than text based telnet.

Top 5 Tips For New Bloggers

G’day! This is my first entry in my Learning Log. I’m very new to blogging. I attempted to create one last year but only made one entry. Creating this Learning Log has been a great experience and I now have a much better understanding of how to create a blog. I would like to share some tips for those who, like myself, are new to blogging:

1. Do some research before deciding on which blog site to use. There are dozens of sites to choose from. If you know anyone who already has a blog ask them what they think of they one they currently use. Although you can change blog sites if your not happy with the one you use it is much easier to choose the right one from the start.

2. “Read the Instructions before Use”, like most people I usually ignore this when I see it on packaging but I wouldn’t recommend it when creating a blog. Although most blog sites will have online help of their own I went to YouTube to get a visual guide to setting up my blog. Just search by the name of the blog site your considering and you will find most will have some kind of tutorial, either an official one, or one that someone has been nice enough to create and share. Doing this before you start the blog will not only make the process easier but it may also help you decide if which blog site to use if the instructions seem too complicated.

3. Have some idea how you want to start your blog. In my case this was easy because my blog has a specific purpose for my studies. Although the purpose of your blog and it’s intended audience may change over time it’s good to have some goals before you start. You may just want a blog for you family and friends to view, with holiday photos, stories, etc. However if you are trying to capture an audience of new readers think of something that will make them want to come and view your blog out of the millions of others.

4. Make your blog easy to view. Even if your blog has great content it is useless if readers are turned away by horrible colours, hard to read text, or annoying animations. I remember when websites first started to have animated .gif files. Although they were impressive a first they soon became annoying as people filled their website with looping useless animations, now they are almost non-existent on most good websites. You can certainly make your blog look good but remember not everyone has the same taste so try to make it appeal to a broad audience. Most blog site will have layout templates you can choose from, start with one of these and edit it if the site allows you to.

5. When writing a post think carefully about what you have written before you click the “Publish” button. Unlike speaking to someone, readers of your blog can’t tell your tone  of voice from the text in your post. What may be humorous to you may be offensive to someone else. Having controversial content on your blog might increase your audience for the wrong reasons. Also be prepare that if you allow readers to publish comment on your blog they may not always agree with your opinion. Blogs are a great communication tool, they allow people to express themselves to a global audience but bloggers still need to use some common sense.