CSUMB Learning Journal

Week 4 was relatively light in terms of classwork if you’re excluding the midterm. We read about cybersecurity and the different encryption algorithms and possible attacks that they defend against. It was interesting to learn more about how encryption works and I liked the content from chapter 8. The midterm went fairly well for me and I got a decent grade. My team is just getting started on PA3 and I doubt it will be too difficult of an assignment. I’d be a lot more motivated to do the extra credit labs if they attributed points to the Labs weighted grade group instead of the Extra Credit group.

I’m glad week 3 is over and the first team programming assignment is turned in. Our team did a really good job, but I just don’t like having assignments that depend on other people. This week we learned more about TCP and UDP along with how data is reliably transmitted over the internet. One thing that’s becoming very clear to me is that I’m very bad at the math portions of the quizzes and labs. I’m probably just too tired when I’m doing the work. These courses move so quickly. The midterm is only 4 days away, but it feels like this course is just starting. I’m starting to think the extra credit isn’t worth the time it takes to complete with the way it’s calculated as a separate weighted group in the grade. That’s all of my thoughts for this week. Week 4 is going to be a lot busier.

This week we learned more about internet protocols and how popular network applications use them. That was basically it. I worked through chapter 2 in the textbook and didn't have any problems completing the problem set. Labs 2 and 3 were fairly easy although they did take a while to do. I ran into a few small problems with lab 3 with the wireshark capture I saved having incorrect permissions, but I was able to resolve the problem and download the file to my host computer from the vm so I could upload it. I’m meeting with my group tomorrow to go through the details involved with programming assignment 2.

It’s Tuesday and week 1 of CST311 is coming to a close. It’s refreshing getting to program in a language other than Java, which the previous two courses required. I haven’t worked with Python for a while, so it took a little time to get used to it again but fortunately the programming assignment for the week was easy. The material we read about in the course was mostly familiar to me. I already knew most of the terms mentioned in the textbook and I think the thing I was least familiar with were the actual names of some of the concepts like nuts and bolts. I only have some layman’s knowledge about networking, so this is still a very welcome course in the program. I’m excited to learn more about computer networking over the next seven weeks!