Not meaning to sound like I am trivialising the studies that I am doing (too much), but
I’ve just had a look ahead into this unit, and there’s a section on web traffic analysis.
Interesting, I thought, perhaps I can learn something…

I was wrong.

I had a better look, and downloaded their sample web log file, installed the application
they give us, then ran it through and had a quick look at the output. Considering we are
supposed to be learning useful things, why are we analysing an IIS log file? Apache controls
a larger proportion of the web server market, and it would be a better example in my
opinion. Add to that the fact that we are analysing a log file which appears to be for a
site bringing in all of 2 hits per day! This is ridiculous, talk about activity for
activity’s sake! At work we are figuring out problems like how to get 16 webservers to
write to the same log file without corrupting it because they are all hitting it so fast,
and at Uni, I’m learning all these ‘important’ things like how to analyse a technically
inferior web server’s mocked up log file!

And people wonder why I don’t have the highest regard for most University study…

Apparently, Glenn Pass, my tutor for NET12, will also be taking NET26 (Cyberanalytics).
This is great news, because I thought he did a particularly goo job with NET12, providing
constant support and motivation to keep moving through the unit. I will be glad to go
another round with him 🙂

Well, there we have it — I’ve just submitted the final assessment item, a 2000-word
essay for NET12. I feel like it came together reasonably well, but I suppose only time
will tell as usual. I will post details about the assignment once the due date has passed.

Last night marked the first chat for NET12 – which turned out quite well. People sort
of stayed on topic for a little while and there was some interesting, if not a little
postmodernist (!) discussion about the actual topic we were supposed to be discussing,
which, by the way, was;

To what extent has the impact of the Internet on society been revolutionary,
or has it been more evolutionary? That is, has the Internet revolutionised the way we do
things or is more a case of the internet reflecting similar issues and changes that
occurred with previous technologies?

There was some interesting discussion about what both "revolution" and
"evolution" actually mean, and then we had some comparisons and analyses of
elements of the Internet which exhibit features of one or the other, or indeed both types
of change. Was a little disappointed to only see a few other people there, and the ones
that were there, were the ones that I was expecting (not that I was disappointed to see
them, but would have been nice for some other people to turn up as well 🙂 – and there I
go with the spatial, physical representations of the virtual meeting we had… interesting.

With a bit of luck we’ll manage another one before this study period is over! 🙂