Strange Aeons
sesquipedalia verba
Simon Wells is an academic researching Argumentation Theory, Automated Reasoning, Intelligent Agents (IA) and MultiAgent Systems (MAS) all approached through a ludic lens.
He is particularly interested in how these tools can be usefully applied to critical literacy, security, gamification, and complex systems.
TwitterSpring Cleaning...
I changed the strange aeons wordpress theme this afternoon from the old one which was a hacked version of the simplicity-light theme to the latest version of Thematic. I have been using an earlier version of Thematic for some of my teaching sites as it is a robust and straightforward theme if you just want to get some information across. This latest version has a much better colourscheme, plain white - nice and simple with plenty of places to add widgets for customisable layout. After much trial and error this has lead to the following layout, with the old theme on the left for comparison with the new scheme on the right:
A big improvement I think. With the widgets in the footer of the page displaying lists of recent posts, recent comments, and categories, I am much happier than I was before where I thought that the categories list was getting out of hand. Now the side bar lists are condensed into drop down menus where possible and useful. I will now have to see how this pans out in usage, and how difficult it is to customise for other sites. If simple I may just adopt thematic as the default for everything and just customise with colour schemes and some judiciously selected and placed graphics.
Coursework #1
The descriptor for the first coursework has been posted to the coursework page.
2010 - Welcome to the Module
Hello to everyone taking AC22001 this year. This website will be the primary point of access to module materials including lecture slides, lab handouts, coursework descriptors, and syllabus outlines.
Additionally, our aim is to use this website to get continuous feedback about how the module is progressing. So if you have any suggestions that might improve the module then please get in touch. For example, suggestions might range from additional topics that you think we should cover to topics that we do cover but that you want us to recap.
There have been some alterations since last year, partly based upon feedback from students. For example, the order of topics for the entire module was rebalanced to give a better overall structure. In doing this we also found time to bring in a week 6 reading week so that all of the School of Computing level 2 modules are consistent in their treatment of reading weeks. An additional benefit of this restructuring means that we have been able to reinstate the second Linux week so that we can devote more time to scripting lectures, and so that there is now a clear three week period at the beginning of the semeter (weeks 1 to 3) where we learn some new skills and tools which we then spend the rest of the semester applying in the context of various basic theoretical concepts associated with computer architectures, hardware abstraction software (operating systems), and language processors (compilers and interpreters).
The Long Road Home
Over on the old server I wrote the following:
I had a domain name sitting around that I wasn't using and I thought to myself "why not use it?". So I have. This blog has now moved to www.strangeaeons.org which I suppose marks me out as a Cthulite. My personal pages have also moved to www.simonwells.org, again a domain name that I though might come in useful, and registered, and then never used. Until now. On the upside, now if I ever move servers again it should be a lot more straightforward and I shall not have to go through lots of urls updating and ensuring that things haven't broken.So you can probably guess that this here is the new home. I have split the personal pages away from my blog so that both can make use of the domain names that I had available. The plan is that Strangeaeons.org will become more of a repository of tit-bits that I find and want to share whereas simonwells.org will continue as before but with the blog pages being more along the lines of news about me and my academic career along the lines of an online C.V. and advertisement for my personal brand, so to speak. I think that it is about time that I maintain a stricter delineation between work and play, and this is it.... Until I change my mind that is.
Post Visualisation Using Wordle
Little oops in this mornings lecture
I realised (or rather was politely informed) that I managed to miss out a bunch of slides in the files topic this morning. I will cover them tomorrow morning. Luckily much of the content I have already mentioned in passing so a quick recap with the slides, especially if you have already skimmed through them, will be sufficient. So tomorrows order of play will be:
- Remainder of files slides
- Creating & Working with files
- Finish security slides
- A quick look at I/O redirection
- Scripting
Whatever we don't go through will be covered on monday and that should wrap up the introduction to the Linux shell part of the module. We will then be in a position to start using the Linux shell as our basic development environment once we begin C programming next week.
Wednesday Mornings
For the foreseeable future, there will not be a lecture on a wednesday morning (10-11AM) due to some timetable clashes. However I did ask Iain to timetable the labs for our use between 9-11AM on wednesday mornings and these are still available to you guys to use. For the moment there will not be any tutors or lecturers in the labs during that period so you should use the time for quiet study, coursework, and catching up on lab exercises.
If we find that we are falling behind then we will use the wednesday sessions to get back on schedule. Similarly if we need to spend some extra time on any subjects then we might schedule some extra tutorials during this time.
Introduction
Welcome to the new website for the AC2B Computer Systems module (AC22001) run by theSchool of Computing at the University of Dundee. All learning materials will be posted to this site in due course.
If you are enrolled on this module then I encourage you to create an account on this blog so that you can comment on topics that are posted. Please ensure that you use your @dundee.ac.uk email address however as I can then give you contributor status so that you can also post links to any interesting articles or learning materials that you find that are related to the module topic.
Hacking My Own Server
UPDATE `wp_users` SET `user_pass` = MD5( 'new_password_here' ) WHERE `wp_users`.`user_login` = "admin_username";Instead I had to be a bit more sneaky. I do have access to the wordpress installation on the web server. So I can make changes to the underlying PHP files. Therefore a change to the wp-includes/pluggable.php file where it checks for the password and displays a page depending upon the result of the check will give me access to the admin dashboard without entering a valid password. From there I can change the existing password to whatever I want it to be. Around line 450 there is the following line:
if ( !wp_check_password($password, $user->user_pass, $user->ID) ) {Removing the logical negation (!) from the call to wp_check_password then attempting to login causes the dashboard to be displayed regardless of the password that is entered. As soon as I am logged in I need to change the pluggable.php file back to its original state so as not to enable others to gain access in the same way. Of course this is not really a hack. If you have access to the underlying code and the place that it is running and you can change that code then it is straightforward to gain access and alter the functionality of the site.
Many changes
I have finally gotten round to moving many of the static pages from the old site to this site. All of my teaching related pages are now online and much of the research related stuff. The next step is to start redirecting old links to this sites from the old server. Part of the problem has been that I have been editing older pages that are no longer applicable. For example, due to changes in teaching load I am no longer teaching any of the Logical Inference & Symbolic Reasoning module, althought the modal logic and defeasbile reasoning topics that I covererd are now a part of the Multiagent Systems & Grid Computing module. As a result I no longer needed to maintain a page for the older module. The most major change to the site really is moving from the wordpress static pages to plain old html for the non blog related stuff.
