Windows - outline v 0.3

Prelude

Why should you read this? Who should read this?

Beginning

Tutorial the zeroth

What you need, what this set of tutorials will teach you, and what you should already know.
  • A computer, typing skills, can read
  • it'll teach you the minimum level of computer sophistication everyone should know
  • So let go of what you know (aside from what we need you to know)
  • we assume that you are willing to look up what we dont' tell you

Tutorial the First - Computer care

General no-brainer tips for everyone.
  • What is a computer comprised of?
  • How should you set it up? (next to a power source)
  • Monitor - the thing you see
  • The case
  • wires
  • Various pieces of hardware
  • mice, keyboard
  • speakers
  • printer
  • modem or internet connection

Tutorial the Second - Basic Computer Tasks

A step into the software aspect
  • windows
  • What a window is comprised of
  • The wider view - desktop, my computer, settings
  • folder/files (file types), properties/shortcuts
  • software - start menu, quick launch, system tray (include run)
  • common shortcuts - C-c, C-v, C-p etc
  • software side - defrag, cleaning up a harddrive, uninstalling unneeded programs
  • touch on software side performance
  • Something fun - installing font files

Tutorial the Third - Using programs

Without programs, computers are useless - distinction between the os and the programs
  • browser-face it, most people use computers in their free time for the internet, ie7/firefox/opera
  • Text-suites to do work, word/oo.org
  • images-photos and stuff paint/gimp/photoshop
  • audio/video-Window media player, itunes,
  • im-talk to friends, gaim/trillian / msn,yahoo,aol,gtalk , irc
  • mail-outlook
  • blender
  • other stuff - 7 zip

Tutorial the Fourth - The blue screen of death

How to recover from errors, serious and trivial
  • A stupid javascript run - how to get out of it
  • a run away script - ctrl alt delete
  • Freezing, and no ctrl alt delete - hard reset
  • Power failure - unless you're foolhardy like me, restart in safe mode, or boot down before a big storm, until we get underground powerlines
  • Backups - restore points and backup cds (lifetime of cds)
  • Getting an aggressive virus - wait for a patch, or wipe the hard drive. Or, go in with a linux boot disk and try to kill it in the registry and everywhere
  • backup hard drives - a good idea, but you might want to use cds/dvds anyways - external hard drives, raid

Tutorial the Fifth - A series of tubes

Start off with the misconceptions - series of tubes, too many apps, etc
  • Connections - a network
  • client
  • servers
  • urls, html (breif definition and overview)
  • search engines
  • email
  • list community portals (yahoo, etc) - fun

Tutorial the Sixth - external hardware

What do you do with it? - drivers
  • printers, especially linking it over a network
  • External harddrives
  • modems, ethernet, wireless cards
  • flash/jump drives
  • Scanners
  • Web cams

Tutorial the Seventh - Practicing safe stuff

Internet safety
  • Spyware, adware
  • Viruses / worms
  • Phishing
  • Hackers
  • Bundled software - exe in general
  • rootkits

Cool

The next level up - becoming aquainted with your computer

Prelude

How the computer works - not how to use it

Level Pond Scum - Okay, but how does the internet REALLY work?

  • IP adresses (IP4 IP6) and DNS servers (ping, my ip), NAT
  • How IM clients work
  • blogs, feeds (how they work)
  • Example - game servers
  • How bittorrent works
  • GNUtella - how non-centered networks work
  • 100$ laptops - mesh networks

Level Hit Man - Security

Iterate - use a firewall and virus scan
  • How hackers operate
  • Why firewalls work
  • How virus scans work
  • Why you still need to be careful
  • A special note to ie 6 users, or a historical warning - activex
  • Some more vectors - cross site scripting (applets, to a lesser extent) and unsecured networks (wireless)

Level Doh! - Doing more hardware stuff

Doing surgery.
  • I think lance should write this one

Level Scaly Reptile - How music works

A quick rundown on music - rarefractions and inflections (?)
  • wav encoding - raw, number by number encoding (44100) samples
  • mp3 - compression, lossy
  • aac, wmv - protected, as with many things, can be cracked
  • Equalizers - most music playing works that way
  • Concept of buffering, especially in streaming content

Level Low Life - Graphics in General

How you represent graphics - raster or vectors, resolution, bit depths
  • bitmaps - uncompressed
  • svg - a vector thingie
  • jpegs - lossy compression
  • png - non-lossy compression - then what gets thrown out the window?
  • gifs - deprecated
  • A little primer on colorspaces, masks

Level Bill Gates - Video specifically

Images and sound - Uploading to YouTube?
  • Mechanics - matching up sound and 30 fps movies
  • Movie files, or constituent files (images, wav)
  • Movie maker - bad~
  • mpg format - related to mp3
  • formats and codecs - divx, etc
  • aspect ratio, widescreen, hd res,
  • flash movies~

Level Beauracrat - Publish your stuff

Taking advantage of the web
  • learning html
  • css
  • style no-nos: flash, unless you know what you are doing, or you're youtube, animated gifs, low contrast, "mystery meat navigation", size (large images)
  • Layout of the site, navigation, broken links
  • finding services - how to upload (ftp) or web interface
  • making your site accesible to others - advertising, putting up good content. Get someone to make a dyn site for you, or you might want a blog. plenty of those around
  • Touch on latex, web 2.0

Level Superman - stuff that you can talk to nerds about

To be a true nerd... if you don't want to be one, just skip this
  • the true history of computing
  • PIeces of computer lore
  • you must revere google - a quick history
  • gaming - warcraft, hl2
  • history with rgards to ai, cause that's the first thing that lots of people think of in connection with computer nerds
  • what are the major players in computing right now?
  • what's the view on supercomputing? what's a flop?
  • it - lotsa computer nerds don't think about it, but they should - outsourcing
  • random stuff you just need to know - l33t speak, ftw, techno, the lingo in general, net neutrality and slashdot(?)

God

programming

Overview of Languages

The mother of all languages - machine code (picture of punch card)
  • Early languages - ada, basic, cobol, fortran
  • Lisp - different
  • Smalltalk
  • C
  • C++ and Java
  • Python and Perl
  • Ruby - recent and growing
  • Javascript - a class of it's own

jscript

  • syntax
  • a dirty example
  • variables, assignment, math, defining functions, type (static/dynamic,weak/strong), (overloading,recursive)
  • Loops - various tricks
  • io in fles, sockets,
  • Including files, linking to libraries
  • OO programming
  • A working example - do something useful
  • parting note - just dive into the local scene, and make programs for open souce before trying out commerical, or go to school. look on sourceforge

Java

total oo

C++

pointers
  • text encoding - why c uses numbers - ascii, utf-8, other esoteric stuff like utf-21
  • perl - cgi

    • Basic CGI
    • Touch on fastcgi
    • Javascript through DHTML, brief touch
    • Form validation in both cgi and javascript - ex
    • AJAX - Using javascript for google-like stuff
    • writing requests, client side (server side is very complicated?)
    • Java applets - point to java specs

    Lisp

    lexical variables, macros

    Euclid - How your computer plots against you

    The inner workings of the beast
    • What happens after you hit power - a diagram, boot sector, bios, cpu (register), memory, hd, peripherals
    • what is a byte? how is it ordered? that 32 bit and 64 bit stuff?
    • how programs run - instructions (include some assembler, or machine code), interrupts
    • os - api (what programs really run on top of)

    Little Black Box

    Command line
    • moving around - cd, dir
    • netstat, ping, ipconfig
    • running programs in the shell, the path variable
    • cygwin? - expand on the real command line?
    • We lied: we're also going to talk about the task manager
    • Processes - look at the taskmanager, pipes
    • threads within the process

    Databases

    SQL
    • mysql, postgre, etc
    • getting into your sql server
    • creating databases, destroying them, moving around
    • adding things, changing things
    • coming back a day later - how to access it
    • some things like views?

    What makes an application?

    Bundled programs
    • The actual exe/com
    • Dll's
    • Libraries
    • config files
    • the appropriate registry settings
    • how to use the registry/what it is
    • install shield - the stuff people see

    Bill Gates - What else can we teach you?

    Relax! You can take on nearly anything now!
    • touch on 64 kb demos - if zach wants to, he can make one = D
    • linux, unix, bsd
    • people behind the site
    • Parting words