Weekly Summary of Task / Assignment

The past two weeks were my learning week, to help me prepare for the major project also known as ABBA (Autonomous Bibliography Building Agent). I had learned new knowledge with the Information gathered from various sources and techniques used. In programming, I had gained experience through trial and error when creating the examples on how programs are being executed using their own codes.

In my third week, I basically revised and recapped on everything learnt from the Visual Basic CD-rom  tutorials. To learn this lessons over again allows me to have a better remembrance of what language/code to use and when to use them. At first, I thought that  learning Visual Basic would be much more difficult and stressful. But after three weeks had passed, I felt that it could be pretty easy to learn (as in ABC?) and very user-friendly indeed.

Others things that I have learned after the meeting I had  with my supervisor is that it takes time to learn new things and there is no rush to anything as long as there is determination.

In this week, I learnt something new when I was asked to find out on the definitions of what HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Within those definitions given, there are several more links that explains other terminologies like protocols,  world wide web, web servers, URL, Java, cookies, IP address, etc. I was also unaware that there are web browsers and servers had verisons. Currently, most of them support HTTP 1.1, which one of the main features is that it supports persistent connections. This means that once a browser connects to a Web server, it can receive multiple files through the same connection. This should improve performance by as much as 20%.

I too found out that FTP is not that simple to understand as just a protocol used on the Internet for sending files. It is defined by RFC 959 (Network Working Group, Request for Comments: 959) published in 1985. It provides facilities for transferring to and from remote computer systems. Usually the user transferring a file needs authority to login and access files on the remote system. The common facility known as anonymous FTP actually works via a special type of public guest account implemented on the remote system.