Stan Bush The Touch

One of my favourite songs from The Transformer animation movie soundtrack - The Touch by Stan Bush:




You got the touch
You got the power

After all is said and done
You've never walked, you've never run,
You're a winner

You got the moves, you know the streets
Break the rules, take the heat
You're nobody's fool

You're at your best when when the goin' gets rough
You've been put to the test, but it's never enough

You got the touch
You got the power

When all hell's breakin' loose
You'll be riding the eye of the storm

You got the heart
You got the motion

You know that when things get too tough
You got the touch

You never bend, you never break
You seem to know just what it takes
You're a fighter

It's in the blood, it's in the will
It's in the mighty hands of steel
When you're standin' your ground

And you never get hit when your back's to the wall
Gonna fight to the end and you're takin' it all

You got the touch
You got the power

When all hell's breakin' loose
You'll be riding the eye of the storm

You got the heart
You got the motion

You know that when things get too tough
You got the touch

You're fightin' fire with fire
You know you got the touch

You're at your best when when the road gets rough
You've been put to the test, but it's never enough

You got the touch
You got the power

You got the touch
You got the power

Orson Welles and Transformers

Transformer animation movie DVD cover

With the upcoming release of the live action movie in theatres, this has made me interested in finding out more information about this animation in general, especially with regards to the original classical Transformer movie way back in 1985.




Orson Welles in 1937
Picture Source: Wikipedia

Interestingly, is the fact that one of the voice actors is the famous Orson Welles that had made the movie Citizen Kane which was touched on in my EL3880B module and which I had written on about in my essay. The fact is that Orson Welles had been much limited in his ability to create films due to the curfew that had been imposed on him by the Hollywood people, and that he had to resort to other professions such as providing voice for animation, commercials, etc in order to finance his own films. Incidentally, the voice over that Orson Welles provided for the main villain Unicron in the classical Transformers movies was his very last film role in Hollywood.


Unicron in Robot mode

With regard to the live action film, it had yet to be seen. Personally, I feel that the original films would always be the most pure form and hence the best as it had not been adapted or modified in any aspects into other medium. Adaptations could signify a divergence or a creation of an entire new content separated from the original work itself.

Bit Depth and Resolution

Something that I learnt from Inside your Personal Computer module is the trade off between resolution and bit depth if you have a slow computer.

Decreasing the resolution of an application or video would allow a higher bit depth to be shown, for example, 24 bit on a computer with a slower video card. However the cons is that the resolution is smaller so I can't see as much as when viewing a higher resolution video.

This can be applied to video games. Another pro factor is the drastic improvement in game performance as well as lesser lag faced when playing the game.

Here are some screenshots of Dark Crusade played inside a window at reduced resolution:

One Word Tag Line Poster

Inside Your Personal Computer Final Exam

Some of the exam questions that have been puzzling me:

1. What is sampling rate and sampling precision equal to in a JPEG image file?

Is it sampling rate = resolution or frames per second
sampling precision = bits per pixel or colours per pixel

2. Twisted Pair wires have 2,4,6, or 8 wires. Which is false?

Is it 2?

Some of the other questions that came out in the exam:

1. War Drivers

- What are War Drivers?
- What problems can they cause?
- How can we prevent ourselves from being made use of by War Drivers?

Kinda expected this question because it was not asked in the quiz question and it is included in the Sound Bytes.

2. Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

- What are DDOS attacks?
- What else does a hacker do to conduct DDOS attack?
- Why is it difficult to recover from a DDOS attack? How can an ISP help?

Did not do well for the last part of the question cos I misinterpretated what the question was asking.

3. Analog to Digital Graph conversion

- Write the binary digits corresponding to the values in the graph
- Plot the Analog graph on the graph
- Calculate the percentage increase in the number of bits used

Did not do well for this question because I was not able to calculate the bits correctly as well as the percentage increase.

Number of values for 0-3: 4 = 2 ^2
Number of values for 0-15: 16 = 2 ^4

Percentage increase = 4/2 X 100 = 200%

4. Why can't hard drive work very well at high altitides?

I wrote that because of the lesser amounts of airflow that is at higher altititues and hard drive require air to cushion the read/write head above the platters during spinning to prevent it damaging the magnetic surface area of the platters by scratching it

5. JPEG and Bitmap: which utilise compression and which don't?

6. Why is the minimum file size on a hard drive 4096 bytes?

The minimum file size on a hard drive is 4 KB which is 4 X 1024 bytes due to Windows XP and NTFS.

7. When a computer sends data to computer Y through a wireless access point, and there are also computer X and Z in the vicinity, which computer will get the data?

Only Computer Y will receive the data.

Total of 90 questions inclusive of True/False questions, MCQs, fill in the blank answers and short answer questions.

Understanding how the internet works

Today's the final test for this module that I'm doing. I liked the last 2 short answer questions that came out in the paper. Basically, the first question asked us about TCP compared with another protocol that is similar to retransmission timeout. TCP consists of Duplicated Acks and Retransmission Timeout whereas the protocol that was posted in the question consists only of RTO. I answered that the protocol is simpler and hence easier to apply in networks and hence more scalable. The cons of the protocol is that unlike TCP which has other protocols such as Duplicated Acks in order to infer traffic congestion on the internet and adjust Window Sizes accordingly to suit the traffic condition, this protocol does not have additional protocols. TCP is thus able to more efficiently utilise the available bandwidth in the network because duplicated acks allow TCP to infer that there is some traffic congestion in the network but is not as bad as that from Retransmission Timeout. Hence, it will only reduce the data transfer rate to that of the congestion avoidance phase. In contrast, upon receiving RTO, the data transfer rate would be dramatically reduced to that of slow start phase. Here's the graph that I drew for the test:










The 2nd short answer question basically asked about P2P softwares such as Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa and what are the pros and cons of these softwares. The 2nd part of the question provides us with a scenario whereby an entrepreneur devises an algorithm to combine a Gnutella network with Google Page rank search engine and ask us to comment whether this would work or not and what are the barriers to this type of algorithm.

Besides these questions, the MCQs are tough because we have to choose the correct multiple choices (not only 1 correct choice but can also be more than 1 correct choice) in order to get the full marks for the question. Many things tested were not from the syllables. For example, I did not know what a Kalman Filter device is.

Computer Ports

Here’s what I learnt about computer ports from the GEK1500 module. Some of the slower ports (legacy ports) are already being phased out and cannot be found in new computers due to the faster speeds of the other ports, especially the Universal Serial Bus port. Below is the list of some ports that are found in computers according to their data transfer speeds.



Serial Port 56 Kbps (legacy port) – normally used for slow speed modems (dialed-up), keyboard and mouse and PDA cradles



Bluetooth 1.2 – ~700 Kbps
Bluetooth 2.0 – ~2.1 Mbps

Used on mobile phones and other peripherals that do not have high power consumption

Pros: Conserve battery life as it uses very little power, do not require line of sight for devices to communicate with each other
Cons: Short range (depending on power can go up to only a few hundred metres), low data transfer rate (~700 Kbps), only faster than a serial port.

IrDA port – 4 Mbps – requires line of sight. Usually used in palm tops, mobile phones and some keyboards



Parallel port (legacy port)– several Mbps per sec up to 12 Mbps – Usually used to connect printers, can also used to connect zip drives and other old scanners and webcams



USB 1.1 - ~1.5 Mbps (Low Speed) ~12 Mbps (Full Speed) – can use to connect devices such as mouse, keyboards and webcams


A twisted pair CAT-3 or CAT-5 cable

Ethernet – 10-1000 Mbps – Use to connect computers to form a network to share resources, also use to connect to the internet via a router and to connect to a network printer



Firewire – 400 Mbps – Commonly use to transfer video files from digital camcorders, music from portable mp3 players, many pictures from digital camera and for other large file transfers. Also can be found on printers but rare. A faster standard called Firewire 800 with a speed of 800 Mbps also available which has twice the speed of the original Firewire 400.



A flashdrive, a typical USB mass storage device (storage capacities can range from a mere few 10s of MBs to today’s 2 GBs and above)

USB 2.0 – 480 Mbps – Commonly known as the Hi-speed USB port with data transfer rate up to 480 Mbps (60 MB/s). Used to transfer large video files and other multimedia files that require high speed transfer, from a digital camcorder or digital camera. Nowadays USB 2.0 ports are the most common and popular ports in computers and can be used to connect many devices such as keyboards, mouse, Ethernet cable, printers, external hardisk drives, and other peripheral devices.