Today is the last day! As we wrap up the session, I would like to say it has been a pleasure being in class with all of you this semester, you were certainly a dynamic and engaging group and that absolutely made the class a success.

As I mentioned in class, I have been asked by a couple of you if you will still have access to the blog, and you absolutely will – I welcome all (legitimate) visitors and some students from previous semesters still visit the site. As long as you have a WordPress account you can even still make comments.

I will continue to make posts over the break, however I suspect not quite as often as I do during the semester (although I might – not sure), and it will pick back up to its regular pace when the Spring semester starts.

For the last Friday post, here is an oddball thing you can do from the command prompt. If you know how to bring up the command prompt, skip to the next paragraph. If not, to get the command prompt in Windows 8, bring up the tile interface by hitting the Windows key on your keyboard which is left of the spacebar, type ‘cmd,’ and click on the Command Prompt app on the left (or under the search bar in Windows 8.1). In Windows 7/Vista, click the Start menu, then click on Accessories, then click ‘Command Prompt.’ If you’re using a Mac, it’s the ‘Terminal’ program in the Applications->Utilities folder.

Once it’s up and running, if you’re using Windows type ‘tracert -h 100 216.81.59.173’ without the quotes, if you’re on a Mac type ‘traceroute -m 100 216.81.59.173,’ again without the quotes, hit enter, and impress your techie friends with the results of someone who had far too much time on their hands (it may take a few hops to enter the destination system, it usually starts after the asterisks). The tracert / traceroute command tracks each server a packet hits as it goes from a source to a destination across a network, and the ‘-h 100’ forces 100 hops so you can see the whole thing, otherwise it would timeout after 30, so by all accounts this required dedication.

I hope everyone has learned something they can use, I hope everyone got something out of the class, and I hope at least  a few of you had fun. Best of luck for the rest of your academic and professional careers, and I will see all of you around.