Well, I’m not sure what it is, but something has been stealing my motivation to blog. Since it’s been a whole … six weeks since the last blog post, and since I’m on holidays now I thought I might as well.

Not a whole lot has happened over the past six weeks. It’s been a potent mix of uni, internets, and sleep. Uni has been fairly good, I’m not sure if this semester is quite as exciting as last semester since the whole uni environment isn’t new anymore, but it’s still not too bad. Here’s a brief description of how I’ve been finding this semester’s subjects:

Object Oriented Programming - It’s pretty good. I’m getting my head around the OOP paradigm, and starting to think of apps as a big collection of objects. We’re about to design and build an implementation of Robo Rally, a board game. It should be quite good. The only thing that annoys me about this subject is that it looks like our lecturer must have pissed off the scheduling gods pretty badly: the lectures are at 8.30am.

Internet Technologies - This is a bludge. There I said it. We’re doing HTML and CSS, which is very straightforward. I like the idea of having bludgy subjects every now and then, but this is ridiculous. We could be doing something useful, like some maths or something, but instead we’re learning about .. CSS.

Computer Systems - I like this subject. The internals of a computer are interesting to learn, even though at times it feels like we’re going through the concepts way too fast. Now we’re learning about assembler language and programming PIC microcontrollers. It’s fun, and interesting. Our lecturer is fairly eccentric, and often goes on random tangents, but it’s good as it makes it much more interesting to listen to than just a guy droning on about how an ALU works. The thing I’m mainly looking forward to is building software for the PIC microcontroller that I can use to control actual real-world things. I’m not exactly sure what I could wire up to one of these microcontrollers, but I’ll think of something.

Usability - Ehhh. It’s a subject consisting of mostly common-sense and jargon. It’s also combined with a new “learning style”: the spike. Basically, before each tutorial we have to have already prepared a report on … well … nobody exactly knows what the report has to be on. It’s a completely vague method of assessment. From the way I’ve interpreted it, it’s a report on what we have learnt in the past week, but another tutor says the questions are related to our case study. Our lecturer says it’s purpose is to “identify a knowledge gap.” Whatever happened to normal teaching styles*? Two clearly-defined assignments and an exam? Or a portfolio where our assessment criteria are clearly defined? Instead of constant, vague assessment, where every move you make in the tutorial is assessed as a binary value (quite literally, three marks, one for our “spike outcome” report, one for our “participation” in group discussions, and some other mark which I can’t quite name right now).

Well, overall, I don’t think i’m enjoying the second semester of PSD coursework quite as much as the first. However it might get a bit better towards the end of the year as things become more challenging. Usability won’t get any more interesting though.

Anyway, enough about uni, I’m on holidays right now. For this week I’ve got planned a whole lot of nothing much. A boxset of computer forensics books arrived from Amazon the other day, I’m looking forward to getting stuck into those. I’m also going to watch some more movies … recently I realised just how awesome HD content is. I downloaded the sample of a release of Office Space in 720p, and it was excellent. However, I really need a new machine to be able to play the video comfortably. (my notebook can sorta-ish, play HD. It’d be nice to have something with a hardware H.264 decoder though.)

That’s all for now, hopefully I’ll post again by the end of the month…. maybe …

–Ben

Well, I’ve nearly finished the first week of the second semester of PSD. First impressions: Eeep.There is a lot packed into this semester. Here’s a brief summary of the subjects I’m going to be doing this semester and what I thought of the first lecture.

Usability - This is a subject that looks promising, but I’m just not completely convinced that it’s going to live up to my expectations. Usability is essentially the study of user interfaces, and how to make them more usable for users. The course content looks interesting but I’ve got the feeling some of it will drag on for a while, which will suck. However, this could be balanced out by the opportunity to conduct usability testing in a usability lab. I didn’t even know we had a usability lab at Swinburne, but the fact that we have one is quite nice.

Internet Technologies - This should be a fairly straightforward subject. Website design in XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. A lot of this stuff is familiar to me, since I’ve done website work in the past. An interesting thing, our lecturer actually made a point of saying we need to take this subject seriously. I suppose that’s because a lot of people assume it’s a “fairly straightforward subject.”

Object-Oriented Programming - This should be a good subject. It’s essentially all about the object oriented programming paradigm, and how objects can be used to model problems, as well as how to implement these concepts in our choice of C# or Java. However to get a HD in this subject (which I’ll be trying to do) you need to look at both. The good thing about this subject is that we have Andrew Cain, who taught us APS last semester.

Computer Systems - This will be probably the most interesting subject, and definitely the most challenging. I haven’t had this subject’s lecture yet (it’s on Friday) but I’ve read through the unit outline which has been posted to our intranet (Blackboard, the epitome of FAIL). In this subject, we will be programming PIC microcontrollers using Assembly language. Assembly is very low-level, as it’s really just a human-readable version of the commands being send directly into the CPU. This subject also covers the Linux operating system, and how to use the bash shell efficiently through the use of bash scripts and tools like sed/awk/grep. I’ve had quite a limited and somewhat rocky experience with Linux in the past, so I’m guessing this will be a bit of a challenge. However as far as challenges go, it’s nothing compared to Assembly language.

Well, it looks like PSD this semester will be a challenge. By the end of it I will have learnt seven languages, will have written code that runs on a microcontroller, will have designed software to be easy to use, and will have written cross-platform code with both of the major competitors as far as big bloaty frameworks go. It should be quite a productive semester!

–Ben

Firstly, 10 points to whoever can pick what song the title of this post is referencing.

Anyway, it’s been quite a while since my last post. Actually, quite is quite an understatement. It’s been about six weeks since the last post. This is primarily because of general laziness: I haven’t been arsed sitting down and writing a big long piece about how my life is going. Until now!

The past six weeks have been pretty good. I’m on holidays from uni. Why we have such long holidays, I’m still not sure, but it’s definitely been fun. Quite uneventful, but good nonetheless. Especially since I’m home, with access to a wood-fired heater and WiFi. It’s also great to be back on my home DSL connection again, considering the cost of internet access at the Swinburne Residences.

I got my results for the first semester a few weeks into my holidays. It was all good, all High Distinctions, so I can’t really complain. I’m surprised that I got a HD for Enterprise Technologies and Architectures though, considering how much crap there was on the exam. For instance, there was a question about UML which I think was a bit out of the scope (we weren’t told that we should be able to draw UML diagrams), but I managed to do it nonetheless. All of the other exams were quite good… I especially liked the bit on the Computer Logic Essentials where it was nearly an exact copy of the practice exam we were given (though with the numbers changed).

Since then, I’ve been quietly relaxing at home, chilling out, maxing, relaxing, all cool… very cool actually. It’s definitely one of the coldest winters I’ve experienced. Brrrrgh. There is so much talk about global warming and how the world is heating up, but all that has been completely contradicted this winter. I’ve been spending the time trying out C# (since we need to use C# or Java for our Object Oriented Programming class), working on a few pet projects (for example: I’ve now acquired most of the hardware to build a totally sweet jukebox, the problem is finding decent software is difficult), and tending to my British Comedy collection. I recently acquired Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and Snuff Box on DVD. Both are excellently funny comedies. I’m also going to try and get Look Around You, because Peter Serafinowicz is a really funny guy. Unfortunately The Peter Serafinowicz Show isn’t on DVD, because it is a pretty funny show. He is a master of impersonation and hilarious spoof advertisments. There are copies of his shows on torrent sites, but you have to hunt around a bit to find them. A hint for finding the right torrent: most people can’t spell his last name, so they just use the initial. And on an unrelated note, there’s a good site for hunting ISOs somewhere on the internet.

Interesting sidenote: There are actually two completely different copies of the Snuff Box DVD circulating. The Region 2 UK release (white cover) has the special features: commentaries on three episodes, a behind the scenes documentary, the soundtrack.. and also all of the episodes are presented in anamorphic widescreen for maximum viewing pleasure. It is one disc. The Region 4 Australian release (blue cover, by Force Entertainment) is a crappily-thrown-together DVD with all of the episodes as letterboxed 4:3, with no special features at all. It is two discs, because the people at Force Entertainment obviously don’t know how to put a DVD together properly, and stored two copies of each episode to make the “Play All” feature work, hence wasting precious space. I don’t know how Force Entertainment could have fudged up a DVD release like this, but they have. I don’t like being screwed over when I actually do decide to purchase DVDs. If you’ve ordered the Region 4 release, send it back and go to Amazon UK and get the Region 2 release. It’s so much better.

Anyway, uni resumes in two weeks time. In the second semester of PSD we have Object Oriented Programming (with Andrew Cain, who we had for APS last semester), Computer Systems, Internet Technologies and Usability. OOP and Computer Systems should be really interesting (apparently there’s assembler in Computer Systems, hence I’m looking forward to it :D). Usability should be good as well, because it’s good to know how to develop good interfaces. There’s nothing more frustrating than a great product with a terrible UI… Hopefully I should be able to learn a bit about how to design straight-forward interfaces for the Everyman. It should be fun.

–Ben

Blogging. It’s a great way to procrastinate. What better way to spend the next ten minutes while I keep nagging myself to get back to exam revision, than blogging!

It’s been quite a busy month. I’m now 18, so I’ve suddenly got the world at my feet. Maybe if the world could be defined as a pile of cables and a server. Yupp, the server I mentioned a few posts ago is up and running. It’s nice to have for backing up my content to. As well as backing up all of my documents, I’ve been ripping a whole heap of my own DVDs to it. I’ve found that a combination of DVD Decrypter and AutoGK is the best way to backup DVDs. And yes, I’ve used Handbrake. It sucks on the Windows platform, like a lot of software which is crappily ported from other platforms.

I’ve also finished my first semester of my PSD course at Swinburne. Well, nearly, I’ve still got my exams to go, but the classes have finished. Here’s a summary of how it went:

1. Algorithmic Problem Solving: Hands down the best subject in the first semester of PSD, and that’s not just because of the coding. It was actually really interesting, especially later in the course when things such as memory management are discussed. A good thing about APS is that there isn’t a heavy emphasis on tests and exams, which is a good thing because debugging and writing out code in an exam situation just doesn’t make sense.
2. Computer Logic Essentials: This is pretty good too, though a lot of it is maths. In fact, all of it is. This subject could be described as a trojan horse: with a name like Computer Logic Essentials you might expect the subject to be about how computers use logic to work. You might have even thought that it was an introduction to some of the more technical subjects like compilers and assembly language, which is what the Swinburne course description says. Well, no. It’s just set theory and propositional/predicate logic. It’s not bad, but it is a bit mislesading.
3. Database Analysis and Design: My original impression of DAD was that it was going to be fairly easy. However a few weeks in it got significantly more involved. Not difficult, but involved. However, this subject is surprisingly well executed. The lecturer Peter Sala was able to take a potentially-mundane subject like database normalisation and make it actually enjoyable to learn. No wonder this guy has his own appreciation society on Facebook.
4. Enterprise Technologies and Architectures: ETA is a subject which maintains a healthy balance between waffly enterprise jargon and insultingly-simple technology questions. As a result, this subject is crap. Sure the lecturer is interesting to listen to, considering he’s been out in the industry, but this subject is just a waste of time from the standpoint of a PSD student like me. Both of the assignments were pricing the IT infrastructure for businesses. That’s right, we had to spend hours on end mindlessly Googling to find the best prices on Cisco routers. If we were going to be working as network administrators, this would be useful. However since we’re learning to build our own software, than this isn’t terribly relevant. Another annoying thing is that it’s groupwork, which sucks, especially when you luck out and get a group where you are the only seriously-contributing member. Hence, I’m fundamentally against groupwork. Therefore I wasn’t happy to find that all of our assessment for ETA apart from the multiple choice test (worth 5% of our mark) and the exam (worth 50%) is from groupwork. Bahh.

The only thing left to do now are the exams and the APS portfolio. My original plan was to post a lot of my portfolio work to my blog, but now since the portfolio has been restructured I don’t think I will. That said, I’ll still post something about the other program I wrote, the Stack Visualiser. However this will come later, after I’ve finished my CLE, ETA and DAD exams. They should be …fun. The most painful one will be the CLE exam, since it’s worth 80% of our overall mark. This is weighted way too heavily, especially considering there is only one other assessment. This assessment arrives a few weeks into the CLE course, so it only really tests us on the first few weeks of content. Therefore we haven’t really had much of a chance to apply the rest of the things that we learn, apart from in the tutorials. Hence it ends up being a bit imbalanced. Meh. Hopefully they’ll fix this oversight next year by adding a few more assessments into the subject.

Anyway, I’d better get back to study. It’s … not fun.

–Ben