Today I recieved a prize, donated by Microsoft, to the tune of £50 for my efforts in the analysis and programming coursework in my SE20 module work last semester. Third place it might have been, and £50 may not be much but out of the whole year taking the module its still something to be rather proud of.

I will be meeting a representative from Microsoft in a few weeks time along with the other two winners (congratulations to Matt and Mai - especially Matt for such an outstanding set of marks) so it should be interesting to get their views on modern software development and the rise of the open source movement, in particular my own open source project work over on RouterTech. If anyone has anything they think I should be discussing with a representative from Microsoft then feel free to contact me and I’ll try and make sure it gets mentioned in the course of my meeting with them, time permitting of course.

So there is no rest for the computing student as I ventured onto campus today to collect some books that I will be needing for my second semester modules starting on Monday. Despite not having any real work till Monday I decided to make the most of the weekend by sorting my timetables for my modules, undergraduate demonstrating for first year modules and sending some e-mails to various people on academic matters.

Despite only having just put my semester 1 modules to bed I’m already looking foward to my next set of modules. Some of the books I’ve checked out of the library look very interesting and give me high hopes that I’m really going to love the modules in the second semester. Its given me a great sense of being organised and productive right at the start of the semester. Hopefully this is something that will continue until the summer.

Indeed they are, and what a joy it is to have them behind me at last. Due to my exams being spread out over the whole two weeks of the univeristy exam period it really has seemed like a bit of a slog. On the whole though I feel they haven’t gone too badly at all. As ever there were panic moments during revision but I can honestly say that when I sat down in front of the papers very little gave me cause for concern and I think I managed them quite well. Just have to wait for the results now to be sure.

School of Computing students very much live by the maxim of work hard, play hard so last night seeing as the work was finally behind us we all went out and let our hair down. We left the exam at 4 and went straight to the Quilted Llama where we got ourselves some sofas and some additional seats and started chilling out and drinking. Matt and I hit the gin (Bombay Saphire no less) and seeing as it was his birthday everyone was buying him drinks. We all ended up getting pleasently drunk which was nice and left at closing time to go to the Library because they were open later. When we finally left there a few of us came home to our house and we basically stayed up all night. I ended up getting to sleep at about 6am.

Its great for exams to be over and great to have such a cool group of friends to celebrate it with

Well the end of this week saw the conclusion of all but one of my January exams and it was certainly good to see the back of them. While I felt all of them went well having one on Thursday afternoon and then one on Friday morning and Friday afternoon was a little much all at once and I was quite drained afterwards. Still at least they seemed to go well and in the student world thats all that really matters - sleep is strictly secondary, although many of my friends will argue with me on that point.

Speaking of my good friends here in Leeds on Friday night we went out for a few drinks seeing as we didn’t have another exam for a week and really needed a break. It was a good break too, starting in the Quilted Llama straight after the exam for drinks and food, having a brief interlude at home and then moving straight onto the old bar for more drinks and much socialising. We all had rather a lot to drink too and it showed in some of the group, in particular Matt when he kissed Sarann’s boots, but we’ll leave that one there as there mere act of posting that picture is going to land me in hot water enough!

After getting home Matt and me hit the gin (”again!?” I hear you cry, yes, again, lol) and sat around chatting and listening to various musical bits and pieces, mainly the Beatles - always sounding good regardless of your state of drunkenness!

Getting a late night wasn’t a great plan however as I was hopelessly late for meeting Claire the next morning for the art exhibition. Still we got there and it was a really interesting installation and a very nice way to spend a day unwinding after a week of exams. It was art based on geometry and one part of the installation took the bold step of combining the patterns in the painting with computer animation and a soundtrack to result in an intriguing and at times hypnotic experience.

I feel this week has been a near perfect example of the old addage; work hard, play hard

Well my first exam is over and despite feelings of impending doom among many and the universal opinion that it was going to be one of the hardest exams I think it went fairly well. Obviously I wouldn’t want to speak too soon but I gave it my best shot and didn’t feel unhappy afterwards so thats got to be a good sign.

High spirits after the exam were further improved by me learning that I had achieved 98% in the SE20 programming coursework, meaning that overall I have nearly a full half of the whole module in the bag without even having sat the exam yet

Yes, its that time again. Campus is full of students despite there being no lectures and there is an air of determination, concentration and concern on the face of many. You’ve guessed it, it’s exam season. I have my first one on the 9th January and its a real pain because its on my birthday. My celebration plans currently consist of a 2 hour exam followed by a rushed lunch and an 8 hour stint in the library in preparation for the next exam a couple of days after.

On the plus side I’m nearly though all my revision so as long as I can keep up the work ethic and remember everything that has been forced into my brain in digests over the last couple of weeks I should be fine. That being said these are the first exams that count towards my degree and while thats a good thing in the sense that work is finally going towards something, its not so good because the fear of screwing something up is increased.

No matter though, I’m going to hit these exams with the full force of computing knowledge and hopefully come good on the other side. Wish me luck!

I was directed yesterday to a very interesting article on the subject of content protection in the new Windows Vista and how it is increasing the cost of hardware and increasing the likelyhood a user will have problems with audio and graphics output as a result of content protection measures inbuilt into Vista.

All sources are creditied and despite seeming to be biased in places the article is actually very fair given the information available. You can read it on the link above. Comments on this would be most welcome.

Users of AVG free for windows may have recently been confronted with a dialogue saying that their anti virus support would cease in January 2007. This is in fact not true and is just an adertising gimmik to try and make you buy one of grisoft’s paid for products. Do not hand over your credit card details!

While it is true that AVG free version 7.1 will cease to work in January 2007 you can download AVG free version 7.5 that will continue to work after that date and long into the future without paying a penny. When you see the dialogue pop up, click the tiny link on the bottom left, then on the web page that comes up you will see a load of products. On the bottom of that page click to download AVG free 7.5, again the link text is small. Installing this file and restarting your machine will leave you protected (as long as you download regular updates as normal) for a long time after January 2007.

Just thought I would warn everyone who might otherwise end up feeling they have to pay to get continued protection - you don’t - AVG free is still going to be just that, free.

It really has been hectic these last few days, with my only real break being seeing John Mayall & The Blues Breakers live in Manchester on Wednesday night. Today though the end is finally here, at least for a few days. This morning I handed in my SE20 coursework, all 15 or so diagrams along with over 1000 words of explanatory text, not to mention various use case description sheets along the way.

While I got down to the research fairly quickly and did the desk work etc. shortly afterwards I stalled somewhat on the actual report and diagrams because I preferred to tinker with other courseworks and various bits of code lying about. It turns out that I had to put in quite a concerted effort towards the end before the dealine to make sure I got all the required pieces of work completed according to the coursework specification, but this I seem to have managed fairly well although I guess you never know until you get the marks back.

This UML lark is the only bit of computing so far that has actually made me nervous. I can safely say that all other work to date I have felt confident about knowing that if I read around the module and attend lectures the courseworks will be straight foreward to do if not an occasional enjoyable challenge. I say nervous because my mind doesn’t seem to work in the way that UML is designed; I start thinking about tables in the database before I have thought about how the manager likes his reports, and I tend to think of things in a much more linear fashion contruary to popular belief that the average person considers things in an object orientated way.

I can see this is something I am going to have to get used to and practice what with the skills being required in both the January exams and SE24 next semester, but still, its not the most enjoyable aspect of computing I’ve laid my hands on thats for sure.

The only consolation in all of this seems to be that I’m not the only bewildered one and so at least I’ll be amongst friends who can discuss and iron out issues not to mention of course cause the mark boundaries to reflect the overall atainment of the yeargroup, which should mean none of us are hard done by.

In line with the latest WordPress release the core code running this website has been upgraded to the latest version. This update closes some known security loopholes as well as providing a few tweaks to the admin side of things which should make brining content to you even less hassle free.

I encourage all users of WordPress to upgrade to the latest version to avoid potential security issues. You can get the latest release on the WordPress site