Reading through my blogroll this morning I noticed a number of posts from school of computing folk discussing lack of motivation and concentration problems with respect to coursework and other tasks for the course. In addition to this I’ve also noticed a number of people suddenly feeling the pinch after the long summer break of not being “tuned in” to the academic workload.

While I’d love to be able to offer some magic remedy to these people I’m afraid there is none. Time management and more importantly effecient use of the time you manage is something that is difficult to master, and no one can ever claim to have mastered it 100%. The few things I will offer in the form of help though are these;

• Plan your time, and concentrate on minutes, not hours. Life doesn’t come in hour blocks, only our timetables do that. 15 minutes spent reading a book connected with your course is better than realising 15 minutes isn’t long enough to even make a start on your next piece of coursework and consequently doing nothing.
• If you get stuck, don’t get bogged down. We’ve all felt like throwing our keyboards out the window, but when you get to that point, have a cup of tea and start something else. Forget what you couldn’t do and concentrate on what you can, after all the solution may come to you later after you’ve left the stress of not being able to find a solution behind.
• Take time off, but plan it in advance. It doesn’t take being told that we can’t work all the time, but all too often we go out when asked by friends and this is usually at short notice. They don’t know what work you’ve done and what you still have left to do, only you know that. Know how much you wanted to get done in a day and reward yourself when you achieve that, not when a friend suggests going out. This also has a knock on effect of allowing you to enjoy nights out better because you are not stressed about work left undone back home
• Choose a condusive working environment. Home where our TV, games consoles and music collections lurk is often not such an environment. Try the long room, computer lab or library. If you are going to work with others keep an eye on how much work you do as a team and if you notice it slipping below what you could do alone, question how productive working with a friend is.
• Finally, if you don’t understand something, ask. We have lecturers and tutors for a reason. If they are not around try news or an e-mail. You could also try asking friends, although be aware they may not have such a high quality answer as they are usually in the process of learning the same material you are asking about!

These are just a few ways I try to keep on top of things, I hope people find them useful. If you have any handy points to add, please leave them as comments.

Finally I struck upon a way to enjoy live jazz and make good progress with my coursework at the same time. All I needed to do was choose my venue for the SE20 coursework as the Wardrobe. That way I could go along and enjoy a bit of live music, and as long as I paid attention to what was going on at the bars and with the staff and such it would be productive too.

I went along last night to do the first stage of my fieldwork and have pretty much covered all the angles asked for in the coursework spec, even asking a friend questions to form the customer interview. Seeing as I go so often I should be able to check my diagrams quite easily too. Jazz and coursework seem to play very nicely together, I could get used to this!

In my LUBS module lecture today we discussed a rather interesting social phenomena called the Halo Effect. This is essentially where we make a judgement of people and then no matter what they do or say subsiquently we allow our minds to bend that action so that it still conforms to pigeon-hole we placed the person in when we first made our judgement.

I found this interesting because I see this around me all the time and it goes a long way to explain why friends stick up for one another even when they can be rather nasty to each other on occasion. Its also rather worrying in the sense that by forming a positive opinion and judgement on someone we almost automatically and subconciously allow then to carry out any action in the future and it will immediately be alright by us, or at very least it will immediately be forgivable by us.

Why this is so interesting in a group of friends context is because quite frequently a group of friends will look at the actions of an outsider to the group that they don’t know and condemn it, and yet if they took one look at their own actions to others or even each other, they might surprisingly find that their judgment techniques need a swift review. Certainly food for thought anyway.

Ok, so today in my business lecture we focused on the importance of communication and understanding the role of personalities in the workplace. In the seminar afterwards we had to do a little activity aimed at allowing us to discover the roots of some of our personal traits and preferences; essentially what fundamental things cause us to act and respond in a certain way in given situations.

Get to the point I hear you say! Well, the point is that to do this we were asked to write a short story about something we did yesterday which we would then pull apart and analyse to achieve the above. I found myself sitting there with pen over paper wondering what on earth I could write. Then I suddenly realised that this was extremely odd; I blog and never have any trouble coming up with content or writing about things I have done so why then when asked to essentially write a paper blog entry was I unable to think of a single word? It would appear that writing in the same style of an electronic blog but on a piece of paper is actually much harder than its computer counterpart.

I’m not going to spend ages dwelling on possible reasons but if anyone has any ideas I’d be interested hear about them

Its that time of year when new students get their first exposure to the Java programming language and we get to drink lots of coffee and ready ourselves to be asked a load of questions about it. Its good though, we’re getting paid £12 an hour for the privilage and also get the chance to continue chatting to the folk we met in freshers week. Dr. Java is still the IDE of choice for the SE15 java course so we are likely to be asked more about why its just crashed than any actual programming.

Our own experience of Java is also being given a kick start back into life in the form of the SE20 course, using Eclipse as the IDE. The IDE experience should be much better, but trying to remember how to write in Java after a whole summer of doing nothing or writing in other languages in my case might cause a bit of an issue. Noses to the grindstone pronto I feel!

On Friday the School of Computing had their induction week party. A gathering in the School where the freshers could come along, get free food and drink and chat with each other, 2nd and 3rd years, and members of staff. It was a fun affair and a number of non-computing folk we know came along as well.

Tony Jenkins ordered in several kegs of ale and we got rather merry sampling it all. Tony himself had a tankard which he kept getting refilled, it was a good laugh and made me wish I’d brought my own pewter tankard along as well.

After the gathering folk from CompSoc got a group of people together and headed off into town. We went round a fair few bars in town, accumulating drinks and losing freshers. It was just one of those comic moments when every change of bar would see us lose some people; either through going home due to drunkenness or sticking around in the bar we were leaving because they liked it.

Drew had some classic drunken moments, the best one being where he played a stripy ball in a game of pool thinking it was the white. The look on his face when I pointed out what he had done was priceless

I’m rather proud of the fact that I was the last member of CompSoc to go home, in fact I only went home when the last few folk decided to call it a night. The bar we ended up in last was Bourbon, huge thanks to Nicci for pointing out its existance as we were trying to find another place to go. Its free entry all night and you can always find a seat. I will most certainly be going back there at somepoint.

All in all it was a fab night and I’m so looking forward to the coming year and socialising with all the new people I have met over the course of the week. It’s going to be an awesome year in the computing

To encourage new computing students at Leeds to adopt the wonderful operating system that is, CompSoc will be running a Linux install-fest on the 3rd of October. This is basically where all students who want Linux on their machines or want to learn more about it and why they should want it on their machines can come along with their PCs and have it installed for them and be shown how to use and maintain their installation. The local Linux users group will be there too, allowing people to sign up for membership and there will also be a few talks going on from a number of studnets about using Linux and how it can improve your computing experience.

I will be putting myself forward to give a talk so all interested computing students who want to come along and hear me talk about using Linux for beginners and a few tweaks and tips for existing and advanced users that you probably didn’t know about, come along. At the very least it will be a chance to chat with other Linux users and enthusiasts and of course grab a few beers afterwards.

Yesterday saw the arrival of new students to the school of computing and with that the responsibility for myself and a selection of others in the school to show them around, make them feel at home and get them started on the computing ladder that is Linux. The two groups I got assigned to were a pleasure to meet and all seemed to be very keen on things and clued up about the course and the freshers week assignments given to them. I’m meeting them later this week to check how they are getting on and if they need help with anything. It feels good to be able to give people a helping hand in a new environment.

Unfortunately I’m going to have to end the post on a bit of a downer though. A friend who is also helping out had a little problem with someone in their group, and its a really stupid thing, but I was just so amazed to hear about it that I just have to post something. Everyone helping was supposed to give their mobile phone number and e-mail address out to everyone in their group(s) so that they had a point of contact for the first week or so in case they had any problems with anything. One un-named girl however got it into her head that accepting the phone number from my friend, despite it having been given to everyone else in her group, implied he was “giving her his number” in “that way” and refused to take it, and indeed was fairly shirty to him for the rest of the group meeting.

To me this is the height of immaturity and if it continues is certainly not going to get her anywhere at uni. If you are soon to go to uni or have just started my advice is to leave the child back at your old school gates and grow up a bit. After all you’ve only got 3 years until you’re in the work place and if you think your collegues and employers will take that kind of crap you’ve got another thing coming. Not to mention of course the chances of getting any help from those around you when you most need it being severely diminished.

Yes, I know, I’m publishing Leeds school of computing stuff on my public blog, but hey, enough people from the school read my site to make it worth doing. The timetable (provisonal, but unlikely to change much apart from room numbers) is now available on SIS. It looks like Wednesdays is free from scheduled contact time and that Monday and Tuesday have late starts. Less could be said for Thursday and Friday which both have lectures (yes, actual lectures not tutorials) starting at 9am. Not a problem for me but I can see some people finding making those a little difficult

I guess the whole reason I posted this really was to say how much I’m looking forward to the new term. I’ve just had a browse through the lists of course content for the first semester and there is some really interesting stuff coming up for me over the next 3 months. Combine that with living with and near lots of good friends, it looks set to be a great laugh. See you all next week!

The Leeds School of Computing website has had a re-design and put simply, I don’t like it. I’m going to list the problems with it as I see them, and I guess we should consider this the beginning of a bit of a rant too….

Firstly, it is the school of computing and we write programs and code. Syntax should always be correct and well formed. This is not the case with the new site. While the code is well laid out when the source is viewed, there are HTML validation errors, not to mention invalid CSS. Also, shouldn’t we be using XHTML these days? I mean I can understand the old site using HTML, it had been around for ages, but this is all new, surely the coding standards should be up to date as well.

Then there is the URL it’s self. The school of computing had it’s own subdomain, comp.leeds.ac.uk This makes a lot of sense (seeing as the school of computing is an entity within the university), is easy to remember and provides a simple portal for staff and students alike. The new URL is engineering.leeds.ac.uk/comp so it seems an entire department with its own computer clusters which have their own hostnames ending comp.leeds.ac.uk now doesn’t deserve a similar place on the www and has been relegated to a sub-directory. Sure they may be using mod-rewrite and it may still be in the same location, but to us users it doesn’t really cut it - we liked our direct subdmain on the www!

Finally the look of it. We all have our preferences on looks, but the old one was very easy to read. Black text on a white background by default, and only one column of text, with links in ordered/unordered lists and positioned only where appropriate. The logo was also unique. Now there is no logo (just the Leeds one with School of Computing written next to it) and some of the layout is done using tables and the header and footer is done using images. The text is also not as easy to read in the default colours, the format on occasion being dark blue text on a light blue background. In this day and age this just isn’t on really.

Now I don’t want to put the backs up of the people who I’m sure have worked hard on these changes and indeed may still have teething troubles to iron out, but it seems to me the site just gives off the wrong impression of the school of computing; merely a sub-department of the faculty of engineering deserving only of a sub-directory on the www, and employing web designers who wouldn’t know correct HTML syntax and conventions if it hit them round the head.

I *know* this is not true having seen the work of these people in many other places (SIS being a shining example of both programming and web design), but the question is, do outsiders to the department? I think it is this question the webmasters need to ask themselves carefully. Yes the old site didn’t look “slick” or “modern”, but it served its purpose very well, had all the right content, was easy to navigate and easy to read. As I was taught in GI11 - these are the most important factors when designing a website, not slick looks - they should be secondary.

Rant over. I guess at this stage it is worth mentioning that despite the above negatives the pages do still open fine in firefox, respond to browser text size changes and load in lynx. I guess these are reasons enough to be thankful; lets just hope that these flaws are discovered by the web team and rectified, after all there are only 3 main issues and these are rather quick to fix in the grand scheme of things.