If you’re a Year 12 student in the Mildura area, and still trying to decide if you’re going to go to university, and when, and where… you might be interested in this: Swinburne University is holding an information session for Year 12 students who are thinking about going to university next year (or the year after if you choose to have a gap year). There will be people on hand to answer your questions about the courses Swinburne has to offer, the logistics of moving to Melbourne to study, living on campus, and university life in general. I’m going to be one of the people answering questions.

If you’re still a bit tentative about what university you’re thinking of going to, you should consider Swinburne. Unfortunately it seems like a lot of people don’t even think of choosing Swinburne when filling out their VTAC forms (as most people just tend to go to the University of Melbourne or Monash because of their reputation). This is too bad, because Swinburne is actually a really good university, depending on what you’re thinking of choosing for your career path.  There are a myriad of reasons to choose Swinburne, but since I don’t want this post to read like a brochure, I won’t start listing them here…but I’ll be elaborating on them at the session.

So, if you’re interested in checking out what Swinburne has to offer, or if you just want to come along to see the guy behind this blog, come to the Mildura Senior College Library on Thursday the 11th of December at 7:00PM. It should be good.

–Ben

Here’s an interesting article on how the IBM TrackPoint was developed, how it was dismissed and forgotten about, and how it suddenly became the feature that made IBM ThinkPads the best notebooks on the market. For those who don’t know, the TrackPoint is the pointing stick found on IBM, Toshiba, the business Dells, and a few other notebooks:

An interesting fact about the cliTrackPoint: initially it was integrated into some IBM desktop keyboards, before they realised it would be excellent in a notebook. IBM stopped making desktop keyboards with nipTrackPoints, but they later reappeared when UniComp bought out the keyboard manufacturing part of IBM (well, Lexmark at that time, since IBM spun off its peripherals business to Lexmark). They still make the excellent Model M-style clacky keyboards. I’m considering getting one, because they are really nice to type on. Anyway, their EnduraPro model is an old-school clacky keyboard .. PLUS a TrackPoint. It could very well be the best keyboard ever made. If all goes well I could be getting one for Christmas … but I’m still trying to decide whether to go for the Das Keyboard instead. Meh, i’ll figure it out. :P  

–Ben

Well, the first year of Professional Software Development at Swinburne just finished. Overall, I thought it was quite an enjoyable experience. The course content so far has been very interesting, with the exception of Usability and Enterprise Technologies and Architectures.

Some notes on this semester’s exams:

Usability: Ugh. I hated this exam for several reasons. Firstly it is a very long exam (three hours of solid work). Secondly, all of the questions are weighted the same, which doesn’t make much sense when some parts of the course are more important than other bits (which is the whole purpose of weighting). Another thing, the case study was pretty shoddy. It was software to be used to manage clothes in a wardrobe. C’mon. Even if Apple made the user interface, nobody is going to use a computerised system to catalogue their wardrobe.

Computer Systems: This exam was not bad.  The length was good*, I had finished the exam in about two hours, giving me an hour to go through and find my stupid mistakes. The only thing that disappointed me was how little it focused on shell scripting. I was quite stressed about shell scripting in the leadup to the exam since we had spent a whole .. two weeks learning it. However, the script we had to write was trivial. All the time I spent fussing about how anal the Bash shell is with whitespace, I could have spent getting to know PIC16 assembler better. Oh well, the assembler was fairly straight forward anyway.

Internet Technologies: In a word, long*. The exam was straight-forward, especially given we had a summary sheet for XHTML and CSS. The only problem was it took ages to write out the XHTML for the form we were given. Coding XHTML by hand is tedious, and you end up with a really sore hand afterwards*.

Object-Oriented Programming: I think my portfolio presentation went well. The only bastard was that I couldn’t include a podcast… I started work on a podcast which was going to be a demonstration of developing an object-oriented solution in C# from the design phase to the development and testing. However, I couldn’t get my screen capture software to record properly (mainly sound sync and codec issues). This was a bit unfortunate*, but I think the rest of the documentation in my portfolio definitely covers the learning outcomes so it should be all good.

Now I’m looking forward to about 13 weeks of nothingness. It should be excellent. I’m planning on blogging more this holidays. I know I’ve said that time and time again, but I think I can commit to it now. Maybe.

–Ben
Now Playing: Gary Numan - Cars

* - That’s What She Said.

The IT Crowd hath returned … the first episode of Series 3 is going to air at 9am today Australian time. This means that by about 10.30am it should be available from The Usual Places. Can’t wait.

–Ben