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

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 11:30 pm and is filed under Life. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.