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

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