I’ve tried to blog again about four or five times since my last post, but never been arsed to finish it. To be honest, my need to post things about my life online has been overtaken by my Twitter feed. I just haven’t been bothered to sit down and write another blog post. However, now I’ve got a whole lot of time on my hands, so I thought I’d give it another go.

Last time I blogged, I had just finished my third semester of PSD at Swinburne. Now, I’ve finished my fourth semester of PSD at Swinburne, and have just settled into my Industry Based Learning work placement.

The fourth semester of PSD was very long, arduous, but in many ways rewarding. Languages in Software Development was a very interesting subject, although some overly-complex concepts weren’t explained enough to see how it’s relevant (like Lambda Calculus), but we still did some very interesting things (like write our own parsers in JavaCC). Database Programming had some very useful concepts which were overshadowed by the amount of time I spent bashing my head against the wall trying to get JDBC+Hibernate+Derby+JSP to work nicely. Advanced .NET Programming was very rewarding, particularly the portfolio work, though I’m still not sure why it’s called Advanced .NET Programming. It should really be called Concurrent Programming. If it had been called Concurrent Programming, I would have chosen it as my elective without hesitation. (Previously I had chosen Games Programming, then IT Security, then in the second week changed to Advanced .NET). Software Project Practices and Management was rather dry but necessary.

One fun part of the last semester was the portfolio piece I built for Advanced .NET Programming. We had to build an application to show our knowledge of concurrent programming and .NET-specific concepts. So, I built a multithreaded streaming radio server. As far as I know, it’s the only C# implementation of the Nullsoft Shoutcast protocol. I used P/Invoke to read from Wave and FLAC audio files using libsndfile, and encode them using LAME. They were then distributed to other clients via a number of worker threads. I also decided to code it so the audio streaming was very extensible, using standard IO streams to pass raw PCM audio around the app. This led to some interesting pieces of code, including a generated text-to-speech audio stream, and a playlist stream which encapsulated other streams and iterated through them, completely transparently to the code reading from the stream. From this I was able to create a sentient automatic DJ: one that would go through a collection of FLAC music files, play one, and then generate text-to-speech to introduce the next song, and occasionally go to a commercial break. Fun stuff.

This year is going to be an interesting year. I’m on my Industry Based Learning placement this year. Instead of studying, I’m going to be working; gaining real-world experience and earning money. This will be very useful when I go for a graduate position, as a year of real experience will put me ahead of others.

My IBL work placement is at the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, part of the Department of Defence. For obvious security reasons, I don’t want to talk about it on my blog. But, it’s very interesting so far. I think I definitely made the right choice.

The only downside of my work placement is I’ve had to relocate to Adelaide. It’s not actually as bad as many people in other states say it is. Most of them are just ignorant trolls who have never actually been to Adelaide, but yet continue to deride it. (Sorry my Melbourne friends, but the jokes are really getting old…)

My only gripe with living in Adelaide is the fact that I inadvertently chose to live in THE broadband blackspot of Adelaide, Mawson Lakes. It’s a very nice area to live… close to a whole lot of amenities, close to a train station, good people, nice architecture, etc. The only problem is, during the development of Mawson Lakes (which was only about yen years ago), Delfin put out a tender for the telecommunications infrastructure for the area. Telstra won the contract as they could do it for a whole lot cheaper than any other company. However, there was a problem with their approach. Mawson Lakes is about 7KM from the nearest phone exchange, Gepps Cross. Instead of building a new phone exchange (that would cost too much money), Telstra wired the whole area with RIMs, which are essentially green boxes which compress a large number of phone lines down into a fibre line that goes back to an exchange. This works fine for voice, but breaks ADSL. These were upgraded to CMUXes about five years ago, which are ADSL1-capable, but with only a very limited number of ports. Each CMUX may have as many as a few hundred phone lines connected to it, but it may only have a maximum of 96 ADSL1 ports available. This of course makes it close-to-fucking impossible to get a port. Even if you do get a port, given the fibre lines from the CMUXes aren’t necessarily very big ones, you’ll end up with less-than-optimal ADSL1 speeds anyway.

The fact is, I’m living in a town that’s adjacent to Adelaide’s Technology Park, but I can’t get a wired broadband service. ADSL1 is out of the question, and so is ADSL2+. It’s partly my fault for not investigating before signing the lease, but our real-estate agent did promise me repeatedly that ADSL was available. So did Telstra when I paid $59 for them to connect my phone line, only to be rejected for an ADSL service a week later. Now I’m stuck with this useless phone line for the next three months. Gaddamnit, Telstra. <_<

For a while, my only option looked like 3G. Eugh. So I found another company called NuSkope. NuSkope provide line-of-sight “wireless DSL” (which is essentially 802.11a, and soon to be WiMax) by installing a receiver at your premises that points to one of their radio towers. I was skeptical, because after all … it’s a wireless service. However, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by their service. While 10GB at 512Kbit for $49.95/month isn’t quite ADSL1 prices, it’s still the best value wireless internet around AFAIK. And surprisingly, the connection quality is good. It’s very usable for VoIP and even gaming, given the low pings. It’s also a very stable speed, and has only dropped out a small number of times in the month or so I’ve had it. Given I can’t have a wired internet connection, this is definitely the next best thing.

I thought that, now I’m working 9-5, I’d have a bit more free time. Especially given there isn’t anything to do in Adelaide. But, alas, now I find myself spending quite a lot of the weekend doing mundane things like vacuuming and cooking and ironing. But, I guess that’s life. I’m still finding time to do other projects, for example I’m making a conscious effort to switch to Linux. I’ve also been working on a number of little projects that I might release soon. One of them is a usage meter for NuSkope wireless (coding out of necessity ). I’ll reveal the other one later, it needs a lot more testing and possibly some refactoring before it’s stable enough for release.

Anyway, that’s pretty much all that’s happening in my life right now. If you’ve read this far, post a comment or something so I know people actually read this crap. Otherwise, I’ll just go back to Twitter.

–Ben

The exams this semester were mixed. The first exam, for Data Structures and Patterns, was suspiciously easy. It was exactly the same format as the mid-semester test, except it mostly covered the second half of the course content. Surprisingly, the questions were worded in a way that it practically gave you the answer. Here’s an example, in a question where you had to write an algorithm to traverse a….hold on second.

WARNING: The following paragraphs contain computer science concepts, which may not be suitable for liberal arts, English or communications students. If you happen to be paying money to study a pointless university degree with no employment prospects, please kindly ignore the next few paragraphs on important concepts which may hurt your overly-creative mind.

Now that the legalities are out of the way, I can continue. One of the questions on the exam involved an algorithm to traverse every node in a tree, using a simple depth-first traversal. Firstly, I was surprised the exam didn’t test the breadth-first traversal instead, which is a bit more involved than just recursively going through the tree. Secondly, the question actually told us how to implement the algorithm. It asked us to write a depth-first traversal algorithm by first calling PreVisit (in the given Visitor object) on the current tree’s key, then calling the depth-first traversal on each of the subtrees, then calling PostVisit. So, essentially, the question told us exactly how to answer the question.

Another example was earlier, where there was a partial implementation of a tree which has three subtrees, which funnily enough were referred to in the code as the Left, Middle and Right subtrees. Our goal was to fill in the blanks in the code, things like writing a copy constructor to ensure proper copy control. It also had a functions for attaching/detaching trees. Interestingly, it had the code to detach the left and middle subtrees, and asked us for the code to detach the right subtree. So, literally all we had to do was copy the code from the statement just above the question, and change “middle” to “right”. This is why I really enjoyed this exam.

The next exam was Software Development Practices. It was a fairly average exam … it was long and fairly hard (that’s what she said). The case study was all about an ice-cream shop. Personally I’m against food being used in case studies in exams, because it’s always distracting. I wonder how many people included the different flavours in their UML class diagram? I’m sure there would have been a few.

My last two exams fell on the same day. In the morning was Database Management Systems, which was a fairly unpleasant exam but nonetheless it seemed easier than I thought it would be. It’s probably because most of the questions are multiple-choice, and the multiple-choice are able to jog your memory for the short-answer questions. Unfortunately, I spent a disproportionate amount of time studying for DBMS in comparison to Data Communications and Security, which was in the afternoon. The exam was quite long and hard (that’s what she said), and contained a few questions which somewhat tripped me. I know of a few questions which I didn’t explain very well. Things like the intricacies BGP routing, which I couldn’t really explain properly.

My results seemed to somewhat reflect my perceived performance in my exams. Surprisingly Data Comms and Security was one of my better subjects, even though I thought I did quite badly on the exam. Overall, I received three High Distinctions and one Distinction for DBMS. So, this does break my consistent string of HDs. Damnit. Meh, I kinda expected it, since I always disliked my Database class.

Now that the first semester is over, it looks like it’s time for seven weeks of solid holidays. Or is it? Well, not for me. At the start of the year I was offered a vacation research scholarship at Swinburne’s Centre for Complex Software Systems and Services (CS3). While usually this runs over the summer, I decided to undertake this over the winter to give me some time between second semester and IBL. Basically it means that for the holidays, I’m going to be working at Swinburne helping with research projects. The project I’m working on right now is an interesting peer-to-peer simulation system using Java and JADE (Java Agent Development Framework). Interesting stuff.

Another interesting thing that happened, I finally received my Unicomp Customizer 104 keyboard. I’ll write a full review of it next week, but to summarise it in a word … Nice. Over the past few weeks I’ve become a bit of a keyboard hobbyist. I’m choosing my words carefully here. My friends have accused me of becoming a keyboard enthusiast since now I know things such as the difference between a scissor-switch and a buckling-spring, and who Topre Corporation are. However, I dispute this, because a real enthusiast would own two really awesome quality keyboards, not one. Still, while many seem to think that spending A$180 on a keyboard which doesn’t have a wrist wrest, multimedia buttons, full n-key rollover, an aesthetically-pleasing bezel, macro keys, or a pointless LCD display, the point is I use my keyboard for easily more than eight hours a day, and if it breaks down it will be a huge inconvenience to my life. So, why not get a good one? Typing on this keyboard is like driving a Cadillac. You know it’s nice. A little impractical sometimes, but comfortable to drive.

Apart from this, not a whole lot else is happening in my life. I’m getting into the pretty standard cycle of wake, go to work, work, go home, procrastinate on the internets, sleep. It doesn’t sound that interesting, but it’s not too bad. To pass the extra time I have I might start a holiday project, like get into tinkering with an Arduino or finally get my jukebox system running. The world’s my oyster. Or at least my McNugget.

–Ben

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.