The other classes I have are Data Structures and Patterns, which sounds like it will be very interesting (C++ and memory management and data structures, sounds geektastic), Software Development Practices which sounds a bit waffley but quite important, and Database Management Systems, which as far as I know is stored procedures in SQL and things like that. I’m also doing the compulsory Careers in the Curriculum unit, which by the sound of it is a glorified TAFE course on resume writing. Meh, best to get it over and done with than having it hanging over me when I go to graduate.

I’ve spent the last week or so settling back into Melbourne. This year I’m back at the Swinburne Residences. The first question I’m asked when I tell people this is “why didn’t you go into the apartments?” … well, I dunno really. The Res was pretty good last year. The apartments didn’t really phase me. UniLodge is amazingly expensive. Meh.

The Res hasn’t changed a whole lot since last year. Well, there’s new RAs, both of the TV rooms now have DVD players (one of them still had a VHS player … in 2008 … c’mon), and there’s now a lot more fines for things like forgetting your keys and removing the flyscreen from the window (which is a $100 fine .. what?!). Also, the cost of it has gone up $15/month. Apart from that, it’s about the same. There’s still an amazing sense that it isn’t good value for money, especially in comparison to residences at other universities. In fact, I think we have the most expensive residences out of nearly every university in Melbourne, given we don’t get a meal service or anything*, however I probably should go and do a bit of research before I say that. I’m just going by informal discussions with other friends who are at other universities.

This week I haven’t done much, apart from vegetate reclimatise to the wonderful world of Melbourne. It’s been a pretty lazy week. I did join the SwinDrinkClub though, so that should be good. The first event is next Thursday: The staff bar on level 3 of the UN building is reopening for SwinDrinkClub members, which is a great thing. Not that there’s any immediate shortage of watering holes around the Hawthorn area, but it’s nice to have one on campus.

Another good thing that happened this week was The Ama-swin Race, the orientation scavenger hunt exclusive to PSD students. While I missed the race, I caught up with everyone at the finish line, which this year was The Hawthorn. It was an enjoyable night.

Anyway, hopefully this second year of university is as good as the first, or even better!

–Ben

* – with regards to meal service, we get a “continental” breakfast which consists of toast, cereal, fruit, and terrible orange-flavoured juice (not orange juice, there’s an important distinction. Maybe this is just a by-product of growing up in a citrus-growing area where we had real orange juice all the time, I dunno.).

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

Not a whole lot has happened over the past six weeks. It’s been a potent mix of uni, internets, and sleep. Uni has been fairly good, I’m not sure if this semester is quite as exciting as last semester since the whole uni environment isn’t new anymore, but it’s still not too bad. Here’s a brief description of how I’ve been finding this semester’s subjects:

Object Oriented Programming – It’s pretty good. I’m getting my head around the OOP paradigm, and starting to think of apps as a big collection of objects. We’re about to design and build an implementation of Robo Rally, a board game. It should be quite good. The only thing that annoys me about this subject is that it looks like our lecturer must have pissed off the scheduling gods pretty badly: the lectures are at 8.30am.

Internet Technologies - This is a bludge. There I said it. We’re doing HTML and CSS, which is very straightforward. I like the idea of having bludgy subjects every now and then, but this is ridiculous. We could be doing something useful, like some maths or something, but instead we’re learning about .. CSS.

Computer Systems – I like this subject. The internals of a computer are interesting to learn, even though at times it feels like we’re going through the concepts way too fast. Now we’re learning about assembler language and programming PIC microcontrollers. It’s fun, and interesting. Our lecturer is fairly eccentric, and often goes on random tangents, but it’s good as it makes it much more interesting to listen to than just a guy droning on about how an ALU works. The thing I’m mainly looking forward to is building software for the PIC microcontroller that I can use to control actual real-world things. I’m not exactly sure what I could wire up to one of these microcontrollers, but I’ll think of something.

Usability – Ehhh. It’s a subject consisting of mostly common-sense and jargon. It’s also combined with a new “learning style”: the spike. Basically, before each tutorial we have to have already prepared a report on … well … nobody exactly knows what the report has to be on. It’s a completely vague method of assessment. From the way I’ve interpreted it, it’s a report on what we have learnt in the past week, but another tutor says the questions are related to our case study. Our lecturer says it’s purpose is to “identify a knowledge gap.” Whatever happened to normal teaching styles*? Two clearly-defined assignments and an exam? Or a portfolio where our assessment criteria are clearly defined? Instead of constant, vague assessment, where every move you make in the tutorial is assessed as a binary value (quite literally, three marks, one for our “spike outcome” report, one for our “participation” in group discussions, and some other mark which I can’t quite name right now).

Well, overall, I don’t think i’m enjoying the second semester of PSD coursework quite as much as the first. However it might get a bit better towards the end of the year as things become more challenging. Usability won’t get any more interesting though.

Anyway, enough about uni, I’m on holidays right now. For this week I’ve got planned a whole lot of nothing much. A boxset of computer forensics books arrived from Amazon the other day, I’m looking forward to getting stuck into those. I’m also going to watch some more movies … recently I realised just how awesome HD content is. I downloaded the sample of a release of Office Space in 720p, and it was excellent. However, I really need a new machine to be able to play the video comfortably. (my notebook can sorta-ish, play HD. It’d be nice to have something with a hardware H.264 decoder though.)

That’s all for now, hopefully I’ll post again by the end of the month…. maybe …

–Ben

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