This picture sums it up well:

–Ben

As I’ve said time and time again, blogging is a great way of procrastinating. What better time to blog than the part of the semester when assignment seem to pile up like … piles … of assignments ….The whole uni thing is working out pretty well. OOP is coming along nicely… my RoboRally game works, and I’m starting a user interface for it now. If all goes to plan, I’ll soon have a nice isometric view of my game, which is over 9000 times better than the command-line interface that I have at the moment.Computer Systems is good. I’m not exactly sure why I’m the only guy who really seems to like it, but meh. Assembler is fun! And rewarding! Hopefully I’ll write some more stuff, all I’ve really written so far is a low-pass filter and a program to multiply and divide numbers. This doesn’t sound like much, but then you need to consider that PIC microcontrollers don’t even have a multiply function… it’s really low-level stuff. I ordered a free sample of the PIC microcontroller we’re using from Microchip (yeah, they have free samples!), and hopefully I’ll come up with something to put it into. The only problem is before I do that, I’ll need to get or build the hardware to program it, but after briefly looking at the schematics, it looks fairly straightforward.We’re also going into the Usability testing lab this week to do our usability testing. This could be good, but it’s probably more likely going to be a disaster. Why? Not just because I’m a pessimist who assumes the worst will happen during anything of great importance (this is 10% of our mark). I don’t think it’s going to go well mainly because last time I was at the usability lab, hardly anything worked. We couldn’t log onto the antiquated machines in the lab, and our testing Tablet PC wouldn’t connect to the wireless (not too much of a surprised: SwinWifi doesn’t quite have the coverage it should). Meh, hopefully it will work. I’ve put together a prototype in Flash which looks quite nice… who knows, it might even turn out to be easy for our participants to use. :PIn Internet systems we’re still doing pointless, easy stuff. That is all.That pretty much sums up uni … it’s all fairly good. The exam period is coming up though, so that won’t be fun. Due to some kind of brain fart, it appears that all of the Swinburne exams are going to be held at the Caufield Racecourse. They said this is because they had recently demolished the old SE building, and hence didn’t have the space to run all of the exams. However, the SE building was decommissioned at the start of the year, so they must have had enough space at the end of the first semester. Well, actually, they didn’t quite, a few of the exams were held in Camberwell. But still, it seems a bit silly.Well, that pretty much sums up how I’ve been going for the past month or so. In a bit I’m going to write another about an issue of great importance to Australian internet users, which is so important that it deserves its own post .. stay tuned. :P–Ben

Well, I’m not sure what it is, but something has been stealing my motivation to blog. Since it’s been a whole … six weeks since the last blog post, and since I’m on holidays now I thought I might as well.

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

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