Four down, one to go

Quick catchup on what’s been happening recently, mostly exams unfortunately:

Software engineering

Didn’t do too badly in this one, there was a nice question about change control using CVS and unit testing which was worth about 15 marks, so I think I’ll have done quite well on that one. The other question in that section involved describing the different types of tests (stress tests, performance tests etc.) which was quite easy as they’re all fairly self explanatory, the only thing you have to be careful about is giving a tautological answer. I didn’t make much headway into the UML questions (I utterly despise UML diagrams, which doesn’t really help when you’re trying to revise them) so I can only hope that I’ve picked up enough marks on the others and in the labs to make up for my shortcomings.

Algorithms and data structures

I thought I’d be alright in this exam, given that the labs were fairly easy and the lecture notes didn’t seem too hard to understand. Unfortunately the questions that appeared on the paper, particularly in the second section, were on topics that I wasn’t too hot on and one (binary heaps) which I don’t remember us ever actually studying. I think I’ll be lucky to scrape a pass on this one, the labs count for 10% but I bet they’ve been scaled so they actually end up counting for 6-7% instead. Bugger.

Architectural support for languages and operating systems

I wasn’t exactly looking forward to this one, but I thought I could wing it, given that about a third of the course involved material relating to caches and virtual memory, which we’d covered in the labs and in the previous semester’s module on operating systems. Luckily there was one question on that topic, although to be fair they couldn’t really leave it off completely, so I did alright on that. There was also a big question worth lots of marks for converting some C code to ARM assembly, which was something I can sort of do and given that it was worth 12 marks you can usually get 6 or 7 by being in the right direction even if you make a couple of mistakes. Thankfully all the questions about the ARM architecture and its pipelines were in one question by themselves, so I could avoid that—I’ve never really been interested in the inner workings of hardware anyway.

Computer graphics

This had one third of the exam based on 20 multiple choice questions (with no negative marking, so there’s no penalty for getting wrong answers and therefore you have a 25% chance of getting it right even if you guess), which was a great start. I could do most of them without too much hassle, and even for the ones which I couldn’t I managed to eliminate at least one or two of the possibilities so it was a case of guess and have a 33-50% chance of getting the right answer. The second section was a godsend with a question on image formats, which is about the only area of computer graphics where I do actually know what I’m talking about. Explaining the JPEG and GIF encoding formats and comparing/contrasting lossless and lossy compression formed the main basis of the section, so I think I’ll have picked up most of the marks available there. The last section was an absolute nightmare though because it concentrated on viewing, models and cameras, involving vectors and maths which I just can’t do. I don’t know why but my spatial awareness is appalling, I can’t judge distances or perceive how objects will appear in 3D space.

Databases

This is my last exam, this coming Tuesday afternoon. I’m fairly confident when it comes to databases seeing as I’ve been using them for several years now (mainly outside of my course), but I am worried that the lecturer will put some horrible questions about Entity Relationship Diagrams or some silly Oracle-specific stuff. If it’s all theory and questions on table structures, advantages/disadvantages of databases vs flat file systems, SQL etc. then I should be fine, but I’m currently checking the course book to make sure I’m up to speed on the stuff that is more likely to be on the paper.

Houses

Still not found one, starting to get a bit worried now! I’ve got the latter half of next week to look though and I won’t have anything else on (at least I hope I won’t) so I’m confident that I’ll be able to find something then. Also a lot of one bedroom places are just coming available now (they usually don’t release details of them until later in the year anyway by the looks of things) so perhaps I can land myself somewhere reasonable in Fallowfield/Withington.

Work

This is the one area which is actually going quite well. I’m a bit swamped with exams at the moment but I’ve still managed to get cracking on Hire Cooling for one of my clients, and hopefully if that does well (with a bit of marketing that I’ll probably be getting involved in/running) then there should be more to come. Also I’ve got three months over the summer to build up more freelance work and I’m hoping to get a virtual server setup so that I can host web sites for a fee (I already do this for one company, but I don’t have the resources to really push this service to anyone else at the moment). Given that I tend to work with small companies in the industrial sector who don’t want much more than basic hosting with perhaps a couple of email addresses, it’s fairly low maintenence so it doesn’t cost me much in terms of time, plus I can host some of my sites on the same machine.

I’ve also got a lot of web sites of my own that I want to work on, seeing as I own 19 domains and am only really using four or five of them at the moment. I think a few of the ideas I have could be reasonably successful and in the worst case I won’t lose anything other than the time I spend on them, plus I hope they’ll bring in a small but steady income to pay for things next year. I definitely want to get Potmaster to a stage where it’s ready to accept new accounts using an automated process (hopefully I’ll have chance to learn Postfix and Courier IMAP over the summer to build the backend) and also Book Trading where students can buy and sell course books for a reduced price.

Third year project

Finally managed to track down my supervisor for next year, he’s been away in America and came back as I was starting exams so I haven’t really had chance to speak with him. I’ve made an appointment to go and see him the week after next though so hopefully I can convince him to somehow up the difficulty level so I’m challenged next year in this respect. He also seems like a decent chap, didn’t mind that his project was actually my last choice and jokingly suggested that I should go and “take care” of the person who got to my first choice before me. 😉

Postgraduate study

Thanks to Jennie I’ve found that there’s a postgraduate law conversion course on offer at Manchester Metropolitan University. Usually I wouldn’t even consider MMU because it’s not exactly got a fantastic reputation, at least not compared to the University of Manchester, but apparently for this particular course it’s highly regarded and one of the best in the country to study at.

For anyone who doesn’t know, the conversion course is for one year and would basically put me in a position where I could go to train as a lawyer without having to do a degree in law. I’ve always been interested in the subject, plus it would mean that if the bottom falls out of the IT/Computing market I’d still have an alternative career path to follow. My parents have also offered to pay for me to do it if that’s what I want to do so I should be good from a financial viewpoint as well.

Societies

I have no idea how events in this area are going to pan out next year, already there are storms brewing in the Megs and I’m worried that, being the only person who goes to Megs and Warped and manages to get along with everyone (apparently it’s because I’m a “fluffy cuddly Tory” according to Jon from the Megs…), I’ll end up right in the middle of it all. I really hate having to choose between friends/groups so I hope it all blows over before the students return in September.

I also need to find some of the current first years to get involved in Compsoc otherwise it will be left to just Vlad and I to run the society seeing as our secretary this year has done virtually nothing and our treasurer will be away on industrial experience next year. Fun and enlightening though running the society can be, I really don’t want the stress of losing two nights’ sleep because the mail server disk has decided to go AWOL.

Anyway, apologies for the rather long post, I haven’t really had much chance to write anything in the mean time. Hopefully I’ll be back to normal once the final exam is over, I’ll certainly be a lot less stressed when the students have gone home and I’ve got no lectures/labs/exams to worry about.