Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Apparently.

That’s the reason my blog, and indeed most of my sites, all my DNS, the list goes on have been down for the past 3 days.

My scripts are fine based on all the checks I have done so I don’t know where the security leak was. So much for managed hosting.

Thursday saw us head down to the Slug & Lettuce on Park Row for the Atheist Society Winter Solstice meal. Despite Jack’s pessimism when I told him I had booked for ten people and the fact that term had ended so a lot of people had gone home, we managed a turn out of eight which isn’t bad at all for an A-Soc social event.

While I was at first skeptical when we stepped into the Slug & Lettuce it turned out to be really good. They seated us quite fast once we had insisted that we actually had made a booking and it started to thin out so service wasn’t affected either. The one criticism that could be made was the music was pretty load but it is half a bar so I guess we can let that one slide.

The food was excellent, I was quite impressed and everyone else I discussed the issue with was also very impressed with their meal. Being two for one on desserts when you order main meals we made our way through quite a bit of food including some amazing chocolate-puddle puddings.

All in all it was a really good night and it was good to have an A-Soc social outside of the pub. Don’t get me wrong, I love the pub visits but it was great to do something a little different and I like to think everyone else enjoyed it too.

Last night, at midnight, the Christmukkah WoW marathon ended. Out of the 72 hours of time in the period, 6 hours was a maintenance window resulting in a total playable hours of 66. I managed Just over 30 which is slightly less than half. Not amazing but given I had to get some sleep (this is the first time I’ve had more than one consecutive day off in months so I want some sleeping time :D) and given I attended events on both Wednesday and Thursday night I don’t think it was too bad.

Progress wasn’t quite as fast as expected, we ended up with myself and Norm on level 20, Michelle on level 18 and George on level 17. I was gutted we never managed to complete The Deadmines but it was fun none the less. We ended the night by getting blind drunk (literally) in the Blue Recluse and heading down to the canal between the Trade District and the Mage Quarter for some good old-fashioned drunken skinny dipping.

So guys, same against next year? 😀

I have a crazy amount of draft posts at the moment. I was never one for leaving drafts to drag on. I had one for my many-times re-drafted “season two” post which I eventually scrapped because I didn’t think I could do the first post justice in the sequel and because of what happened at the end of summer. As a general rule though I have none.

Yet at the moment I have 7 and I’ve just published a draft so I had 8 before that! I guess I just have a lot to say and not enough time to write it at the moment. Not that a lack of time ever stopped me blogging before. I wonder what is different now.

Having got into work last weekend I was suprised to see that the posters for the Christmas party stated the venue was The Chemic Tavern. This was an odd choice of venue given it was literally miles away from our store but most conviently for myself only two streets away from where I live :D.

Despite a very, very modest turn-out it was good to see the people who turned up. Myself and Zoe spent ages catching up as we haven’t seen each other in ages which seems to be a recurrant theme – I hadn’t seen Hannah, Rich, Danny in ages either and the list could probably go on. Plus Kath spent the night handing our free drink tokens so I’m not complaining. Not quite up to last years standards but a good night none the less.

For the past few days, a group of us have been engaged in the Chrismukka WoW marathon. Starting at midnight at the end of Tuesday and finishing on midnight at the end of Friday it is 72 hours of non-stop hardcore World of Warcraft gaming to see what level we can reach. While we’ve had to take some time out to attend various events and even sleep once in a while it’s been fun to get away from reality for a while.

My room is slowly filling with crap as drinks bottles and takeaway line the table tops while clothes and general crap line the floor as well as my to-do list building ever more but right now I feel like I can ignore it and take some time off. At least until Saturday when reality comes crashing back in again. But that is over 24 hours away yet!

It’s been another fun weekend. Including some rumours which rather pleased me but I won’t be discussing on a public blog (don’t get excited, it isn’t juicy gossip). It has sparked an interesting series of thoughts, though.

Turns out Eric Atwell really does live this side of Leeds. He came in tonight while I was working.

Speaking of which I Googled his name to check I had the spelling correct and thought “hmm, what if I had blog to the end of this search query.” It wasn’t long before I was fishing around to see what SoC staff had blogs. While my search was admittedly limited to a narrow selection of the staff, one man, of course, failed to disappoint.

The blog is called Pythoneer’s Journal, so I’ll leave you to guess which member of staff it is :D.

Which then leads me onto the question, is it a good thing if you know that people read your blog? (Or perhaps another way to phrase it, how bad it is if you know people read your blog?). Because if you know people do, how much do you start censoring it?

I mean, would I be so harsh on coursework specs if I knew the author of it read my blog? Would I be so harsh about my PD31 group if I knew they read it? I like to think so, particularly because I knew several of my PD31 group did read my blog but it makes you wonder…

There is something magical about all-nighters.

I’m going to miss them when I graduate. Although I will hopefully graduate into an environment where there are still plenty of them. I can’t see it disappearing if I’m working at a software company beit my own or even if I sell out. Hopefully the professionalism of a company will give us the organisational skills to actually get some chair races going too.

Helen commented “you lot love all nighters.” Who is us lot? That is a very sweeping generalisation which really annoy me. But what could I really expect, after all, everyone from Wales is small minded. Eh, see what I did there ;). The point is, I kind of do love them. They suck in having to do work and I would much rather have the work done beforehand with plenty of time to spare. But if the work is out of the way and it’s just adding extra bits or polishing things off then they can be a lot of fun too.

You get a wonderful community atmosphere that you don’t really get during the day. The desks are piled high with energy drinks and cans of coke (unopened of course, nobody drinks in labs :p) and the bins in the corridor outside smell of the late night run to Fortune Cookie which last night saw us order so much food for the people in DEC-10 that we got a box to carry it all in.

In the end, while I wouldn’t miss the stress of late night coding sessions just before deadlines, I will miss the atmosphere and experience. What we should really start having are all-nighters as soon as the coursework comes out :p.

We’re currently working our way through the second SY33 coursework but like the first, it’s a pointless exercise. It doesn’t test your understanding of anything to do with SY as we have to do things like consume the Yahoo Search web service – all the code for which is provided by Yahoo in their developer’s library. Your actual task in this coursework is trying to work out what the coursework wants you to do. That is a task which turns out, is very difficult.

Yet again the author of the coursework spec is unable to grasp numbering (it’s worth noting I believe the specs had different authors so no one person is to blame). The first coursework had two sets of concurrent numbering systems while this numbering system starts at 0 instead of 1.

The real issue though is how unclear the coursework spec is. It randomly jumps between instructions, setup information, hints, etc. You have to spend a lot of your time picking out the actual spec from the spec itself. Once you have, most of it doesn’t work. You spend more time trying to get the setup instructions working so you can do the work than doing the actual work itself.

To demonstrate my point, I started writing my coursework in gedit but got a load of errors. The solutions didn’t help, the only other solution I got, and I got this repeatedly is, “oh, use Eclipse.” So much for the school’s policy of avoiding a focus on specific software. I did but this just produced more errors. There are loads of extra classes you needed, Dan kindly email them to me but it didn’t help. I then added all the ones Si told me I needed, still didn’t solve the problem though.

We ended up concluding that I had identical code to Si and Dan’s so it couldn’t be my code. Kieran eventually traced the error down to the WSDL2Java tool not producing all the files I needed. So I spent some time looking into that but in the end found that I did have all the classes.

Eventually, at around 2:30, it just started working randomly. This left me way behind even the people that had just turned up that day to do the coursework. I eventually managed to get everything else sorted and moved onto servlets around 3:30ish.

That was another mission. 5 hours I spent trying to get them to work. Kieran spent a good few hours on it too. It never did. Because of lack of time in technical coding? Nope, of course not, but because setup was yet again the mission it shouldn’t be. We were having to compile everything in Java 1.4 for some reason. This produced an endless string of errors that resulted in me spending all night in the lab and still not getting servlets working.

Wrap-up consisted of having to answer the few questions and also print out a copy of my readme file to include in the physical hand in – why? What purpose does that serve? This detailed how to get it running like they had any chance given pretty much everyone got beaten down into using an IDE because it was such a mission to get it working from the command line (although I did eventually manage this in the late hours of the morning).

Seriously, what is the point of this coursework? To test my patience?

Got back my GI31 coursework 2 marks today. They aren’t too pretty. While it isn’t the mess that my first coursework was (the coursework itself was OK I thought but the mark it got wasn’t), given how much time I invested in it and what standard I thought it reached I was disappointed with the mark. I got 69 and a half. Doesn’t sound too bad but then this is one of the good modules in terms of actually examining you on useful stuff (rather than BS modules like DB). Further more this kind of thing needs to pull my grade up. How can it pull my grade up when it isn’t even a first itself?

There gets to be a point where you just have to conclude, “I’m not just not putting the work in. I’m just too stupid.”