Rock Band

by Kieran

Last night was the first time I had played on the ever-famous Rock Band in HD on the XBox 360 with the full kit.  I had a go on drums and guitar, and left the singing part out to save embarassment ;) the drums were my favourite I think, I was "in the zone" as so to speak.  The song range is really quite good with many famous tracks both new and old.  The best part is the ability to get extra songs from XBox Live for a small cost.

The general feel of the game is really quite impressive and will keep your attention really quite focused onto your own instrument.  The quality of everything is also very high.  The only thing I’m not keen on is the level of difficulty between easy and medium being quite dramatic.  Easy was just too easy, but then the medium setting I found a lot more difficult.  I play instruments myself which gives me an upper-hand, but only marginally as Rock Band is a different concept.  It’s hand-to-eye coordination in a sense, whereas guitar isn’t played in that way usually.

Rock Band generally makes me want to buy an XBox 360, although a) we don’t really have either the time or the money due to our wedding only being 6 weeks away and b) I’d only really like to play one on an HD TV, which we don’t have.  Perhaps next year when the prices go down and we’re more settled, but I really can’t justify it right now, as tempting as it is ;)

Taking The Trophy

by Kieran

Over the last year I’ve met struggles beyond comprehension, things I would have never expected, yet I’ve also met with tribulations more-so than ever.  To be honest with you, if it weren’t for my family, and friends, I would have never got as far as I have, so when I say "I have succeeded", it’s not just my personal success, it’s the success of those whom surround me.  If I could point individuals out, they would be my immediate family (i.e. mother, father, brother and sister), my in-laws to be, my fiancee, Dan Bryant (whom I studied with at university), Joe Haines, Jo Cooper, and Steve Taylor (also course buddies), Steve Streeting (unbelievably patient with my absurd questions ;)), and various other friends such as Rhys, Stu and Fab for supporting me after my illness.  It’s quite amazing how such little efforts go such a long way.  All in all though, there have been a large quantity of individuals who have helped me one way or another over the last year and a half, especially from Solent Community Church and my flat mates Phil and Lou, and church elders Matt and Richard.  Again, I could go on and on, so apologies if I haven’t mentioned you.

Over the last four weeks I’ve been at my new job and thoroughly enjoying every minute of it, and because of this my focus has completely changed from university life, to working life (and amazing at how quick that has happened already).

So, this brings me to my actual point of this post.  Yesterday I was awarded with a first class honours degree in Computer Science, and I must say, it was the biggest struggle I’ve ever had in my life.  It was a scrape, but I feel comforted to know that my efforts, and the efforts of those around me, finally paid off.

As for my future in education, I’ve decided to slack off for a bit because life is just far too busy for anything.  I’m spending all day every day coding at the moment, and the evenings give me zero time for anything else as I’ve got a lot of house work to do, or I’m at the gym.  If I don’t respond to e-mails (as many have already noticed) then it’s because I don’t check them until lunch times.

A big thankyou to everyone!

Back and Busy

by Kieran

I got back to Guernsey just over a week ago after our seven hour boat trip from Portsmouth where I was surprised with club class which was a nice treat.  I actually had a single day off before I started my new job so life has been so hectic that this is the first time I’ve managed to get on my laptop in about ten days.

So my new career is good, and the learning curve has been as always, quite immense.  I’m working mainly in VB.NET, SQL, JavaScript and ASP.NET where I’m spending time fixing bugs, making enhancements and responding to personal requests which eventually reach my desk.  VB.NET is quite a simple language, but not without its quirks as I have previously mentioned.  My job keeps me interested as I feel I can add my own personal touch, opinions, and share things that I have learnt in the past with other employees.  For example, we currently have no real bug tracking and feature-pushing system to help us keep track of everything, we literally work by pen and paper so I’m currently pushing for this as we can hook it up to our SVN repo and keep track via revision.

The systems we work with are actually quite important as they’re number-crunching systems, and if a figure is even marginally out then we could do some real damage, although there’s many safety measures to ensure that this would never happen.  I also have skilled professionals working closely over my shoulder to ensure nothing could go wrong.

Being back in Guernsey is quite nice, although I find I have absolutely no time recently for anyone, neither responding to e-mails or being able to answer calls.  By time evening comes I’m cleaning the house as we’ve filtered through all of our stuff trying to get rid of things we don’t need, which inherently means there’s more mess than ever.  Today the front room is finally tidy, but we have been out of the house a lot recently, especially as we forget to check our gas tanks which ran out leaving us with no hot water and no way to cook anything.

Finally, I’ve worked out my university grades, and I’m on the borderline, it’s now completely down to the officials at the university whom are apparently "fighting for my case" in the ever-going battle of a first class grade.  I feel as if I should just give up trying and settle down! ;)

Twitter, What?

by Kieran

I’ve been surfing the net a lot recently just generally having a look around and finding a phenomenal amount of posts about the serious love for Twitter.  Can I just ask this one vital question; why?  What benefit does it have? It reminds me of Facebook status updates, something which I typically refrain from using because I just can’t see the point in them.  Twitter is completely devoted to ask the ultimate question of "what are you doing?" and allowing people all over the globe to simply find out what you are doing.

I’d rather read a post about time-wasting than read someone’s current status.  Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t keep up with Internet trends.

Harmful Generics

by Kieran

A few years ago, whilst I was using Java 1.4 I was introduced to the newer features of Java, more notably generics.  Once I had learnt how to use them correctly I thought they were an absolute blessing from the monkeys at Sun.  More recently, however, I’ve had a number of people point out to me that they’re not as useful as one may assume them to be, and in fact cause more problems rather than solve them.  The reason I use generics is for applications that deal with objects at such an abstract level that they could never really determine what type of object they are unless some seriously awful code was lurking around (which I have been known to do).

I was writing an application dealing with Shape objects, with a lot of help from a certain someone.  I had to be able to draw Shape objects to screen but without knowing their type as they were being serialized and received over a network connection.  I literally couldn’t find out what type of object they were unless I did some very static type checking, which is something I wanted to avoid.  Furthermore I had a draw(Shape s) method which took the generic type and drew it to screen using its own method with the correct graphics context.  So in this case I ended up calling s.draw(g); which is a solution I admittedly found over at Java Ranch.  In my opinion, using generics in this case is absolutely fine, because there is a type hierarchy, and it is ever-expanding so the abstract approach using generics was beneficial.

Ken Arnold clears up some of his issues with generics by looking into recursive (or circular) types such as Enum<E extends Enum<E>>, something which scares the crap out of me, that’s for sure.  However, if you read through the comments you’ll find some insightful comments on generics, namely that they were poorly introduced, or they shouldn’t be mixed with arrays whatsoever, and as some people point out, C++’s template system is far more complex.  I’d like more insight into this area as for me generics are a day-to-day, run-of-the-mill usage of language features.  I actually don’t know how else I would approach problems without them.  Perhaps this could be compared to activists who disagree with OOP?

Note: I am aware generics was a Java 5 feature, it’s just it was previewed during Java 1.4 ;)

Getting Stuck Into VB.NET

by Kieran

I’ve taken some time out today to go over some of VB.NET’s language features and general "dialect".  It’s a very odd language and seems as if it has been patched together from remnants of a shabby past.  There are language features that still exist in it which are both nonsensical and medieval, for example "Sub" which doesn’t seem to relate to anything.  Modules are a way to call statically from a console application, instead of starting the application through a form, yet are more of a deprecated VB6 feature.

Everything I’ve worked with feels to me as if the VB6 developers just really didn’t want to let go of the language after it became a language of the past with competing languages steadily overtaking.  The grammar behind it has been changed into less understandable things based on everything that is taught in the computer science field such as static memory, public, private, and protected access modifiers which are a common grammar amongst many-a-language.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with coding in it, and I’m already getting the hang of it, but it just feels as if pushing .NET on VB was a "last hope" of making the language last another 5-10 years.

Sure, it’s all a part of the .NET framework, so the language doesn’t particularly matter all too much, but I honestly don’t see the big hype around it.  For a start, it’s nothing new, runtime environments were around for years before .NET came on the scene.  The library features just feel like a direct copy of the JDK (another reason why I shouldn’t have much of a problem with getting on with it), and the language itself has just been made to be more understandable, although I believe that’s far from the truth.

Understandability, of course, doesn’t just come from a natural use of language when it comes to software development.  As developers, we’re taught to use a standard set of language features, and these are typically copied over into other languages.  Compare, for example, C, C++, PHP, Java and more.  If you can get on with one of these, then there’s a good chance you’ll feel comfortable with the rest.  Some other languages overstep the bounds however, although it does confuse me greatly, because C# fits into a category snugly with Java.

So finally I have to sum it up as follows:

  • It’s nothing new
  • In effect, it could reduce productivity due to its highly different nature
  • It’s all a part of .NET, therefore language doesn’t have much of an impact, this is down to familiarity more than anything
  • It’s an old language that has been revived

Again, this doesn’t mean I have a problem with it, and I’m more than happy to work with it, and what I have learnt so far is great as I’m feel more comfortable with it.  Perhaps I’ll learn to love it even more so in the future, but I’m honestly shocked at how vastly it is used in the industry today.  In fact, a good four or five colleagues of mine are using it in full-time jobs.  I guess of course, it’s entirely dependant on the application being developed.

How To Screw Up Your Degree

by Kieran

I’ve just got back from a two hour exam on data structures and advanced programming.  I know the course content like the back of my hand, yet today I’ve left that exam room knowing I’ve got a 2:1 in my degree.  Why? You may ask.  Because I spent almost three quarters of an hour answering one of the biggest questions of a breadth-first topological ordering of an acyclic directed graph where I later found that I had missed out one of the vertices in the adjacency list.  That’s right, it does screw up the entire answer, so guess what I spent the next half an hour doing? Almost having a panic attack.

Additionally, this exam was the ultimate finish to my degree, because if I had got a first in it (which I haven’t) I would’ve got a first in my degree.

How pissed off am I? I’ve just thrown a first class honours degree down the drain all because I messed up one question in the exam.  One bloody question.  I feel physically sick.  Oh, and we did figure out the markings afterwards, and I haven’t got every other question correct as was rightly pointed out to me.  Because I ended up panicking so much I ended up screwing up some of the final questions.

Joy to the world.

EDIT: Well, due to my extenuating circumstances (that is, because I’m officially not supposed to be at university this year due to illness) I’m allowed to defer meaning I can retake the exam in July and still get the maximum amount of marks.  It does mean however that I’ll need to re-study the course material, and I will have a different exam paper, but it gives me an extra chance to get a first class grade.

A Safe Landing

by Kieran

I’ve always enjoyed watching anything to do with space on TV, especially with all of the Mars landings.  Today the Phoenix craft landed successfully, and after watching the videos on the landing process I was amazed.  It’s quite a futuristic landing using thrusters to come to a halt and then just dropping.  Usually craft of this type just make their landing using just parachutes, but I assume they couldn’t in this case because the probe isn’t designed to move, therefore the parachutes couldn’t get in the way.

The one thing that gets me is that when you see the videos of the probes, you don’t get a real feel for it, especially for their size as they seem so small.  Well, I ran across this picture today showing the real size of it, and it’s a crazy amount bigger than I thought.  It’s "little" digger arm must be quite large.

Why An Upper-Second Degree Classification Is Okay

by Kieran

In recent months I have been obsessing over my degree classification.  Based on the methods of calculating my degree there are a few that could possibly apply, but the most appealing one would require me getting a first class grade in an exam I’m about to take on Tuesday.  The likelihood of me getting this grade is quite slim, not because I don’t know the course material, but because of the style of questions presented in third level exam papers which instead of asking logical questions with single answers, instead ask you questions you would have never seen before and challenge you to find an answer and how you reached that answer.

Many colleagues around me have already got their first class degree based on their average from last semester, unfortunately for me however I concentrated on a particular field more so than others which sure enough gave me one of the best grades in the class, yet it meant I suffered in other areas.  I asked a friend of mine what their degree classification was and they gave me some interesting insight into their degree which made me feel quite satisfied and less worried as to my future.  "Your degree classification should reflect your natural ability, not your pushed ability, unless of course you want to be stressed in your future jobs".  Listening to this made me feel content, that’s for sure.  I’ve been pulling my hair out over my degree classification for the reason that I’m currently averaging 71% meaning that I need to get 75% in my next exam.  This means that if I fall short, even my a couple of percent, then I’m miss my first class grade.

What I don’t realise, in the bigger scheme of things, is that (supposedly) a 2:1 grade is in fact above average in my particular field of study, which shocked me.  The thing with degree classifications is they work differently from what we’ve experienced our entire lives.  A’s, B’s and C’s fell into areas such as 80+, 70+ and 60+ where as degrees fall into "if it’s more than 70%, you’ve got yourself a first" which doesn’t feel like much, but relative to degree-level education, it’s actually quite high.  As family and university staff have pointed out to me - being a perfectly valid point - is that just over a year ago I lay on a hospital bed on a life support machine.  Now I hate to use this, I really do, because I’d rather not use it for an excuse, yet disregarding the fact as an excuse it is an observation worth taking note of.  The truth is that the doctors told me I definitely wouldn’t go back to my job (I was on my placement at the time) and I may - and they used may in the strongest sense - be able to go back to university.  Here I am after almost 9 months of university still battling on with my exams.  My illness has caused some prolonged effects which have had an impact on me in the last few months, of which I will not go into details.  Let’s not forget that I’m getting married in just over two months either.

Whether I get a first class grade, or an upper second grade, what I have to realise is that I am still an achiever regardless of how I may compare myself to others around me.  I will still enjoy my work, I will still be able to perform, and I will still be employable in my field of work.  A first class grade is an added bonus, sure, from here on out I’m looking at a more exciting future with more experience being gained than ever before with extra time to concentrate on the things I really love doing.  The problem I have is that every single friend I seem to have either has a first class grade, or is definitely going to get one.  I say, good for them, and I really am pleased for them, but I’d rather be happy then obsess over it, not achieve it, then spend the next few years being bitter over it.

I want to be happy as an average university student, and that’s what I’m going to do! :D

(just as a side note, some exciting things are about to happen over at reformsoft!)

Stupid Web Payment Systems

by Kieran

I have a serious hate towards web payment systems that fail to load on the final booking page.  It’s happened to me before, then I’ve ended up making two payments.  Tonight I booked our boat trip back home for when I finish university only to find the final page didn’t load up.  After waiting for quite a while it was obvious nothing was going to happen, so I just closed the page.  I then checked my e-mails to see if I had got a confirmation and waited a while to make sure the mail server retrieved everything that was most up-to-date and nothing came through.  Knowing it hadn’t confirmed it I re-booked the trip (they’re not cheap either), which went very smoothly and I was presented with the "success" page for the payment.  I then check my e-mails to find two confirmations, one for the previous attempt, and one for the one that worked without a hitch.

I understand what it’s like to code web systems, I’ve had to do it before, but there needs to be something more rock-solid in there checking against pages which don’t load.  Otherwise, customers have to look at it, know it didn’t complete successfully and either phone up the company they’re dealing with the next day, or phone their bank to see if any charges have been made.  It all causes unnecessary hassle.  Perhaps the web systems should notice payments made with the same details and give the user a warning that a booking under the same name / card has been made in that evening?

Either way, we’re going to have to phone up on a high-tariff line just to cancel a booking which their system screwed up.  These things annoy the crap out of me.

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