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

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!

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.