Paul's Blog

…but I’ve finally got round to posting again… Since my last post, I’ve been rather busy, with the Spring term and all the work that went with it, and for the past 11 weeks I’ve been on placement (nearly half way )

So.. the Spring term… the group project was completed and the presentation went well. Everybody seemed suitably impressed, which we weren’t entirely expecting. Coursework was rather unfairly balanced with some courses having much more than others. Apparently many weeks of work is worth the same 16% of a course as a single, quite short piece… The exams were once again crammed into a single day (apart from the business exam, which was multiple choice anyway). This time, one exam had a third of the paper on something that was only briefly mentioned as a side note on the course website and never even mentioned in the lectures. Suffice to say I couldn’t answer that one, but then that seemed to be a problem faced by most people.

Over my one week Easter holiday, I built my sister’s website. She designed it of course… Other than that I took a bit of time to just relax. Not that there was really enough time for that.

In April, I started my industrial placement at Bloomberg, where I’ll be working until September. It’s a pretty good place to work, with a fairly relaxed atmosphere and lots of fish… not to mention free snacks and coke (Coca-Cola and Pepsi… you’ve got to have a choice ). I seem to be spending my time writing C++ for the server side, and JavaScript for the client, although I’m not going to go into the details of my work, and I am really enjoying it. The money comes in handy too… If you find yourself somewhere around Moorgate station, a trip to Whitecross Street market is quite a good place for lunch with a wide variety of different things to choose from.

Aside from all the work, I’ve had a number of days out in the park enjoying the warm weather (at least the periods of it that we’ve had), as well as a weekend by the sea in Worthing and a few barbecues. That does seem to be the benefit of doing a proper job rather than being a student all the time… the weekends are completely free for me to do what I want, work stays at work.

I’ve also started reading again… It’s been far too long since I really sat down and read a book, so I’m completing my Discworld collection. I’ve just finished the Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, which for some reason I’d never read before, having only seen the Sky adaptation of them, and am about the start on Moving Pictures… The ones in between are all sat on my shelf at home, so I’ll just fill in the gaps. One day I’ll read the whole series in order, but I think I’ll leave that for a while.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to. There’s probably something I’ve forgotten, but that’s what happens when you don’t post anything for 5 months.. it probably wasn’t important anyway

Once again, most of the country’s been brought to a standstill by snow… It might just be justified where I live though, with over a foot of snow falling from 5pm on Tuesday night, and for most of Wednesday. It’s more snow than I’ve ever seen in England, and caused many people to be stranded on the A3 overnight… Roads all around the town were essentially impassable causing all sorts of transport problems.

It was quite tricky to walk through it, with it being up to my knees in some places, but there were quite a few places where it had made a really nice view. After walking around for a while, we ended up at the pub for a drink before heading back home. Later in the afternoon, we helped next door build their igloo, finishing it just after it got dark.

All in all, it was a nice day, I’m just hoping it will have cleared enough for me to get back to London at the weekend…

Another year has passed, and frankly, the end of it was a bit hectic! I didn’t manage to start any Christmas shopping until I was home as for some reason I didn’t seem to have any free time for the last few weeks of term. Thankfully, I managed to get all of the things I needed to buy, partly thanks to the free trial of Amazon Prime… Free next day delivery really is nice, even if Royal Mail made it take 2 days to arrive. I’m not sure it’s really worth paying for though, so I’ll probably end up cancelling my subscription.

The snow was a nice surprise for December, with it very nearly being a White Christmas for me! Unfortunately the snow had just about melted by Christmas Day. Luckily, the snow didn’t have any effect on my exams, despite it snowing the night before. It’s probably just as well that there wasn’t more snow in London that week, as the last time it snowed, TfL didn’t really seem to manage very well!

My exams for the term (because we’re not around to have them in the Summer) seemed to go quite well, although starting at 9am was a little bit tough. They were both over by lunchtime, leaving us time to have a nice lunch in Eastside before our trip around the not-so-Circle Line. We also did Secret Santa whilst we were there, and I got a giant Gummi Bear, which really is a great present!

Once again, I saw in the New Year at the Fireworks on Embankment, surrounded with food and drink down in Stockwell. The fireworks were great as normal, and just afterwards it started to snow, albeit only for a short time. It’s just a slight shame that the hot dog seller didn’t seem to have cooked the onions very well…

Have a very happy 2010!

With the release of Windows 7, and the fact that I can get it free from MSDNAA, I decided to leave Vista behind and upgrade. I also decided to move to the 64 bit version.

The only problem I’ve had so far seems to be a rather strange configuration issue in Apache, but I’ve managed to work around that until I find out what’s going wrong. Everything else I’ve tried to install has worked just fine.

All of the hardware that I’ve connected so far has worked without a problem, although I did have to dig around a bit for Memory Card Reader drivers as Acer don’t seem to provide 64-bit drivers for my model.

I quite like some of the new features in 7, for example, the way you can use a slideshow for the desktop background and the new aero features when you hover over a window thumbnail or show desktop. It’s a shame Firefox doesn’t yet have support for giving thumbnails for each tab.

Jump lists are also quite useful, providing quick and easy access to recently used or favourite files. I’ve pinned a few folders that I use frequently to the Explorer jump list on my taskbar.

The new version of Virtual PC for Windows 7 is also a great improvement over the previous version. It seems to run well and allows you to run applications on the guest machines as though they were installed in the host, which is quite useful for testing web sites in IE6. Ubuntu seems to work in it as long as “i8042.noloop” is added as a boot option to make the mouse work, although I can’t seem to get the Virtual Machine Additions to work. Maybe I should try SuSE (which is actually supported with the VMAs).

Overall I’m pretty pleased with the Windows 7 experience and am glad that I've updated from Vista. I’m sure other features will come to my attention as I continue to use it…

Results are out for another year, and were actually better than I expected. Fortunately I didn’t fail anything, and my coursework seemed to be good enough to bring my overall grade up. I was pleasantly surprised by the results of some of my exams, and some others were about what I had expected. I’m still on course for a first at the end, so that’s good.

The group project went fairly well, despite us trying to demonstrate some broken functionality in the presentation. Our game probably could have been much better if we’d only had more time, but I guess they didn’t expect anything too spectacular with only 4 weeks to write it.

I did quite enjoy the hot weather of the past couple of weeks, although I probably should have tried to get out more in it. It’s just a shame that the tube doesn’t really have any way to cool the carriages down… the Central Line was really hot in the sunshine, and I would probably have been a bit better off taking the bus instead.

I managed to watch quite a bit of Wimbledon on TV this year. It was good, although it would probably have been nice to see Murray get to the final, but there’s always next year. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to watch the final between Federer and Roddick, and from the score and the clips I have seen, I missed a good match. I suppose I can always watch the highlights on iPlayer…