Monday 30 September 2013

Teething problems.

Well, after the confusion over my time table for the MSc Computing at Birmingham City University, I find myself in a nightmare situation of having to study Databases again; a subject that I don't get on with, that is confusing and much too high brow for me.

On Friday afternoon, just before leaving work, I discovered that the Database for Enterprise was scheduled for Monday morning at 9am. This was obviously short notice (especially for my employer), and to add insult to injury, the lecturer has not yet turned up nearly 30 minutes after the lecture was due to begin. I hope that this is teething problems, but with the lost time already (as there wasn't a lecture last week apparently), it's looking increasing unlikely that this will be a module that I'll pass because there simply won't be enough time left to cover everything that I need to know if we're running two weeks behind the proposed schedule, especially as I don't have access to the teaching material associated with this module.

Thursday 26 September 2013

Now linked.

If you're reading this through BCU Moodle/iCity or whatever it is and wondering how I got so many posts, well I linked my Moodle blog to my Gaming and Technology blog. Most impressively, considering how useless the SharePoint interface usually is, it actually works! Oh, and you may have just got a lot of SPAM to your bcu mail account - sorry about that.

Anyways, today was my first lecture on the MSc Computing, and it's my favourite subject too - computer programming and software development. I'm really going to enjoy this C# stuff I think.

I emailed the lecturer Steve about a site which goes some way to explaining how computers do mathematics, and why you may end up with rounding errors - the link is floating-point-gui.de, and I recommend it for all budding developers. Although this sort of thing may go beyond the scope of the module, if there's any interested programmers and developers who want to chat about more advanced programming topics then just nudge me. Whatever my Uni ID says, I use my middle name (just to confuse everyone) - don't be shy as I don't usually bite.

Hello World... again.

Yet again, I find myself a student. This time, it's at the Birmingham City University, and - oddly enough - I'm studying MSc Computing.

Today was my first lecture: Systems Development, or more precisely, C# Programming, and even though it's a Masters, there's still the need to go through the print "Hello Mum"; or whatever to get the basics of the language. Thankfully, I had some writing to do though, so I sort of did that during the lecture. So, look out for news of a Pitfall clone for the Commodore VIC 20 and some ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 news in a Micro Mart issue soon.