JoshuaScotton.com

That’s it… I’ve finished my honours degree! YAY!

The final exams today seemed to go well so I now await my final degree classification after my exam results come out in December.

I’ve just finished the final mock exam for the courses I’m currently revising for. I have two exams on Friday, both of them are three hours long, with a break of one and a half hours in between.

Revision is going well at the moment and I think I’ll get my target results. The one thing I’m worried about is how my hand is going to respond to six hours of almost non-stop hand writing.

As I use email and messenging as my main form of non-verbal communication I don’t physically write that much normally, so my revision has been as much about getting my hand writing legible as it has about studying the course!

In other news Entertainer 0.2 is very much on the horizon, hopefully we’ll see it released before the end of the next sprint over this coming weekend.

I’ll be going now to type my notes out…

I played the front nine at a very wet Brailsford Golf Course on Wednesday.

The picture is from behind the right bunker on the first hole.

I got my first par score on hole 4 which is a par 3 so I was quite pleased with myself.

Golf is one of those sports where even if you are playing pretty awfully (which I am most of the time) it is still great fun.

I’ve finally come up with a revision plan for my exams in October. I’ve taken the specimen exam this week and as there aren’t any past papers I’m re-reading the 12 textbooks and then taking the specimen again.

Hopefully this will show up the areas which I’ll be needing to work hard on in the last week leading up to the exams.

I decided earlier this week that I’d better start work on my next assignments which are due in early September.

As they are the last assignments for the two courses I am currently studying for (actually my last two in this degree) I’m not allowed any extension period so I had worked through the books faster than usual to give myself ample time for the assignments.

It’s a good job I did because three computer and laptops, four operating systems and seventy-two hours later I had only just managed to get the particular netbeans project I would be working on for the first (M362) assignment to run!

My head was ready to explode as I faced every obscure error in the book, NullPointer and  ClassNotFound exceptions abounded as I tackled problems on both Ubuntu and Windows XP on my laptop, then it was Java Web Start and Glassfish problems on another. When I finally got worried that I was running out of computers to install Java SDK 1.6 + Netbeans 5.5.1 + Glassfish + Java DB it finally worked.

So much for a headstart, I’m just about ready to start the assignment now, half a week later!

Let’s just hope I don’t get problems with the second assignment…

As I finished another OU assignment yesterday, I only have two more assignments and two more exams until I’ve finished my OU degree.

As I’ve been doing a lot of python programming recently it’s been wierd trying to get back into Java programming for the assignments. Using Netbeans does make the transisition a little easier as it always reminds me when I’ve left out a semi-colon here and a “}” there.

I had to get an extension for this assignment because of the exam revision for M366 taking up a lot of time, however it’s finished now and I can concentrate on finishing off the two remaining courses.

I’ve just go back from taking my final exam for M366 Artificial intelligence. It was a tough exam but I think I’ve done ok.

Just two courses left before my final final exams in September and then I’ve completed the honours degree!

I think I’ll go watch Italy and France play football and relax now…

Finally finished reading through Block 4 of M366 on Neural Networks.

Fascinating stuff, I particularly enjoyed the way you can train a simple network to sort complicated input patterns into the right categories etc.

Elman’s word clustering in his semantic experiments is amazing, especially the way that the network clusters related words into lexical groups while it is being trained to guess the next letter in a sequence!

Anyway, now that I am ahead of schedule with this course, I can now finish off reading the other courses’ books before continuing with the assignments.

I finally finished off my M366 assignment today and submitted it via the OU’s ever helpful eTMA. Boy did I miss the online submissions when I was doing my math courses last year.

This means that I have a tiny bit more free time to spend on other stuff, like pimping this blog with a shiny new Ubuntu badge that you can see to your right (courtesy of crunchbang.org)

Also I can start reading the course books for my two new courses starting February, M362 and M257.

Luckily both course make use of Java and Netbeans, which I have used before, so the learning curve will be smoother than with M366 (for which I had to learn NetLogo in about 2 days to finish off an assignment)

Hope you all had a great Christmas!

Got my third year results from the Open University and they were good enough to keep me on target for my first class overall, so I’m very pleased with them.

Have a great New Year

LIPS Paintball Shop provide a fantastic service. I sent off my air bottle on Monday, they fixed it on Tuesday and sent it courier back to me today (Wednesday). I’d broken the fill valve O-ring but it’s all fixed and ready to go when I next play paintball.

When I next play paintball depends on how fast I finish off my first M366 (Artificial Intelligence) assignment. It’s due on the 11th December and I’m hoping to paintball for the final time this year on the 8th.

I got round to studying today and have got 1/4 done so far so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.