JoshuaScotton.com

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…

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)