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Today was quite a relaxing day, B wanted to borrow my digital camera so I told her to meet me in Putney at 3. I managed to arrive there at 1 and chill out at the Natural Cafe, it’s pretty awesome I must say. The teas they make are pretty taste, I had myself a nice teapot of Earl Grey whilst doing my project report (nearly finished haha). The main reason I went there was because of the Free Wifi Hotspot, however upon sitting down and trying browse through my usual sites, it seems that the internet was unresponsive, I mean I got it connecting and everything, but you couldn’t surf whatsoever. Maybe that’s how they lure customers! FREE WIFI HOTSPOTS, but no internet connection on the hotspot.
When B came we had a quick chat, shared a muffin, B drank some of my Earl Grey and she was off.
I’m quite keen on sitting at that place every day and doing work there, its just a nicer atmosphere (not to mention you’re kinda forced to do work due to the lack of things you can do with a Linux laptop lacking in games or music). But I guess the travel and cost for tea makes it not worth going there. I’m nearly done with the project initiation document anyway so its cool.
Went to lecture today, was a waste of time, should of stayed at home and continued on report. Managed to juice out my laptop batteries near the end of the lecture, didnt charge it last night so I’m pretty impressed that it managed to serve me for 2 days worth of work.
Agenda:
- Prototype demonstration + review and quick feedback
- Project Initiation Document review and feedback
- Discuss about project weighting
- Discuss use of design techniques, whether Agile and XP are appropriate
- Implementation routes; Wordpress + Plugin vs Hardcoded PHP vs Ruby on Rails
- Do I need to talk about platforms and applications to write the script?
- Planning methods to use (i.e. Gantt, Pert etc)
- Suggestions for other research material to include on PID
Any other business:
Action/Targets:
Next Meeting:
TBA
The thing is crazy. Drop me an email or text if you’re bored haha
After a rather dull week attending uni, I’m glad to say it’s now Reading week. Technically it should be a time for people to finish their coursework, revise for their exams or mingle with their associates. Though for me, this week off will be the perfect time for some ultra extreme coding. I’m hoping to ACTUALLY finish the whole individual project site by the end of reading week so I can kind of relax for the rest of the year haha (Well I most likely will need to get some writeup sorted as well).
But yeah. Thats probably the main focus of reading week, will hopefully make a visit to B’s college as well. She’s been dying for me to pay a visit to her place so now’s probably the chance.
So here’s a list of things to do and things NOT to do for the week
- DO spend copious amounts of hours coding for your individual project
DO visit B’s college- DO update the blog with whats going on (in particular the individual project stuff, it will be good to keep track of what has happened throughout the year)
- DO ensure that the room is clean so I can work more efficiently (I’ve worked out that I only work hard when the room is clean)
- DO relax a bit
- DON’T play counter strike: source all day, especially that mode where you fight off 20 terrorists with rusty knives
- DON’T play piano all day too, though its fun it should be done sparingly
- DON’T buy a macbook/imac/mac pro/mac book pro on impulse, which leads me to another don’t
- DON’T listen to kev’s shopping advices they’re usually 3 words…”Go for it”
- DON’T overkill on your laptop, yes eyecandy and desktop customisation is fun, but its USELESS haha
- DON’T stay up too late, its bad
Hopefully I’ll abide to them
Managed to contact Jonathan Briggs after his lecture today and got him to become my supervisor. I’m very glad I have him as a supervisor because he definitely knows his stuff (being a professor and all). He’s already given me some work to do, this includes:
- First thing he asked me was “If i asked you to do the project in 2 weeks, what would you do?”, my reply to that was “Powercode!!!”, he said that was the correct thing to do and told me I should give him a very rough but functioning prototype of the project, the good thing about doing some powercoding now is that you dont have to powercode at the end of it all, which is definitely a plus. Afterwards we would simply improve the site one by one, also making sure that if I took any shortcuts, I’d probably have to make sure its done the right way, the idea of it is to simply expand a fully loaded project until it gets its grades, rather then go through the typical process, only to find out you dont have time for implementing the thing and will resort to powercoding at the end (which is alot more painful at the last minute). So yeah, 2 weeks, a fully implemented site that “kinda” works. I’m quite keen on powercoding I must say
- He also asked me to produce a list of all the buzzwords that I intended to use to for the project and begin to prioritise on which ones will work and which ones wont, probably a nice way of brainstorming ideas for the project and all
So those are my two targets, the former being the most important one, so now I’m just going nuts with the coding and ensuring that I get something done. Its definitely not a good sight I must say but its worth the shot.
Like I said, a very good supervisor for a project 
Must say, never saw this one coming. Thought this would be done during the holidays, but now I really have to backtrack on what I did beforehand. Thank god I stopped at April the 10th. Got may, june, july to sort out haha (so about 12 chunky paragraphs and thats sorted). Then I have a 3000 word report to do, but that can easily be managed.
Previously, I have emailed Jonathan Briggs back about my ideas and whether or not he wants me to be my supervisor, havent got back to him yet, however, I have got replies from Andrew Leneghan, we would like to meet up for a quick discussion about the whole project he wishes me to do.
We’ve also got information about who are project advisors are, my advisor is Beryl Jones, she’s a Principal Lecturer & Field Leader for Information Systems. I’ve had her for my database modules and got an A out of it. Hopefully she can help me out a great deal.
I’ve organised to meet Andrew today and just emailed Beryl right now about my current situation in terms of project ideas, read on for the complete email (quite long winded)
Today I managed to approach Jonathan Briggs, a very successful person in the whole CMS/ecommerce side (joint owner of a company called www.othermedia.com) I showed him three ideas that I was hoping to do for my final year project, they included:
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