EPTHi, it's J. I hope you are well. I have been in X for a few weeks now. It has been amazing to be in my own space at last. Though I was sick last week and it has been a bit stressful, I have mostly caught up with the things I'm supposed to be doing.
My degree course is Software Engineering and so for my "final project" grade I must plan and create a computer artefact. I'm still not sure exactly what to do but my latest idea was to make a set of tools that would allow someone to produce their own game easily by using the tools. It does not sound easy!
I have thankfully finally finished some of X's work ("The Man's work"). After doing it non-stop for days. This was a computer program to go through a website's pages and extract the data from them. A bit like going through the pages of a book, but imagine if the book had lots of little books inside it aswell. The challenge, for example, is that we are NOT allowed to refer to book titles or chapter headings and so must "count" and store counters on how "deep" we are into each sub-book, subtract from this when we go back a level, and CRUCIALLY for each sub-book be able to record how "far" down each page we have travelled prior to and aftrer entering a particular sub-book.
A good example of this nightmare is when I spent a good 1-2 hours coming up with this line:
pageNumberOfPage = Mid(pageNumberExtract,(InStr(pageNumberExtract, "of")+2),((InStr(pageNumberExtract,"EX")-1)-(InStr(pageNumberExtract, "of")+2)))
That line of code looks at these words on the webpage:
"Page 22 of 66"
And takes only the "66" part to store it for a further calculation.
There is of course a much easier way to do this but you live and learn!
Anyway enough of all that. I still have many new things to do. We have had Introduction classes to all of our units so it is highly evident that I have an endless amount of self-study to be getting on with. Our courseworks are things like "choose a topic relevant to the unit and produce an artefact or presentation related to it" so there is no delaying!
(for reference the units I have are
1) Computer security techniques (e.g. encryption)
2) Networked devices (e.g. mobile phones)
3) Mobile applications (e.g. what you see on your mobile phone screen, like the camera/messaging)
4) Academic Development (e.g. how to write properly - Yes I chose this one to make life easier!)
5) Software Engineering techniques (e.g. Project Planning)
6) Personal project
It's a good job I like computers. (Or do I?)
It is Saturday today, I expect you are having lunch. Perhaps a cream cake although I wouldn't like to assume.
I will stop writing now and wander into town to pay rent and possibly Gym which I have been AWOL for a few days. There is not too much to say, I have made a few friends but kept to myself after being sick last week and now sort of engrossing myself in this work. Which is good.
