406 Not Acceptable

Woo, finally recieved my final mark. Thanks to a nice (or should that be agonising suspense from a?) text message and later some sneaky student taking photographs of the results board. I was nowhere to be seen, as I couldn’t be arsed to drive 60 miles to find my results. Is it worth me repeating my grade?

On the flip side, as not everything can be rosy, I tried to get an easy job. After what must have been the easiest interview I have ever had, I was deemed overqualified. That really is annoying… as anything (well apart from working in a coffee shop) will do.

Applied for a ton of IT jobs, but I fear my non-existant experience really hinders me…

Strangely enough a temping agency turned me down, as I had no recent office experience (quite obvious really, I have been busy at university this past year…)  What was annoying was that I had been advised by friends and family that this would be the best way to gain aforesaid experience.

The job hunt continues…

Oh and yes, I know I incorrectly spelt underqualified and overqualified in the title.

This happened ages ago, but was rather annoying. Must have been a all nighter due to some project… lets hope this does not occur on Monday night/Tuesday morning…

My last 60 pence too!

In a strange move, you can’t move an image down the page in Wordpress 2.6 if there is no text above it. Makes me think: bug, feature, or hidden button? Mmm… medium picture size is tiny too, I don’t really want to resize my photos down to 640×480 every time. That images shows what Wordpress does to a nice 5 mega pixel picture if you let it loose.

Will there be another picture next week? Will there be the shock of another post tomorrow? Who knows, accidentally stumble here thanks to the wonders of Google to find out!

As you may have noticed, I’ve changed the theme on this site to Diary Notes. I found one annoying issue with the theme — the author decided to leave his/her meta tags in. Mmm… not so smart! I don’t think many people will want those in!

So this post is just to make sure the happy google bot has another look at this site, before the dodgy tags break stuff. Nice to see that this site actually ranks in google these days.

Project inspection/demonstration on Tuesday (silly department can’t organise themselves.) Now, that’s not so bad… but its at 9:30 in the morning! No I am not that lazy, it’s just I live around an hour and a half from Birmingham — that’s without the morning traffic! Lucky for me the drive in means I’ll be on the main commuting road in my county… and I have to pass through another city… brilliant! So I’ll have to set off well before 7 am to give myself the time so set things up for the demonstration.

In even better news, I should see my project supervisor beforehand. Now I can’t do that on Tuesday, so I have to go in on Monday too!

Perhaps an allnigher will occur? Me thinks so!

I’ve decided that it would be best to me to hold back any articles on J2Me until after I have finished my project. I am not doing this because I do not have the time, but instead for plagiarism purposes. After all I would be posting code from my project onto this site and that may flag up on some plagiarism detection program and give me some serious hassle. The bigger issue is if anyone steals the content from this site (unlikely) and that gets picked up… then I’d have even more hassle to deal with.

Anyway, expect this stuff in September/October. I’ll have a few articles written ready for when I finish the project.

What’s really annoying is that some people get an extra 4 days to do their coding… that’s not what I’d be calling fair…

Well so far, anyhow it’s time to celebrate! Well, somewhat… I’ve got a project to do!

Over the summer (read till October,) I’ll be busy working on my project; hopefully it won’t mean a massive lack of activity like my exams caused. In fact I should be able to write up some tips on using J2Me as I go along. I am rather lucky as I managed to persuade my supervisor to let me develop a game using J2Me, which should be lots of fun to make and test

I have noticed that although there are a few good sites, tutorials, and guides on developing games for J2Me; there is a distinct lack of help on how to use the Visual Game Designer and Visual Map Designer features that were introduced with Netbeans 6.0. (Correct me if I am wrong, but they weren’t in Netbeans 5.5.) Because these tools haven’t been around very long there is also a lack of books covering them. The only real useful information about using them is the sample ‘game’ included in the Netbeans Mobility pack. So when I get the time I’ll provide a guide on using these tools for a simple ‘game’.

In addition, I should be able to host the odd version of the game. As it will need testing on multiple devices and I can’t just go out and buy a load of phones! Of course the emulators are useful, but there are situations where the device can act differently. I’ve noticed this being the case when using JSR-226: The 2D Vector Graphics API. Annoying really as Vectors can be a great tool for mobile games. With their being a number of resolutions to work with vectors have a great advantage over sprites, but with the low implementation of JSR-226 in devices, I’ll be overlooking them.

Back to beer!

With the final term of University comes the big push, exams are nigh! I hate exams, as I feel they are not a good indicator of ability; instead they reward memory skills more than actual ability or comprehension. Anyway, I have 3 exams in the space of 5 days in the middle of May, then one all alone in June. It’s not hard to guess where I will score my highest mark. I will be getting around two weeks of hardcore memorising for the last exam, meaning a high mark is, without major calamity, almost assured.

Bah, off to be grumpy and revise…

It seems by predictions for today were almost right, with Chelsea narrowly beating Arsenal 2-1 and Manchester United – helped by a slightly controversial sending off – thrashing Liverpool 3-0.

Right now I am still feeling the effects of Wednesday/Thursdays all nighter. I have felt sleepy ever since that crazy night of Java, I’ve even ran out of milk so I can’t keep myself going with cups of tea or coffee   What’s even more depressing is the fact I still have two assignments and revision to look forward to over the next 5 weeks, then exams after that. So I won’t get much time to relax over the ‘Easter holidays’ which basically started after easter, so really aren’t easter holidays at all.

Is not very productive. So far we’ve fixed 4 bugs, ate pizza, broke it, fixed it, one of us went to the gym, others slept, ate more crisps,  messed about by stealing monitors and keyboards to make the eee pc into a desktop,  did some overclocking, thought about java, and sulked over the lack of a kettle. So all in all a good use of time!

The group project is nearing the deadline and the coding side of the work seems to be complete (bar the guaranteed major bug.) I’ll be pulling another all-nighter tomorrow to help finish off the testing and written work.

After numerous last minute revisions to the protocol and the server everything back working again! Loving it when someone recodes the server, client, or protocol then comes up to you and says: “By the way, your Gui is broke.” Really? It was working when I updated and went to bed >:( Perhaps that has happened too many times in the last 5 days for me to care anymore…

Since I am knacked, heres a lovely (Java ish related) comic from xkcd to keep you entertained:

With just over one week to go it seems everyone in my Java group is burnt out. This just happens to be the perfect time for such an occurrence…

Work has seriously piled up over the past couple of weeks. I’ve got the main Java project, a bunch of complex SQL queries (because the database is so badly designed,) database diagrams, oh and some UML stuff. All that in just over a week, sounds easy!

In addition, I seem to have taken over the job of creating the GUI for the project – something I did not wish to handle; but with the way everything else is going, I think it would be easier to stick to doing something independent of the main work (the client program the GUI interacts with is pretty much finished.)

Now I am off to try and write some more useful things and do some work