Openlog - A Uni Blog

(I didn't blog on Wednesday... but never fear, the memory is still pretty fresh.)

Wednesday = Programming Fundamentals

I think writing out my notes is a good thing, especially for Prog Fun (Hehe). It may be less neat, but for some reason, I reckon it makes me understand it better. Well... I'm not really sure.

In any case, I looked over the notes the night before and went to the lecture, and then it was off to the first tutorial and lab. The tutorial I thought was fun, writing out the lines of code, and underlining methods, and classes, and objects and so on. The tutor commented that my writing was neat, and I guess it was. I haven't written anything in ages, and I think I'm making an attempt to be neat - the only thing is how long it can really last. That I know from experience. xD

The workshop was a bit harder, not to mention with the people on either side of me freaking me out with their skillz. Alright, I jest, but they completed it very quickly, whereas I worked quite slowly. I had some problems with the last section in particular, where you had to make a house from scratch. The problem was that I did not understand the code that Bluej gave me when I made the new class. Although the booklet did say we could copy the code from the moving the circle, I ... was quite stubborn. In the end, I had to copy anyway though, however to make it more unique, I tried to change the size and colour of the house. Black house + fuschia (it looked fuschia anyway) roof = odd house. I had to create some objects with the existing classes to try to see what kind of code I needed to write in, since the compiler kept telling me I made an error. The coding didn't seem exactly the same as what we did in our tutorial, nor did it match what I tried to look up in the textbook. I suppose I'll have to work this out later on and see what I can do now...?

And one of the members of the group changed classes, so it looks like we have to look for another member. I think there was someone I know from the Anime@UTS club who was not in a group, but I ... have actually forgotten his name...

Thursday = No classes. ^^;

Friday = Web Systems

I found Friday particularly fun. The lecture was pretty interesting, and I think Unix is pretty fascinating, as frustrating as it can be trying to get the Movie Player to work (but I think I overlooked some things there, so it really is my fault...). At any rate, the lecture was about file allocation methods and .... I actually wonder if I should defragment my disk, even though the lecturer mentioned newer versions don't really need defragmenting anymore. At any rate, the lecture was quick! As a friend commented, if only Prog Fund went this quickly! (Well, it's just that two hours can be a bit... taxing...)

The workshop we were working on LinuxGym. For some reason, my internet dropped out at first, so I couldn't access even Google and LinuxGym couldn't access the internet either, but then I logged off and back in and it seemed to fix itself, so I got it working. I have realised that it seems that LinuxGym doesn't work in certain situations.

But back a few steps. My friend next to me (no full names, but his name is James) was having a little trouble with LinuxGym. First of all his folders were all missing (like the ch1-fdr (?) and the rest), so he had to manually make them (actually the first exercise's question was not very clear, and didn't mention it had to be in the chapter 1 folder until we clicked 'mark'). And then on the third part of it, LinuxGym froze and he had to close it. But when he reopened it, it would not log him in.

This is what I realised. I told him to try relogging into the online er, site? (the 192.168..... etc) and then try to log into LinuxGym, and it worked. LinuxGym will not work without an internet connection, and it will not work unless you are logged into that IP address either. I think the connection from before must have timed out, just like the Juniper Network Security things for UTS Wireless. If you break off from the Wireless, you have to close the Juniper security before trying to log back in to use the Wireless or it will not work.

I feel like UTS's technology can be so temperamental.

But we finished the questions, helping each other. James did a few typos at one point, or couldn't find the right thing to type and I'd show him, and I'd make a typo and it wouldn't work and I'd consult with him. I also helped the person next to me, and some people behind me before while doing the calender thing. I'd always spelt calender as calender, but the site wanted us to store it as 'calendar' which was why we'd keep getting the question wrong. I guess this hones our observational skills. :D

All in all, although we all had some problems trying to get everything to work, it was quite fun, particularly the helping others. xD I do like to make people happy, and then I'm happy too. And helping people makes me happy too. Maybe it was my attitude the previous week that I felt so down and depressed about university. But now it seems pretty exciting, except for all the things due - that makes me quite apprehensive. >_<

I also made an error before. The IT wireless network (which the Student Centre has no idea about) is actually called UPNFIT. Which everyone calls upen-fit, but I always just call it U-P-N-F-I-T. I think that's just a habit I have of reading everything in Caps, as just the letters? Unless it's during internet conversation of course.

This afternoon (4-7) I also had a good time with the Anime@UTS club, watching several shows. We watched Mr Brain, a japanese drama which was quite.... odd and hilarious and... odd. And then watched Baka to Test to Shokanjuu and Seitokai no Ichizon which parodied some other shows. Some things I didn't get and I wonder at my anime knowledge, but then again... I do read more manga than I watch anime anyway, so I wonder if that can be excused.

Then we also watched Detroit Metal City which made me want to crawl under the table and hide there for a few hours. I don't know those people. xD It.... was not my type of show, is all I can really say...

I guess that's all for now? Unless I've forgotten something. The club as an Art/Mecha Jam tomorrow, so I'll be going for a while, then I need to get some new clothes. I'm kind of running out with uni, since although wearing the same outfit is not unusual... well wearing the shirt 4 days in a row isn't something people want to see either... But I need to work! *worry*

Tuesday = Introduction to Information Systems

Agenda:
- Teamwork

Todays IIS was so-so, teaching us about teamwork. I'd read some of the resources posted on the UTSOnline beforehand - which made all of us groan upon reading the dreaded word belonging off the screen off my Netbook - and had thought over some of my experiences of groupwork before, seeing reasons which people would work in groups and the way some groups function.

My experience has not all been good of course. No finger pointing, but obviously there have been cases of some people not pulling their weight and not meeting deadlines (of course, they tell me this is something definitely to be expected). Given the opportunity, I think I can be a pretty good team leader, it's just that although I can be somewhat organised, have direction and so on, I'm just too lenient of a person, and if someone ends up not finishing something or there's something unclaimed, I would go and do it myself. Perhaps some of it has to do with the fact that I rather like to do some on-hand work - which is why I've always been a little apprehensive about Management positions. Do they still get the chance to actually do on-hand work rather than to instruct others on what work they should be doing? So far, I get the impression that it's not all like that, of course, from the sponsor visits, however, this still has not completely reassured me. I suppose time may tell.

In any case, although the teamwork session was not necessarily something I would not have realised in due time, I know now what to look for, since it has been pointed out to me. When you hear about it, the reaction you get is that it's not something that you don't know (at least if you are thinking rationally), but when in the actual situation, it doesn't hit you until later... This is nothing particularly surprising, and is often the case. I hope that I can see such a situation approaching before it happens and causes us a dilemma however.

Tutorial
My first tutorial was somewhat odd. The teacher is a research student currently at UTS. Although we had been distributed sheets during the lecture about what would be happening within the tutorial session, we did not follow the sheet at all and instead did a lot of chatting about information systems.

After a cursory going around of the room with each person merely reading out their name and their desired result from the subject (obviously I'd want as high as I could...), we started talking about different information systems. I'd actually been looking forward to walking around in pairs, learning more about my class, but this obviously was not to be and was somewhat a disappointment for that reason.

Although the information systems discussion may be useful in the future (the failure of an information system), there was a point I mentioned about the speed of a system, like the speed in which it responds. I'm not exactly sure what he thought I said, although he seemed to grasp the point at the time, and yet he mentioned it again barely 5 minutes later, and I just sighed.

We formated our groups for Assignment 1. But due to the fact that I really didn't know anyone, since we pretty much skipped what we were supposed to do in that class, mostly the class appeared to form groups with people in their immediate area - obviously some of them knew each other - while the others sort of wandered around until they were invited into a group still missing members. Me and two other girls were at the front, and we looked at each other and asked where we lived. In terms of area of residence, it couldn't be a bigger nightmare, to be perfectly honest. I dread to think exactly how we shall work on the assignment with all of us present, unless we do it all at UTS, and yet we cannot pick a video store to research within the CBD (was this mentioned on the sheet, I am not clear, however I was not told this and someone else told me this).

At any rate, I'm not totally sure we were communicating in that class. A class about communicating, yet I felt like I was missing the tutor's every second word and he was missing every second word of ours, judging by the things he neglected to write up on the board as it was said. (Also I could not read his short hand. AC DE is what exactly? I can only GUESS it's supposed to be Account Details, since we were going through a diagram he'd drawn of a Banking system which I felt was seriously flawed.)

I am concerned.

Wish me luck.

Monday = Communications for IT Professionals.

Agenda:
- ACS Foundation ... talk
- Library talk on Online Resources
- Language Task

I did somewhat find the talk by the ACS Foundation quite intriguing, since halfway throughout that er... talk, I suppose it was (lecture? Not really) I realised that perhaps even though I'm in a course which is largely focused on programming and business, this doesn't mean I can't still be creative. I think what spurred this was probably when they were discussing the internships with different companies (which despite my Industry Study semester, I think I would be very interested to participate in, if possible!), and I saw the Adobe logo amongst the ones of the other participating companies.

This reminded me of the Refresh Roadshow day that happened a fortnight ago. I admit quite freely, I haven't really used my CS4 much, so I was quite stumped by half the things that were going on there, however their presentation of some of the new features of CS5 were fascinating .... and yet, this is going sadly off-topic. *coughs slightly* (What? I had a cold! xD) In any case, they had several mentions that developers and designers work together and sometimes their roles would have to overlap somewhat - although this was actually them developing tools so that they could work together without dispute (You didn't code it how I designed it! But this design is completely ludicrous and impossible!) - but any rate, this caused a sudden epiphany, so to speak, as I realised I don't just have to be a programmer, I can be a designer and a programmer!

And work for Adobe!

Kidding. (I think.) But maybe this was obvious to others, but not to me. I don't mean just designer in the sense of designing a piece of software for a purpose, yet designing it ... in the way people create programs like Photoshop, for lack of a better example. I'm not absolutely certain how to explain it - the idea is still somewhat hazy even within my mind, but I do have an aim of making things aesthetically pleasing, so perhaps this is what I have in mind.

In any case, they continued on to the Online Library Resources after that previous talk (which I covered extremely badly) and went through things which I had been shown when I went to library training during O-Week. I kind of felt I wasted my time going to the O-Week one now... Oh well.

And then came the Language Task. That kind of worried me. On the first page, it asked to put down my first language, which I think is actually Chinese. But I do much better at English than I do at Chinese (I can't write much in Chinese, I'm not kidding), so I really wouldn't say that I'm an ESL or anything. I do recall they put me in an ESL class when I was little, but I really doubted that I needed it. It was completely useless and I didn't even understand the reason I was there in the first place (sopleasedon'tthinkI'manELS pleasepleaseplease).....

In any case (-still groaning from despair over my own demise-), the task was simply a graph with statistics about smokers in Japan, China, USA and Europe and we were supposed to describe it - in simple terms. I hope I did a good job, but as always, think I probably made a grave error somewhere along that line. The last   section of it was perhaps a little weak.... I tried my best, right? -worry-

That was pretty much it. Hung around in the FEIT First Years Lounge for a while until it was 1pm and time for the BIT Information Session (hp decided to reschedule?) and we talked about camp and future sponsor visits, and so on with Des. It was quite enjoyable overall.

/End longwinded day recount and rant.

01/03/2010 - 05/03/2010 + (07/08 Activities)

This is only to make a small recount of the first week. The order of my subjects is as follows:
- Communications for IT Professionals (Monday)
- Introduction to Information Systems (Tuesday)
- Programming Fundamentals/Object-Orientated Programming (Wednesday)
- Web Systems (Friday)

CITP::
To say the least, this subject doesn't exactly cover something I don't know, but I suppose it's a good idea to try and develop my communications skills further, for all that the subject appears to be like English for Uni. I admit that my oral skills could do with a polish, however. Even so, an upside of day one was being let out early. ^^

IIS::