My Life

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Having only three exams this semester La Trobe University still managed to screw me over by giving me two in one day and my last one two days before the final exam date.

Today I sat my International Trade exam. Coming into the exam I didn’t feel very confident, this was mainly due to the fact that I had first thought my exams was on the 25th… I was wrong, and secondly I had worked all weekend which gave me 3 – 4 hours per night to study for it. I had never bought the allocated book so I had to refer to lecture notes but the lectures weren’t full, you had to fill them out during the lectures (can’t get better then that).

I had attended 90% of the lectures, but I had never printed off the lecture notes. All in all I thought I did pretty well on the exam and only didn’t know about 3 questions. Hopefully everything ends well and I’ll only have two subjects left to complete next semester.

Thanks,

Marat

Yes… yes it it. And I bet you we’re all excited right? After three years I’m pretty tired of it.

But I guess there’s not much any of us can do about it. Three exams this semester and two exams next semester and I will be over and done with university for good.

Don’t like the fact that on the 12th of June I have two of my three exams, but again… that’s just how life goes (never your way).

To all those whom are currently stuyding or will be studying for your upcoming exams, I wish you all the best and good luck.

Thanks,

Marat

And to tell you the truth, it wasn’t a very good one.

System Design and Methodologies is a subject that involves a lot of models and charts and is exactly what myself and my team from project did last year for… well you’ve guessed it, project.

The subject is going to be a little bit more in-depth than what we had to learn ourselves in project, but it will be a lot longer than what we had done for project. We have a whole semester of models, charts and designs to deal with and after the first lecture I don’t think I want any more of it.

From the first lecture today the only good sign that I saw was the fact that the assignment had to consist of a maximum of three members, which is good because I’m doing this subject with Brendan and Dave, two members from last years project.

Well I best be off. Wish me good luck for the rest of this hellish semester.

Thanks,

Marat

Well it’s that time of the year again.

University has started again and this year for me is going to be a tough one. But not in a way you may think. This whole year apart from a single subject I must repeat next semester, I have four elective subjects. They include Global Environmental Issues (GEI), International Trade, System Design and Methodologies (SDM) and another one which I haven’t picked yet.

As you can see for a Computer Science student, I’m not doing much in the way of Computers apart from SDM and even then I don’t like computer architecture, flow charts, ER diagrams etc which is exactly what this subject is about. For the others… well lets just say I have my very own ranking system, and they seem to be the easiest

So far we’re into the second week of uni and GEI seems pretty okay but the lecturer seems pretty lost for words. I’m sure he’s a smart guy and all, being an Associate Professor you’d have too be, but when he’s lecturing or tutoring he just doesn’t seem all there. He’s very distracted and lost for words most of the time and there aren’t even any lecture slides to go off. On the bright side, International Trade looks quite interesting and the lecturer is actually quite funny.

Well I must be off now, actually I don’t but there’s nothing more for me to write about at this moment so I’ll just go now and watch a movie or two while I laze around the house.

Thanks,

Marat

Well it’s been a long semester, and even a longer year. But we’ve finally made it.

As you may have noticed, it’s been a while since I had posted anything new on this blog and this was mainly to do with the fact that I was so caught up with university that I just didn’t have a) the time and b) the motivation to do more… well work

I have just stopped studying for one of my exams which I’m sitting this Monday. It has gotten to the point, and my fellow Computer Science/Information Systems friends will have to agree where we are just so drained and burnt out that there’s just no motivation, or energy for that matter, to make us want to sit down and study hard for the next two weeks.

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Well, last Thursday was our final presentation for Project and unless we make it into the Industry Presentation it was the last well… anything we’ll ever have to do for Project… of-course except for the exam.

We as a team have worked hard for it and I guess it had paid off. We had managed to produce a complete conversion from Shapefile to XML to RMX using the Uniform Data Model back to XML and Shapefile (I don’t expect many of you to know most of the files but just know hardly any information is out there for any file and when we started this project, that was about all the information we ever had).

We were up against two other teams and with only two programmers, Brendan Attard and myself we had managed to get a perfect conversion going. It really is a relief to have finally finished this subject and it has been an experience none of us will ever forget.

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Today at uni I was on our favourite flash games website Addicting Games. I found a game called Avalanche. It’s a small and simple little game where you play as a small rubber or some say P.K. gum and you try to climb your way to the top.

As the lava below you moves up, and the bricks above you fall down, you must try to steer clear from the lava and avoid being trapped or crushed by the bricks.

The game is pretty addicting and was a great little time waster today at uni, but with out work loads, anything that can get us away from coding for 10 minutes is a god sent.

I recently climbed my highest ever, 817ft

Give the game a go, I swear you’ll love it.

Thanks,

Marat

Well it is 11.35pm at night and I have completed, tested and saved my new generic XMLReaderRMXWriter class.

It had taken me just over two and a half hours to complete this class and change my code to make my program work with this new generic class. I must say that I am very proud of myself for this accomplishment

Due to the implementation of this new class I can now delete four previous classes Dimenion0, Dimension1, Dimension2 and DimensionB which contained repeated and redundant code, and have also managed to save on quite a bit of code in my form class which use to have if statements to determine which class’ methods I was going to use.

One thing I was amazed about was the small amount of errors I had when testing. I virtually had variable doesn’t exist errors which were simple to solve (just create the variable), this was mainly due to the fact that I hadn’t copied all the variable definitions across from my other classes.

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On my usual daily hour long drive to uni I was thinking about my project. I was thinking of making a new class to contain both a generic XML reader and a generic RMX writer.

Now I’m not talking generic as in it will take any XML file and read it in. The XML file must be of a specific format and must contain certain elements for this class to read in. And the same goes for the RMX writer.

The main reason behind this new change is the fact that I currently have four classes, Dimension0, Dimension1, Dimension2 and DimensionB. Each class has its own XML reader and RMX writer. Because each XML file and RMX file for each dimension have their own specific attributes that correspond to that class only, I had originally included the XML reader and RMX writer in each class.

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I was woken this morning by my brother at 7am telling me that the American stock market (mainly Dow Jones) fell another 1.29% overnight, what this means is the Australian stock market will fall around 2 – 3% today… yay for me

I have uni at 11am today, but really cannot be bothered going anywhere. I could however (and Noel would love this) go for some of those fresh jam and cinnamon doughnuts that are made every Thursday. I had my first taste last week and they were pretty good… nice and fresh and very fluffy (I’m not gay alright)

Today after uni I think I’ll have to get cracking on our group project program again. I have a few problems with my half which I may show you later on (mainly there are gaps in lines where there shouldn’t be )

Anyways… I’ll probably have some coffee or something, or maybe I’ll have some with the guys later at uni, not sure yet. Yeah I’m a bit lost this morning

Thanks,

Marat