For all you Facebookers, have a look here.

Last night’s class was stowed out, and someone new to spinning needed a bike right in front of the instructor. So muggins here went on one of the bikes on the stage next to the instructor. You can see the difference between Andy (the instructor) and me, especially at ‘running’. But the exposure meant I couldn’t slack off at all – intense fun!

I’m working away at my Web Design and Development coursework.

Achievements so far

• Registration works. If you omit any of the required data, it will ask you, for example, Are you as ashamed of your town or city as humans should be of their history?
  • I’d like the Address line 2 field to be optional, but the moan-mechanism kicks in if it’s omitted, so the workaround is to make it required.
  • I’d like the ‘register me’ thing to be styled text, not a button – but this is well down the list of requirements.
• Logging in and out work.
  • I’d like the ‘log out’ thing to be styled text too – again nowhere near a priority.
• The footer pages (FAQ, site-use policy, etc) are full of in-character text, while being vaguely useful.
• There are functional ‘mailto’s where relevant. OK, I know I should use forms to avoid spam but who said this site would ever go properly live?
• Errors where the site doesn’t correctly link to the database are trapped by automatically going to appropriate error-message pages, including opportunities to go back to refreshed versions of the recalcitrant pages or to email the webTribble. He or she will be too busy, ahem, making the Tribble with one back to reply, of course.
• Lesson 1 is created. I’ve not yet worked out a way to prevent students from jumping straight to level 6. Currently I have one piece of code for the list of lessons – I guess each lesson will need its own code with the same text but omitting ‘forbidden’ links.
• I’m slightly dreading writing the tests – I fear a combination of AJAX and goodness knows what else will be needed to make these pages mark themselves. As for keeping a running total of honour points – aarrgghh!
• And if you resort to emailing the webTribble from the FAQ page, after all the work I’ve put into it, the email will have an automatic subject I am as stupid as Deanna Troi.

Here’s my bug/things to do list.
Green = squished
Orange = unsquished or not yet attempted, low priority
Red = unsquished or not yet attempted, high priority

1. need line 2 of address to be optional
2. sort error messages
3. correct sideboxes
4. language & culture lessons
5. normal lesson 1
6. normal lessons 2-5
7. culture and history lessons
8. test 1
9. tests 2-5
10. thermometer of honour points
11. E-K dictionary
12. K-E dictionary
13. registered needs screen name
14. sort what happens when duplicate accounts attempted
15. login and assimilate me should be styled text, not buttons

Ah but I’m learning and having fun – can’t be bad!

Less than a week until Tour o’ the Borders! Are you as excited as I am at the prospect of cycling 50 miles through pretty hills? Why not?

Anyway, we did a couple of laps of Arthur’s Seat, combined with a wee shopping trip this morning. We’ve not found time to check out the route but I’m fairly confident of finishing in about 5 hours’ cycling time. (We start at 9:30 and must finish by 4pm, so we have 6·5 hours and so must average 7·7mph.)

As I’ve probably moaned about already, the second USB-WERK is on its way back to the vendor so currently I have no way of taking power from Lev’s hub-dynamo to jPhone. I have a couple of options:

• yesterday I ordered an alternative product called LightCharge
• if all else fails, I now have a stem-bag which just has room for the external USB battery.

jPhone strapped to LifeProof handlebar- mount to allow charge door to open	jPhone properly in Lifeproof handlebar-mount	charging external battery

Oh, and I now have cellphone-tipped liner gloves so I don’t need to freeze while operating jPhone en route. These fit just nicely under my Sealskinz winter gloves. Come the summer (and it can’t come soon enough!), I think they’ll work well with my gel cycling mitts.

Come to think of it, I have more pairs of gloves than footwear:

1. neoprene sailing gloves (blue, no brand)
2. fleece gloves (blue, Thinsulate), attached to fleece top
3. fleece gloves (black, Craghoppers)
4. gel cycling mitts (red & black, Specialised)
5. mountain-biking outer gloves (black, grey, brown, SixSixOne)
6. winter cycling gloves (black, Sealskinz)
7. supposedly warm (but in practice not) microwaveable gloves (red, black & grey, Alago)
8. liner gloves, which once had cellphone tips (black, no brand)
9. liner gloves (black, Gore)
10. liner gloves with cellphone tips (black, North Face)

Cast your mind back to this, in which I moaned about late delivery of marks. Well, the lecturer in question emailed on Thursday 4th

Feedback sheets are now in the school office – you can pick up anytime.

Here’s mine. As far as I can make out, it says

Mission statement	Words like sufficient are a bit weak for a mission statement	4/5
Numerical measurements	Not sure about the last one	4·5/5
Navigation map & storyboards	Extra marks for detail Well done, nicely presented and annotated	10/10
Visual style	Well done, extremely detailed	5/5
TOTAL		23·5/25

Following on from the previous report, here’s the cyclemeter map of Monday’s cycle: Arran’s north loop. (I’ve no idea why the map doesn’t show the journey back across the String to Brodick.) Total distance 37·82 miles, at an average speed of 10·86 mph. (The true average will be very slightly higher because I started cyclemeter and then put gloves back before moving off – it was far too cold to cycle without gloves.)

We stopped briefly at

• the florist just north of Brodick
• Sannox cemetary to vist Elly’s mum and dad
• Lochranza (toilet break)
• Machrie (our second attempt to visit Elly’s friend’s tea-room – no joy thanks to the snow which had stopped everything on Arran’s west side the previous week)

The wind which had helped us up the Boguille (the hill between Sannox and Lochranza) was against us on the west coast – it varied between bracing and horrendous. It didn’t get any better going up the String (the road that crosses Arran east-west), but it made the drop down the String back onto Brodick more interesting. I’m slightly disappointed that I didn’t break my personal downhill speed-record but there were too many cars and cross-gusts to let go of the brakes – or perhaps I’m just a wimp.

Cycling in brilliant sunshine, yet with freezing wind and snow either side of the road was weirdly beautiful. I wish I’d taken more photos…

Here’s some pix from the weekend (click the thumbnails to get full-size views).

Views from Lochranza

steamed-up camera (Machrie no-tea-room)

Lev at Machrie

Peacock at our hotel

I received the following today:

Dear Student
Your coursework 1 mark today is x%. You can pick up the mark sheet from the school office on Tuesday 16 April – sorry it’s a bit late but I’m not back in Edinburgh until then.

I’m underwhelmed – this communication is from a computing lecturer: one who appears to specialise in online things, even.

• This mark was given just within the 3-week deadline. However, I believe this deadline is about giving full feedback – so far this has been in the form of annotated marks sheets. As you can see, these won’t be available within the 3-week window. Considering that courseworks 1 and 2 for this module are closely entwined (requirements here), receiving full feedback could make a large difference to the overall module mark. There’s less than 2 weeks from when the mark sheets will be available to when coursework 2 is due.
• Obviously this lecturer isn’t cut off from email. If it’s possible for other lecturers to email mark sheets as PDFs then it’s possible for this lecturer too.
• And if it was possible for one of my lecturers to continue supporting students and being an all-round decent chap despite a massive personal misfortune earlier this year, then it’s possible for this lecturer to find a scanner if he’s marked our submissions in dead-tree format. (A few lecturers insist on electronic submissions, partly to avoid wastes of paper and partly to use plagiarism-testing sites.)

By the way, in my case x = 94. This is for 25% of the module, so I have 23·5% so far. Here’s my submission and here’s the updated marks infographic.

It’s currently feeling a bit weird that after all this time, I’m only 53% through my MSc in terms of potential marks. By the end of this term I’ll be 67% through – and then the dissertation, which has to be finished by Christmas 2014 will account for the final third.

Happy Easter, all.

Comments on this very welcome. The footer links should all work, as will the link to the KLI.

I don’t think the register step will work because I’ve not enabled PHP on my main mac’s web server. If it does, you should end up here.

And if I’d finished the log-in function, you’d be able to get here. But I haven’t, so you can’t – yet.

In other news

• ParcelForce have been extremely unhelpful
• the replacement USB-WERK has failed so I still can’t charge jPhone on the move
• We have a long weekend of training for the Tour o’ the Borders, starting tomorrow. So we’ll have a great excuse for munching loads of chocolate!

It’s just possible I’ve once or twice been faintly critical of our Web Design & Development lectures. Today we suffered through over an hour of incoherent ramblings such as ‘well that’s the only way to do it, but there are other ways – you just have to google’ and more sentences with the pronoun ‘it’ meaning 5 different things simultaneously, with nary a noun in earshot.

This was actually a blessing – two hours of lectures were timetabled. Anyway, we were allowed into the labs early, so here’s my first shots at a landing page and logged-in user page for my coursework, along with screenshots of how they should look.

• landing page
• landing page screenshot
• logged-in user home page
• logged-in user home page screenshot

It would be good to hear of any platform/browser combination issues.

I had intended to make most of the text, especially the items in the sidebars, the same font as the main title (KlingonBlade) but it’s not legible enough at those sizes. The substitute, KlingonDagger, is more legible but I think it’s more celtic/elvish than Klingon – not that I’m any sort of expert, of course!

Next tasks:

• Make up the pages referred to in the bottom row of links.
• Make up the registration and log-in systems – oh the joy of MAMP!
• Make up the lessons.
• Make up the tests and build a way of tracking students’ scores over the tests.
• If possible, replace the Klingon Empire logo in the right sidebar with a ‘thermometer’ that shows their total score.
• If possible, when a student scores 90% or more in a test, play a clip of Worf saying something appropriate about honour.
• If possible, when a student scores 50% or less in a test, play a clip of Gowron drawing his d’k tahg. Then the student’s score is reduced to zero and he or she is forced to start again at lesson 1.

It might be fun and educational after all!

So the marks for the groupwork assessment for Management of Software Projects have been released. This assessment is 50% of this module’s mark – the other 50% will be for an individual piece of work which will be set in a few weeks’ time.

Headline: 74% for this work, so I already have 37% for this module.

This mark is the very top of the ‘mere pass’ range. 1% more would have put my mark into the ‘distinction’ range. The lecturer was quite complimentary about my personal reflection, which surprised me – I’d thrown it together in about a working day.

At this afternoon’s tutorial, we were given a bit more detail:

• Marks for the group-work documents were all around 35 out of 50.
• Marks for the group presentation were all around 10 out of 15.
• The top mark was 74%. (Some reason for smugness?)
• The bottom mark was 64%, while the average mark was 68·7%.

Anyway, here’s the bits for you to peruse

• Coursework requirements
• Our group’s submission (which was far too long)
• My individual assessment
• My marks
• Marks for our group’s presentation.

I’m now exactly halfway through the available marks for the MSc, and have an average mark of 85·8%. Here’s the updated infographic.