You may recall a post in which I reported some issues with an exam. I saw the lecturer in charge of this module yesterday. He agreed that the exam had the issues I described, apologised for them and even thanked me for bringing the issues to his attention. I have no doubt he’ll take whatever action is needed to minimise the chances of these issues recurring.

End of problem, as far as I’m concerned.

Reading BBC news while reinstalling Hexie as a triple-boot machine (MacOS, WinXP and Ubuntu Linux)…

Scotland the brave!

Recently a former colleague mentioned going to a ‘spin’ class. I asked for an explanation and was told ‘Spin is a gym class designed by the devil. It involves cycling uphill for an hour to hard-core dance music’.

How could I resist this? Cycling to music but without headphones, no traffic, no weather and above all without the potholes and cobbles that make cycling in Edinburgh such a pain in the rims* and ringpiece**.

I couldn’t join the class my colleague goes to – it’s only for alumni of Ediburgh’s other university. However, Google found Lifescycle. I went to my first session this evening – it was all I’d hoped for and more: very friendly and welcoming, obviously knowledgable and committed instructors, yet with a slightly hippie/ just be/listen to your body ethos. I’d guess that the mean age of the class was around 25, while the instructor was probably about 40. I couldn’t keep up with all of the standing cycling (adjusting to and from standing on a fixed-wheel bike requires a knack which I’ll take a while to acquire anyway) and I imagine my ‘velocity’ was only about half of that managed by the experienced spinners around me but I’m pleased that I kept going, cranking up the resistance as we came to ‘hills’ and pushed hard against ‘headwinds’.

I think the musical/emotional highlight was pushing hard, and then harder, and then harder still along to Comfortably Numb. Along with millions of others, this song almost always gets me, takes me to a much darker and unhappier place – and yet somehow it’s cleansing. Maybe the cleansing effect is a byproduct of nostalgia, coupled with the knowledge that I am much happier (or possibly just more complacent) than I was in previous years. Whatever, allied with intense physical effort, I could just lose myself in the experience – an entirely sober inebriation!

The comedown was realising that that the session was only half-done! However, I kept going and I’m pleased I did so. I’m told I cycled about 30 km in the hour-long session.

Oh, and then I had this fun cycle back in the dark. I had thought that Leith Walk would defeat me or that Picardy Place roundabout would be impossible. (It used to be too much for me when we lived in Brunswick Road.) However, I managed this largely uphill 2·3 mile cycle in about 18 minutes.)

My legs are going to hate me tomorrow but I’m so looking forward to the next session.

* Not rude – see here
** OK, that one was rude.

When installing an OS or any other bit of software from a physical medium, it’s very likely that the installation will be out of date. For example, the installer DVD for Iggy (my Mac Pro) installs version 10·6·3, while the latest version of ‘Snow Leopard’ is 10·6·8.

Apple seems to handle this sensibly – software update offers a ‘combo update’ that upgrades in one go from whatever version of the OS you’ve installed straight up to the latest in that family. However, if you want, you can download the updates from 10·x·y to 10·x·y+1, 10·x·y+1 to 10·x·y+2, etc and install them one after another. This can occasionally be useful. For example, 10·6·8 causes kernel panics on my Hackintoshed netbook so I keep it at 1·6·7.

I’ve just installed a VM for Windows Vista, and am part-way through installing a VM for Windows XP Pro on Iggy, so that I can try to reproduce any problems my family might have with their Windows boxen, while still being able the smooth VNC facilities built into MacOS to take over the PCs.

Firstly, credit to Sun/Oracle for VirtualBox – their hypervisor ‘just works’, is free and has great documentation.

Secondly, no I don’t want to use Apple’s BootCamp to choose to install Windows as a separate bootable OS:

• I want to be able to use Windows and MacOS at the same time.
• It seems you can’t have more than one instance of Windows on the same physical hard disk, even if it’s partitioned into several logical hard disks.To get around that, and to prevent any nasty effects on my MacOS boot disk, I installed Windows XP on a different hard disk. (Iggy has room for 4 physical hard disks.) The only way I could get Iggy to stop booting into Windows when I wanted to return to MacOS was to
  • shut Iggy down
  • pull the Windows HD
  • start from the MacOS installer disk and use it to choose Iggy’s MacOS startup disk.

   

It seems that the EFI boot-chooser didn’t just work – no thanks for those rather stressful minutes Steve. (Iggy predates Tim’s promotion to CEO and Steve’s promotion to glory.)

So on to the Windows way: having installed Vista, I started on the long update process. I’m absolutely happy that Microsoft puts out so many security updates. My ire here is for the arses who make this necessary.

However, I’m flabbergasted and ready to shove excretia through Steve Ballmer’s letterbox because, after an age of downloading and installing updates to the original installation of Vista, the update system offered Service Pack 1 ‘including all the updates previously installed’. Same again with Service Pack 2. Same again with the different versions of Internet Explorer. For the love of wasted bandwidth WHY? Why not notice that my installation is the original version of Vista, then offer to go straight to Service Pack 2, then offer the security updates that postdate SP2, then offer the latest version of IE rather than having to download and install every version from 6 through to 9?

Even more galling, the update for my copy of MS Office went straight for Service Pack 3, so it’s not as if Microsoft don’t get the ‘go straight to the current version’ idea. Do they have shares in my broadband provider? Honk tweet gibber!

Is there a way around this day-long update horror for when the VMs become corrupted? (Yes, I will take snapshots and other backups of the VMs…)

… this!

Just out of the Computer Systems exam which could have raised my grade.

While the questions on Architecture and OSes were on topics and at levels on par with the course and previous exams (and I didn’t need to attempt them because I have already passed these blocks), the questions on Networking were either on topics we hadn’t covered. (Supernetting? Anycast? Static versus dynamic routing? No recall these being even mentioned) or asked for more depth than had been covered or even hinted at.

During the teaching sessions, there was no mention of further reading being needed: in fact the lecturer for this block had said everything we needed was in his handouts. It was not. In fact, I had to do a lot of extra reading just to begin to comprehend the gaps in his handouts. (Of course, reading around a subject per se is a good thing.)

It would have been more productive to stay in bed today and enter pictures of my bits in Keith Richards lookalike competitions. Fumingly angry again.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

At 13:12 today I was informed that I’d got 26 out of 30 for last Friday’s exam. This is 87%. It’s short of what I had expected once I’d sat the exam (though much higher than I thought I’d achieve before the exam started) and definitely short of what I want to achieve (90% or more in each exam). My other marks are 28/30 and 29·5/30, so while I’ve achieved 93% overall so far, I’ve not reached my self-imposed target so I want to achieve at least 27/30 tomorrow.

Another target is to get into the top marks band (95 to 100%). To do this, I’d need to achieve at least 28/30 tomorrow.

Meanwhile here’s my current marks status.

Am I too hard on myself? You betcha!

<Edit>
No, Sarah Palin doesn’t make me hard!
</Edit>

I’m somewhat annoyed that it’s taken so long for last week’s marks to be sent out – I’m at home revising when I could be at an interesting lecture on green IT.

I’ve just received my mark for the classwork which accounts for 90% of the Software Development module. You can see it here.

You can obtain or see my original code

• as a Word doc,
• as an RTF file,
• as a PDF,
• as a text file
• and as the original source file.

Those of you who fly Macs should be able to download and run the binary code while others may be able to download and run the .jar file I’ve just created.

You can see my write-up here.

So I now have received my results for approximately 17% of my MSc, and have an average score of about 92·9%, as shown here.

However, I’m still waiting for the result of last Friday’s class test for the Networking block of the Computer Systems module. I was told we would get our marks today but have seen nothing yet. So I may have to sit the full exam this Friday and hence not be able to meet up with former colleagues tomorrow evening. You may recall my dissatisfaction with the running of this exam. Bah and double bah!

Also, I will not receive the result from yesterday’s Database Systems exam until 24th January 2012. I believe this is because the exam board doesn’t ratify marks until 19 January. Bah a third time.

This morning we sat the exam on the Networking block of the Computer Systems module. In contrast to the other blocks in this module, this one has been something of a farce:

• Instead of the 4 lectures mentioned in the course guide, there were only 3.
• The first lecture didn’t cover a lot of stuff mentioned in the course handout. However, it wasn’t made clear whether this was background information or examinable material.
• The first week’s tutorial was ‘sit down and do these questions’ – I don’t recall the lecturer for this block saying anything. Some of the questions needed information from the bit omitted from the first lecture.
• The first week’s ‘practical’ session was taken up with feedback from the previous block’s exam.
• The second week’s tutorial was cancelled – no reason was given.
• The second week’s practical didn’t occur because the lecturer was ill. Because it was due to start at 9am, it’s understandable that no other lecturer could be draft in that day to present it. What’s not understandable is that it wasn’t rearranged for another time.
• The third week’s lecture was crammed with at least 2 lectures’ worth of material – the only material I’ve had any difficulty with in this course. (For the curious, it was subnetting – in particular the differences between classful and classless subnetting, which were not clearly explained: who does subnetting, when do they do it and why do they need to bother?) I struggled with this for a couple of days: it did some damage to my ongoing note-rewriting and revision schedules and to my sleep pattern.
• In the third practical, the lecturer went over DHCP and DNS, topics he’d not covered in lectures even though these were in the course handout. At the end, I asked the lecturer if he might have some time later to go over what I was beginning to understand. (Earlier in the session, he had invited us to ‘please ask – I am here to teach you – or email me’.) He said, in what appeared to be an exasperated tone of voice, ‘we are just teaching you simple stuff – just read the notes, it’s all there, that’s all you need.’ I walked out near to tears.
• Despite having said the 4th lecture wouldn’t occur, he later told us he’d been at the venue in case any of had any questions.
• The lecturer was late for another session (I think this was the 3rd tutorial) by about 30 minutes. By this time, I’d found a few books and online sources which, although slightly at odds with each other, made things clear. Kudos to the author of the online TCP/IP guide!
• The cherry on this cake of shit was today’s exam.
  • We were ready to go into the venue by 8:55 for a 9am start.
  • A cleaner let us in at 9:05 and we waited, without any sign of any staff member, until about 9:15. (The exam was due last 45 minutes and some of my classmates had other lectures at 10am, during which they needed to present final work for that course.)
  • Eventually one of us went to the department office, only to be told that the lecturer was on his way.
  • He arrived about 9:25 and then cheerily said something to the effect that everything was OK.
  • The lecturer in charge of the whole module then arrived and gave a genuine apology for the total breakdown in communication which had caused this delay, for which he took total responsibility.
  • The lecturer for the block then arrived with the exam papers – rather than having already printed the papers and locking them in the department office so that any staff member could have been drafted in to invigilate, he’d needed to print them and had found that at least two printers were out of service.
  • But we weren’t to worry because we would only need 15 minutes to answer the questions. To give him his due, they were pretty simple – mostly parrot-learning rather than any deductive stuff and no questions on the stuff I’d taken hours to get to grips with.

I’m pretty sure I’ve passed this exam but won’t know for sure until Wednesday. I then have to decide whether to take the final exam for the whole module on Friday morning: I’ve already passed the course because my marks from the two previous blocks already exceed the passmark for the module. However, I might want to improve on my mark for this block. (I won’t need to answer the questions on the previous two blocks – we’ve been told ‘You can attempt any section or sections of the exam and we will give you the better of the two marks for each section (i.e the better of the class test or the exam section). As always, it is an overall mark of 50% that gets the pass: you can compensate for a fail in one section by getting a higher mark in another section.’

If I don’t take this full exam, my final assessment for this term will be a full exam on the Database Systems module on Tuesday morning. It will be in the Sighthill campus, at least 45 minutes’ hard cycle from here (and two of the roundabouts on the way are rather, er, exhilarating) at 9:30. We won’t know which room the exam will be held in because the university doesn’t announce venues until an hour before the start of the exam. Sighthill is said to be very hard to navigate, especially if you’ve not been there before, so we are advised to be there about an hour before the start of the exam, so I’ll need to leave for the exam around 7:30. We will get the results of this exam after 19th January.

I’m also now waiting for the mark for the Software Development module – the lecturer saw my program running on Wednesday and appeared to tick all the boxes on his marking sheet. (I was a little disappointed that he didn’t try any invalid data because I’d put a lot of effort into trapping invalid entries.) I hope he likes the copious comments within the program and the detail I put into the written submission.

So I can’t yet update my marks diagram but I’m reasonably confident of having passed 2 modules this term. (Software development was a full module, while Computer Systems and Database Systems were both half-modules.)

The result reported on 8 November is put into perspective by

• someone else getting 100%
• the average score being around 75%.

Bah!

I’m the only person currently studying this course part-time: the others also have a very demanding unit that I will take next year. So I think my mark should be reduced by a third.