As both Long and Michael have already beat me to the punch, I’ll have to use some fancier graphics to point out that Mix On Campus is on its way for later this month. Mix On Campus is a free event for Australian students, aimed at “innovating your web knowledge“. Think of it as a cut down version of Remix (which itself was fun, but not free, and a cut down version of Mix, which was rather expensive).
The dates are out, the speaker schedule is released, and the prizes are juicy looking (nom-nom-nom, jelly beans, as well as Xbox 360′s, Hoodies, Vista Ultimate, and webcams. But seriously, jelly beans!)
Mix On Campus will be held in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney (on the 20th, 26th and 30th of November respectively) running from 10am to 4pm.
Brisbane
Tuesday, 20 November at QUT City Campus – Room 117, B Block, 2 George St, Brisbane (Register, Map of venue)
Melbourne
Monday, 26 November at Melbourne Conference Centre (near RMIT), 333 Swanston Street, Melbourne (Register, Map of venue)
Sydney
Friday, 30 November at UTS City Campus – Guthrie Theatre, Building 6, 702 Harris Street, Ultimo (Register, Map of venue)
The schedule for each venue is looking pretty nice, I’m particularly interested in the XNA Development that wasn’t at Remix, although I’m disappointed about the lack of Cheezeburger Studio that was demonstrated at TechEd. I’ll definitely be at the Melbourne event, even if just to keep Long company and to heckle Nick Hodge during his Popfly demonstration.
Be sure to register, and for more details check out the official blog and Nick Ellery’s blog.
Update: Updated binaries and source code now available from Codeplex!
Uh, not sure why, but I’d say avoid using my WGS addin until I release v0.3, because it seems to be using a massive 50% or more CPU usage – on both cores – on my laptop.
I might have to look into WMI and see if there are known performance issues with it, but for now, I’m just issuing a ‘you may have problem with this program’ warning.
Performance, and other things, are coming soon in v0.3 – but Uni is rearing its ugly head so the next version may not be out till the end of the week
Edit: Yeah, seems to be WMI (or at least the way I’m using it). Every game detection adds ~5% CPU usage.
My current detected amount of games gives me about 40% usage. Disable the addin drops it down to <9% CPU usage.
I’ve been digging around in my registry lately, to find a few registry values for games I have installed for WGS (v0.2 was meant to be out yesterday, but I’m waiting ’till I get the DDE code right), and I found the gem to the side.
It really speaks for itself…EA, please go and buy a book on Windows Registry, or failing that, just use common sense – you do not need 4 keys for Battlefield 2142, let alone 2 ‘top-ish’ level keys for essentially the same thing. I’d hate to think what would happen if I installed an expansion!
Microsoft have released a public beta of Tafiti (which means “to search” or “to research” in Swahili, depending on which MSDN Blogger you read), they’re new way of interacting with Live Search via Silverlight. It has a few handy features such as the ability to save search results across different sorts of searches (news, web, blog, images, etc) by simply dragging it to the side of the screen – ah, must be some sort of Surface search engine prototype! Another feature is the carousel between search types, which is pretty speed to pull those results down.
Overall, it is very pretty looking and even fairly functional. Unfortunately, Tafiti is a little too impractical to use to replace LiveSearch/Google. The Tree View (do a search of the ‘web’ type, then a TreeView button will appear up the top) is a fantastic example of where Silverlight (Flash would fall into the same category here) would benefit from hardware acceleration like its bigger brother WPF. Don’t get me wrong, its useable as a tech demo, and it is fantastic to see Microsoft encouraging ISV’s to develop Silverlight applications by demonstrating what it can do, but as it stands, Tafiti is just too slow to want to use on a day to day basis.
Hardware acceleration doesn’t exist in Silverlight, which when I first heard about WPF/E was somewhat surprising. Without Hardware Acceleration, you don’t have 3D. You have “2.5D”, which can look just as good, but requires a lot more programming to achieve the same effect. Hardware Acceleration, as well as proper 3D, would really heat up the Silverlight Vs Flash debate. I guess one of the issues with implementing that would be – port DirectX to Mac, use OpenGL on both, or have seperate rendering on each Operating System.
Aside from those issues, well done Microsoft, looks cool.
Update: MSDN Blogs are really going nuts for this
This is by no means a complete list, but here are some of the blog posts on MSDN about Tafiti (mostly “we’ve just released…“)
http://blogs.msdn.com/stanley/archive/2007/08/22/tafiti-search.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/singaporedpe/archive/2007/08/22/tafiti-search.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2007/08/21/Microsoft-Introduces-Tafiti.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/jim_glass/archive/2007/08/21/search-a-new-way-try-tafiti.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/nishant/archive/2007/08/21/tafiti-looking-at-live-search-in-a-new-way.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/clare_dillon/archive/2007/08/21/try-out-tafiti-a-new-search-visualisation-application.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/socaldevgal/archive/2007/08/21/beautiful-search-via-tafiti.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/ronang/archive/2007/08/21/tafiti-a-new-search-experience-with-silverlight-and-live-search.aspx (has a video about it)
http://blogs.msdn.com/markjo/archive/2007/08/21/tafiti-com-search-engine-built-on-silverlight.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/architectsrule/archive/2007/08/21/microsoft-launches-tafiti-rich-search-experience-via-silverlight.asp
http://blogs.msdn.com/mithund/archive/2007/08/21/what-is-tafiti.aspx
(Note, not as hyperlinks ’cause I don’t want to ping spam. I couldprobably disable it, but I don’t feel like wrestling with WordPress)
Why it’s time to rethink & ReMix
On the frontiers of the Web, the boundaries are blurring: between developers and designers; between advertisers and publishers; between software and services; between media and technology; between TVs and PCs; between producers and consumers. The old order is getting a little mixed up.
ReMix is Microsoft’s conference for cutting-edge web professionals designing and building next-generation experiences through Silverlight.
With capabilities never experienced before, Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web while bridging communication gap between designers and developers.
(from http://www.microsoft.com/australia/remix07/about.aspx)
Held at Crown Palladium Promanade, ReMIX07:AU was an interesting event, Will and I tagged along to various things together.
Day 1
-
“Registration and refreshments”
8:00 am – 9:00 am
Wow. Early morning. Sucked. Will and I went to the wrong place thanks to me, but we got there eventually.
There was food, I think, but nothing that stood out too much
-
Keynote Address
9:00 am – 10:30 am
Finula Crowe – product manager for Microsoft Australia, and a lovely lady in general (we spoke to her at WebJam) – opened the keynote, then handed over to Brian Goldfarb – Group Product Manager in Redmond (I think?).
It was amusing to see that despite Finula having a very thick Irish accent, the crowd responded to her as if she was ‘one of us’, but as soon as the American Brian stepped on, people tuned out a little.
Brian talked about how Microsoft provide a platform rather than just a product. That is, .NET.
Then on to how the platform has to change to keep up with users changes. No longer is all your ‘computing’ done on a computer, but its also done on an Xbox360 (through XNA), on a mobile phone (.NET Mobile Edition), and through the web browser (ASP.NET and now, Silverlight).
Overall, I found Brian to be a bit boring – Will agreed, but probably because it was the exact same speech/slides as what he presented at MIX. Maybe its how American’s generally talk slower than us aussies, but he just seemed to be slow moving throughout his presentation.
Shane Morris who followed with demo’s of the Expression products quickly.
Lucas Sherwood from Lightmaker followed showing off some of Lightmakers endevours with Silverlight (and I think WPF). This was probably the most interesting part of the keynote for me. It was fantastic to see what is actually achievable with Silverlight/WPF, rather than “oh, its so awesome, you can do so much, let me show you my hello world/flickr carosel”.
I’m fairly certain somebody from @WWW presented something, I just can’t remember who/what. I think it was the National Geographic video website powered by Silverlight which had a guy drinking from elephant dung.
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Lee Brimlow
Rapid Fire Design & Prototyping in WPF
10:45 am – 11:45 am
Lee showed off his adventures in WPF, starting with his very first attempts just by using Expression Blend as if it was Flash. This included some three dimensional stuff, animation, video, the ‘must have’ Flickr example, etc.
Then he moved onto the examples where he played with XAML/proper classes, some physics, speech API, lists.
Overall, while his presentation was done well, it was a bit boring and slow moving. It would have been nice if he had of showed how he achieved some of the cooler things in Blend (Yahoo WPF client anybody?).
For me, there was nothing new in this presentation – I’ve played with WPF, both with XAML and through Expression Blend..
The complaints about ‘AllowTransparency’ that Lee had, I’ve already blogged about.
I was a bit disappointed and disheartened by this first presentation, as it wasn’t what I was expecting from Lee (since I read his WPF Blog). I don’t really think it was Lee’s fault so much as I think the hour long sessions weren’t enough to properly cover the content. An hour and a half to two hours would have made most of the sessions ‘better’.
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Morning Tea
11:45 am – 12:00 pm
I can’t really remember much about what food was there, apart from Morning Tea on Day Two. That is to say, most of it was fairly ‘blah’, and in small quantites.
For essentially a geek conference (thanks Blaman…), the food was lacking.
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Laurence Moroney
Rich Web Applications with Silverlight, XAML and Javascript
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Unlike the first session I attended, this was a more ‘developer’-centric presentation.
Unfortunately (for me), Laurence covered Silverlight 1.0, not 1.1 (which is the cool .NET version, rather than Javascript. This is the reason there isn’t many notes, plus, anybody reading things blog as probably already figured out what Silverlight is from MIX).
In a nutshell, Silverlight is cool because its ‘object oreintated’-ish; it handles enough media – WMV7/8/9, VC1 (think HD), WMA and MP3; said media is handled very nicely behind the scenes with buffering/downloading as well as bandwidth optimisation (so it won’t buffer too much unless the user really needs it) and most values are normalised for working with them nicely.
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Lunch
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
The food served was the same served both days, and the same served at the Cisco Technology Day which was in Crown Palladium. Sadly, it was much better at the free Cisco Tech Day – more food (~4 tables rather than two), and the nachos were warmer and less soggy.
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Lucas Sherwood
Switching to WPF and Silverlight
2:00 pm- 3:00 pm
Continuing on from his quick demo in the keynote, Lucas showed off two applications – one WPF, one Silverlight – and talked about his company’s (Lightmaker) experience – that is, being thrown in the deepend on several fronts.
The programs he showed were really nice ‘looking’, unfortunately the WPF one (The Olympic Social Network) failed to get past the login screen.
The Silverlight application Lightmaker developed for Orlando Magic was really neat looking. So neat that I’ve started playing with Silverlight 1.1 myself, and a demo of that should be up within the next couple of weeks (I’ve got a dozen blog posts to get through first…)
Lucas stated a few times how he’s a developer not a presenter, and yes, he occasionally did exactly what I do when I present is shuffle back and forward and talk fast, but I have to admit, he had one of the best presentations (minus the grand exceptions) of the conference.
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Steve Marx
Vista Sidebar Gadgets
3:15 pm- 4:15 pm
This was in the smallest room, so the presentation had a much ‘closer/personal’ feel to it.
Surprisingly, Steve was the first to use Internet Explorer. Not the only one, but the majority of presenters used Firefox, which was interesting.
I’ve looked at Sidebar gadgets a little, so there wasn’t anything hugely surprising for me.
Sidebar gadgets are HTML/Javascript. They have certain restrictions on them – sizewise as well as capabilities. They’re really insecure (no way to encrypt sensitive data). They can host Silverlight data, as well as making AJAX calls.
Its good to see that there are some ‘forward thinking’ parts to Sidebar gagdets. For example, in the Gadget.XML, <permissions> tag current does nothing (its set to ‘full‘), but they are hoping to add more security into it later, as well as potentially expanding it (speculation, but maybe an iGoogle-esque webportal where you can drag gadgets from your sidebar to your portal – and visaversa).
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Afternoon Tea
4:15 pm – 4:30 pm
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Phil Beadle and Dave Glover
Orcas for Web Developers
4:30 pm – 5:30 pm
Phil and Dave had an interesting session on some of the new web developer based tools available in Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas), particularly looking at XHTML/CSS tools, as well as Javascript Intellisense/etc. These features made Expression Web seem a bit pointless – look down to the Expression Web session coverage to see what I mean.
Overall, good presentation, those two looked like they had a lot of fun.
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WebJam & Galactic Circus festivities
5:30 pm – 10:00 pm
I thought WebJam was crap to be honest. I wasn’t in the actual tiny room they were presenting in, so all I had was 3x massive TV’s and horrendous audio feeds to go by.
Apparently they had no net connection there, and since its WebJam, that kind of messed things up a little.
Sat down and mostly talked to other ReMIX attendee’s, which was good…the people of ReMIX (attendees, presenters, and general staff) really made the experience great. Nothing like seeing Frank run like crazy ;)
Day 2
Unfortunately, I was so wrecked after day one (I didn’t get home till 11pm or so!), I didn’t bother bringing mums laptop with me on day two, so I didn’t write that many notes/can’t remember too much of it.
Day two, however, saw me bring along my Foam Blue Monster.
Nick Hodge snapped that photo while Will and I were playing Gears of War on the Xbox 360′s setup. Just for the record, I won most of the games ;)
I’ll get some better photos of the Blue Monster when I get home.
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Keynote
I rocked up half an hour late because I slept in till 7am. 10 minutes before my train was supposed to leave.
The crowd seemed mostly asleep when I arrived anyway.
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Joseph Cooney
WPF Fundamentals: Developing Rich Interactive Applications
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Michael Kordahi
Designing with Microsoft Expression Web: Today and Tomorrow.
I attended this mostly because the other two sessions running at the same time didn’t really appeal to me, and that we were to receive a free copy of Expression Web (xWeb)For what its worth, Michael did a fantastic job of promoting and trying to sell the product. The truth is though, I don’t think anybody was impressed enough to want to go out and buy this, or switch from whatever they were previously using.It would be fair to say this is a direct competitor to Adobe’s Dreamweaver and while its a huge step up from Frontpage, xWeb still seems to be a long way behind.
A few of the very bad points are:
- xWeb doesn’t support any other server side languages other than ASP.NET in v1 (v2 is meant to add PHP).
- xWeb doesn’t have Intellisense for ASP.NET (C#/VB.NET etc), so you’re extremely unlikely to want to do any ‘backend’ code in it.
- Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) has most of its big selling features like HTML/Javascript Syntax highlighting/Intellisense. And if you remember Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) Expression Web Edition (try saying that a few times…) is free, and xWeb is “worth” $550AUD…well..
- The Expression range is trying to be both for designers and developers. If thats the case, why does xWeb have the worst interface out of the suite? All of the other Expression products have a unified black ‘I’m-dark-and-sexy-therefore-I’m-a-designer-tool’ appearance to them, but xWeb is stuck in Office 2003 mode.
- Doesn’t support any versioning/source control
- Won’t open VSProj files like Expression Blend does
It did have some good points, like being able to drag-and-drop CSS, as well as the decent WYSIWYG code generation, but nothing that was a really big selling point for somebody who can figure out XHTML/CSS, which aren’t exactly the hardest things to learn.
xWeb WYSIWYG editor won’t make it easier to create fantastic/unusual XHTML/CSS appearances, nor does its code view have anything that things like Notepad++ doesn’t have.
If anything, if you’re a WYSIWYG person, its fantastic. It generates standards compliant code. Thats about it though.
The other thing to note was Michael is a funny guy, and had a fantastic presentation (Standards compliant code gets the chickz!). Its just a pity his subject sucked so very much.
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Panel: Web 2.0
On the panel was Cameron Reilly of Podcast Network, Ben Barren from Gnoos, Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWeb, and Michael Kordahi with Brad Howarth of lagrange communications moderating.
I didn’t write notes for this panel – for the audience it was intended for most of the information and discussion would have already been done to death. “Web2.0 is not just a technology, its an idea”, “Australia lags behind”, “Corporations lag behind”, etc.
Cameron Reilly was very distracting – he was very overconfident to the point where he seemed arrogant. I won’t call him arrogant as thats unfair, I haven’t met him or talked with him personally, but when he blamed the lack of “Web 2.0″ development in Australia on the ‘audience’ because we weren’t willing to take the risk of mortgaging our houses, quitting jobs, etc to fund startups…well…he seemed a bit arrogant. Plus, the glasses that he wore really made him look ‘Bono-esque’.
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Steve Marx
Go Deep With AJAX.
Will fell asleep during this one. Steve’s presentations aren’t too bad, but he has a bit of a monotonous voice, it was late in the conference, and the stuff he covered was pretty boring.
“What is AJAX?”, followed by Microsoft’s implementation of that through ASP.NET. Yeah, I learnt a little about what controls were available in ASP.NET AJAX, but thats only because I haven’t played with ASP.NET yet.
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Closing Panel: Designers are from Venus, Developers are from Mars
This panel was made up of Lee Brimlow, Gerry Gaffney of Information and Design, Philip Beadle of Readify (Phil is a hilarious guy. He loved his Javascript work, as well as colouring things red – a true developer), Adam Kowaltzke of Avanade and Shane Morris as Moderator.
This panel was ‘funnier’, but by this time we were all mostly asleep (just because ReMIX was drawing to a close, not because they were boring.)
The panel talked about ‘designers vs developers’ and ‘designers + developers’, both how it has been in the industry, and how it is changing, as well as roles that are popping up so it becomes ‘designers + devingers vs devingers + developers’ – an intermediate role which can do both, and is able to translate for both sides.
I’d like to consider myself a devigner, but I’m not so sure if anybody else would ;)
I’m sure this was a better panel than what I’m able to blog about it, but as stated, we were all tired by here and just wanted to get home.
Overall…
ReMIX07 was a lot of fun. All of the presenters seemed to be very passionate about what they did/presented, which is a good start.
The presentations were of pretty good quality/design, although it wasn’t hard to tell the difference between ‘designers’ (or ‘devigners’ I guess) and ‘developers’ presenting.
Next year, it really needs free WiFi setup, as well as more powerpoints to recharge laptops. Those with laptops want to be able to fire up their computer, get to a Microsoft portal where we can download the slides (and maybe even the examples) so that we can compile whatever is on the big screen on our own computers – just so we can see it really work.
It wouldn’t hurt if they had fewer sessions that went for longer so they could cover the content a bit better.
I wouldn’t complain about better ‘free software’. MIX in Vegas got Expression Studio (and a ‘unique’ cover for each attendee no less) and Vista Ultimate (and random other goodies like a pen and memory stick). By comparison we got Expression Web, which is fairly hit-and-miss product.
I’m not trying to suggest that the only reason I went to ReMIX was for the free stuff, but its hard to get excited about Expression Web when the major session on it made it seem pathetic (which backed up my thoughts on my previous trial of Expression Web). If they had of given us Expression Blend, on the other hand, I would have been ecstatic as its a fantastic product.
Nick Hodge has a good round up of many ReMIX blog posts for those who are interested.
My apologies for posting this a week late, I’ve been a tad busy (more blog posts to follow, at around one per day or three). I also took a whole stack of photos, but not many of them turned out too well, so I’ve skipped them.
Google’s unofficial motto was ‘Don’t be evil‘, a good motto most people would admit. That is, of course, until they contradict such a motto, and start being evil.
First it was censorship, then it was the stuff about scanning books, Google Earth’s photos being security risk, inability to counter click-fraud on Adwords, the list goes on with the ‘troubles‘ they’ve caused. Google Watch has more on this if you’re interested.
Then you’ve got the whole ‘we buy out everything‘ approach.
Recently Google bought FeedBurner. There was a bit of an uproar (sorry, didn’t save the links) from a few bloggers who used Feedburner, they didn’t want Google having that sort of power. Google would then be able to track content makers and through Google reader, the content readers. Thats some nasty privacy issues if you think about it.
The ironic thing is, I know of another company who has bought out a lot of other companies (and continues to do so), who is considered evil by millions of people – including the majority of its user base. They’ve been sued to hell over their lifespan, but are slowly changing their image to a ‘friendly/decent’ company. Microsoft.
Speaking of Microsoft, they’ve got this new product out, you may have heard of it. Vista.
One of Vista’s best features was its fantastic search. Apple’s OS X has the same sort of thing, dubbed Spotlight.
Apparently Google wasn’t too happy with Vista’s search, it was far too built into the OS, far too good, and was stopping them from implementing their own Google Desktop Search. So they bitched about it. Loudly. And its been brought to the Department of Justice, and Microsoft is being forced to change the way Vista handles its search.
Winxperts reports on it.
Okay, sure, Microsoft is apparently abusing its power to release features in its own products now. They’ve agreed to three things, the the one that stands out the most is point two. (emphasis is mine)
(2) The default desktop search program will be launched whenever Windows launches a new top-level window to provide search results. This will include an existing location on the Start menu that a user can select to display additional search results in a new window. Windows Vista also includes search boxes located in the upper-right hand corner of various windows in the operating system, such as Windows Explorer and the Control Panel. In these windows, when the user enters a query Windows Vista will continue to display the search results using the integrated desktop search functionality. Microsoft has agreed, however, to add a link that, if clicked, will launch the default desktop search program and display search results from that program.
What does that mean exactly? I’m not to sure, but it sounds like the search facilities in the Start Menu will have to pop out into another window. That defeats the point of having the search there at all!
Look, even if I’m wrong (please, please somebody prove me wrong on this one), Google has still over stepped their boundaries, and are moving into asshole territory.
Where is the complaints about Spotlight, doesn’t it have the same level of integration?
The problem with all of this is how ‘reliant’ on Google’s services/products I am.
- My homepage is set to iGoogle
- I use Google Reader several times a day to manage my RSS feeds
- I use GMail, both the G-Chat and mail features
- Picasa2 is fantastic for managing my photos
- Google Adwords lets me run my websites a bit easier.
- Google’s Calendar is a wonderful organisation service…if only I could edit it with Windows Calendar
So whats the solution? Go to another ‘services’ provider? What happens when they start ‘getting evil’, or worse….Google buys them out?
Realistically, I’m now looking at having to port as many ‘services’ over to open source (or writing it myself – any such products I’d release under CC licensing) and running on my own servers as possible.
This blog is already running on such software, rather than using Blogger.
This gets rid of the ‘privacy’ issues that plague Google (and for good reasons!), but then has the pitfalls of I have to maintain it, patch security holes, etc.
I was already looking at writing a webmail app (did you know GMail doesn’t allow attachments with exe’s in it? Even if they are Zipped, TARed, RARed, etc), I’d toyed with the idea of adding Calendar integration. Now I just need to write/find a decent RSS Reader, photo manager (I’d be willing to pay for one if it was good enough…), and ‘web portal’.
Sigh. You know the worst thing? All my research for this post was done through Google.
Update: Turns out some of the later ones, apparently, cover material we didn’t, so they won’t be on the exam. Exams tomorrow. Good time for people to find that out Ray
One of my fellow students had queries about the “Some Typical Exam Questions” document posted by our lecturer, namely, the answers seemed to be wrong.
This was the response
Yes some of those earlier sample solutions were done incorrectly. Hopefully the later ones are correctly done.
Ray
…what? So, the sample solutions with you provide sample answers for isn’t right? And you can only hope that the later ones are correct?
I think its about time I say “KTHXBAI” to Monash, as this certainly isn’t the first thing on the list of complaints…
I’ll post the letter I’ll send to the head of school (started writing it a few days ago) once it’s finished.
I don’t know how to describe this..
[code]
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
GIMMEH VAR
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10 O RLY?
YA RLY
BTW this is true
VISIBLE "BIG NUMBER!"
NO WAI
BTW this is false
VISIBLE "LITTLE NUMBER!"
KTHX
KTHXBYE
[/code]
I’ll try with a picture…
Nope, that didn’t explain it.
The above code is ‘LOLCAT‘ – a new programming language – which is part hilarious, possibly part predicting our future.
I might have a play with it if it works with Apache ;)
One of the tasks in my OpenGL assignment is to add a few models to the rooms we created in the first assignment.
Here’s a screenshot of my model:
(mouseover for wireframe)
I know it ain’t pretty, but generating things by points (ie, glVertex2f(2.5,.25);) isn’t fun..
I’m sure Steve Clayton will appreciate this ;)
The subject, for those who don’t know, is Hugh Macleod’s Blue Monster
“Sample Solution for assignment 1. Note I have put this together very quickly and it doesn’t have a lot of comments. It also doesn’t adhere completely to the specification, I’ve just done the major parts. There also appears to be a separate floor plan down below the building, this is in fact a representation of the array I have used to check for limitations on movement, I drew it to check it was right and then didn’t remove it.”
That’s the note attached to the sample solution for Assignment 1 in my OpenGL unit.
It wouldn’t be so bad if assignment 2 wasn’t based on assignment 1. And it probably wouldn’t be so bad if the note was vaguely true.
- Instead of ‘it doesn’t have a lot of comments’, it should read as ‘it has comments, most of which are useless due to their scarcity’ (we’re talking one comment per function, if we’re lucky)
- ‘It also doesn’t adhere completely to the specification’, should read ‘I made it roughly like what you had to do, but if you submitted anything like this, you’d get no more than 50/100′. The task involves generating two rooms. The example incorrectly generates the second room (in several ways)
In any other unit, an example like this would receive zero marks for code layout (lack of comments, although, this is the first example he’s given with consistent indentation), understandability (variable names? ugh), etc.
I have other problems with this unit, specifically, the language of choice. I don’t have any real objections to C++/OpenGL, but I have objections to the way its taught.
If you visited the unit description, you’ll see a good knowledge of Java OR C/C++, as well as two prerequisite units that are taught using Java.
At Monash, the languages in this course have been: Java, VB.NET, PHP/Perl. Two out of three (the two you actually ‘compile’) are heavily Object Orientated. In this subject, we’re discouraged from using OO. That’s right, discouraged.
To make matters worse, no C++ is taught, just the GLUT commands. While the syntax is similar, there are some things that are very different from Java (pointers, not being able to return arrays, etc etc)
To make matters worse, this is the best taught subject I’m doing this semester.
When chickz0r’s mother had a heart attack, obviously my studies were effected, so I applied for an extension. Gour Karmakar, my lecturer for Enterprise Programming did not respond. In-fact, he hasn’t even acknowledged I sent it, despite how many messages I’ve left in the discussion boards (being off-campus, I don’t have any other access to staff).
For this subject, I’m yet to receive my unit book. We’re in week 11 or 12 of the semester, and I’m yet to receive the unit book or DVD containing the virtual image we’re supposed to be working off.
But when I complain, oh, how quickly did he jump to email somebody else to look after it. Note, that was a week ago, still no further contact, and no materials.
Although, I dont’ know if I’d like the materials anyway, all of its from Douglas Thomson (not saying Doug is bad, from memory, he was one of the few who could actually teach! I mean it more in a ‘I wish Gour would make/understand/read his own materials’ sort of thing), who was fired by the Uni (I believe). Its rediculous that everything has his name written on it, lecture slides, assignments, etc, its as if Gour just doesnt’ care!
And with my final subject, Operating Systems, the lecturer seems pretty lazy. I don’t know if this is the case, but all the lecture slides/example materials come from the text book. I don’t mean rewording or derivation from the text book, I mean, word-for-word copying of Tenembaum‘s Modern Operating Systems. The most hilarious thing is we’re forced to do a Plagiarism Declaration before we can access the assignments.
