Hello everyone!
I've put up a video of my flat that I made using my phone (low quality when moving) for anyone to look at if they fancy checking out my digs. The flat is on the 4th floor so its a fair climb but we get good views.
This Friday I will be travelling with my family up to Aberdeen for graduation. I got a 2:1 mark for my project so I missed out on a First despite scoring 75% 1st marks in all my exams and assessments. This is a shame as Amazon have opened a new centre here and are interviewing graduates with Firsts. Hopefully the word has spread that SM has been hired by them which is great news (can you feel the jealously?!?), as our class genius it's what he deserves.
The job is going good now that I'm involved in projects. SQA works by giving each different coder a different layer to the application to make then you do unit tests on different peoples work to make sure it's all dandy. They use the traditional Waterfall approach to design doing concise documents on the system, requirements, specs etc then do a UML framework. This creates stub classes that we then implement. For J2EE stuff Struts are used as are message beans. Everything is checked into CVS. We use Netbeans as our main IDE on Windows XP then put our programs on AIX/Solaris/Linux backend servers using a PostGress like database. Best thing atm is my machine is about to go from 512MB or RAM to 2GB which as we all know is what Java likes to use! If you use Eclipse and haven't seen Netbeans recently then you should definetly check out this great demonstation
I've decided to join a gym consortium in Glasgow called Glasgow Club as I think a year of just eating takeaway pizzas and pub lunches has taken its toll on me. I might document this process to inspire others (provided I don't give up). I have a gym induction tomorrow so I'll let people know how it goes. My aim is to get my BMI down to normal by my birthday in May which I think is achievable.
I've coded a few apps for fun in the meantime though they all use other webpages and String indexes so they break damned easily. Netbeans 5 has great j2me support so I've made a few phone applications sending XML to and from servers (I found a massively easier way to send data then what Bruce was recommending which speeded up the process).
Lot's of Excitement on Friday as I got a new graphics card. I bought an nVidia 6800 GT (Asus pre-overclocked version) from eBuyer and hurriedly put it into my machine to find out that it uses a power cable. I own a shuttle so slack wires don't exist so I had to put my hard drive on top of the machine to use both the gfx card and the hard drive at the same time. This was all fine and dandy until I answered the phone and nudged the power cable a tiny bit. Immediately the hard drive set on fire with candle flame sized flames coming out of each chip on my 200GB hard drive. The machine was miraculously still running powering the fireworks show so I grabbed the hard drive and disconnected it. Needless to say I haven't checked to see if it works as the underside is now a smouldering wreck.
Alison is away in Belgium at the moment so I'm home alone. So it's just wow for me and the start of a new regime tomorrow when she's back. Hopefully I'll keep the gym up and update my blog more often now.
See you on Saturday if you're attending.
Joe.