Merry Christmas everyone, whatever your faith (you get the sentiment)!
MS221′s first TMA was returned yesterday. My tutor has a sense of humour – she gave me an extension, acknowledged receipt and within a day emailed me to tell me she’d given me a week’s extension on TMA 2 so I could “catch up more gradually”. I spent a few days thinking I’d totally screwed up the assessment but I actually got 93% – which I’m pretty damn pleased with (especially as I didn’t answer one part).
Haven’t done much Project Euler recently – I’ve been busy studying. So here is an answer to problem eight which asks:
Find the greatest product of five consecutive digits in the 1000-digit number.
I’ve had nothing but problems with this TMA, the latest being Word refusing to open my solution document. Last time I bother with that, its a lot easier just to write it all out by hand.
I hope I can remember the material for the exam. Being allowed the handbook and working through past papers will probably be enough but I’ve found MS221 a big jump from MST121, frankly it’s put me off level three but you never know.
My problem is that I just can’t spot patterns so have great difficulty making conjectures. There’s a conjecture question in the first TMA and although I’ve got the Mathcad sheet all set up, I can see an approximate connection but can’t think of a way to formalise it.
First TMA on MT264 (Designing applications with Visual Basic) got returned today – 96%. I’m very pleased with that and exceptionally lucky given that I read the material in a week, attended one on-line tutorial and wrote the assessment in a couple of days.
I’ve seen complaints on the module forum that tutors aren’t getting assessments back to quickly enough. The cut off was the 15th (I submitted on the 13th) and it was returned on the 27th, I don’t really see what the problem is.
Nested selection reared its head again but I didn’t lose any marks for it. In every programming module I’ve been picked up for using Else If so I played it safe and used nested If statements. So I was advised to use Else If proving I can’t win!
I finally realised how you link qualifications together “on the way” to a degree with the Open University. So I’ve now achieved the Certificate in Information Technology and Computing. Which was nice (as they say on The Fast Show).
Apparently, that makes my name Dougie Richardson, Cert IT & Comp (Open). I think I’ll skip that.
Next stop is the Diploma of Higher Education in Computing and IT, which is 240 credits (currently I have 120 points completed and 60 in progress, with another 30 point module starting in February if I get a place). I can link MS221 to this qualification as my free choice at level 2.
Its encouraging but it still seems like a mountain to climb – I only hope that the government doesn’t do a Darth Vader and alter the bargain further.
Still some way to completing my degree part-time (at the end of this academic year I’m half way). I’m not soliciting my services – just looking for advice from the community and if anyone has a few minutes it’d be very much appreciated.
I enjoy mathematics and programming, my degree modules have revolved around the two, covering Java and VB.Net (its a very Windows centric place the Open University but it’s getting better). I’m in the UK and would like to go back to Edinburgh for family reasons when I leave the services in a couple of years time. Looking at the job boards, there’s a lot of Java contracts in the area.
Has anyone got a job with only open source experience? Does anyone know of any open source projects that are Java based and would be a good starting point to build on the fundamentals? Are there other qualifications or courses that you recommend? What are employers looking for? Does anyone work in a specific field that utilises both maths and programming? Is there a language that is in particular demand or do you find that good experience is more value? What’s a realistic starting salary?
Someone asked me yesterday “You’re good with computers, can you give me a copy of Photoshop?“. Aside from the fact I run Linux on most of my computers, I’m not keen on being accused of software piracy on the basis that I’m “good with computers” or any other reason. I made the mistake of asking why he needed it, he wanted to resize some pictures – so I suggested Paint.net.
His answer? “Oh no that’s free, it’s bound to be rubbish.”
Strange, I thought he wanted Photoshop free.
Extract from an article over at “The Art of Manliness” that gives instructions on editing hosts to block time wasting sites:
Linux
If you’re using Linux, you’re probably a geek and don’t need some guy who blogs about manliness to tell you how to edit your host file.
I bought a new laptop the other week, a Samsung NP-RV511-S02UK. I have been using a Samsung NC10 dual booting Ubuntu and XP. An NC10 is a wondrous thing but when push comes to shove, a 1280×600 resolution is too small for Visual Studio work – especially when you want to see a PDF at the same time.
I removed Ubuntu from a Samsung NC10 yesterday, now the F4 recovery option doesn’t work. Please excuse the lack of screen shots on this Howto but I couldn’t think how to capture from the recovery manager and camera shots look rubbish.
It would appear that Samsung uses a custom Master Boot Record (MBR) – so for Grub all is well because you can choose to boot into the recovery partition and away you go. However if you have followed any of the usual guides to removing grub (such as running an XP CD to a recovery console and typing fixmbr) F4 will not launch the restore tool.
System Rescue CD is a great tool to have handy on a USB key. You can, so booting into it run this command:
fdisk /dev/sda
Now pressing “p” should show you that the recovery partition is 1, so type “a” then “2″, “a” then “1″ to make it bootable. Now write the partition table by typing “w” then reboot. At this point you will boot into the recovery manager and be able to recover but the F4 key will not still not be available at boot and of course trying to create a backup will not work either (as Windows will be booted on restart).
Once Samsung Recovery Manager III has loaded up, press Ctrl+Alt+F10 – I had no idea there was a management mode until I read this page (French) but be aware its only available from the recovery partition. It asks for a password – “secos” (without the quotes). Once in management mode, click the “Image” tab and select “Export” then “Select Location”, I used “D:\”. Click “Start” and accept the dialogue box that comes up. This is a backup of the recovery partition.
Once this stage is finished, select the “Tools” tab, insert a spare USB stick and click “Admin Tool USB”. It will format the USB stick and then install some utilities. It takes a couple of minutes. Once finished click the close button in the top right and it’ll ask if the computer should be turned off – say yes.
Boot with the USB key we just made, bringing you to a completely different recovery menu. Click “MBR Fix” and then close the application.
Now when you reboot you’ll notice that the MBR has been repaired and F4 once again boots into Recovery Manager III.
I'm a thirty something engineer with an interest in Computing (particularly Linux), Psychology and Mathematics. Married with three kids, I've been studying with the Open University since 2008, I'm focussing on BSc (Honours) Computing and IT (B62).
An enthusiastic but amateur runner.
Yeah and a total geek.
