M254 - Not quite 100, but not out yet.

After the panic last week in trying to get my M254 TMA03 ready (and being convinced that I would have to miss some questions), I had put the thought of it to the back of my mind and not expected anything back from my tutor for a couple of weeks. I figure it would take that long because he has a sudden glut of TMA's arriving at the same time.

So imagine my surprise when an auto-generated email arrive in my inbox on 24th June (just less than two whole days after submission) telling me that my work had been marked and returned. I downloaded the returned documents and opened them with some trepidation - had I fluffed some of the hurried answers? Had I picked up the wrong end of the stick and mis-understood what some of the programming requirements were? I knew that my code worked - but was the quality of the code good enough? Could I have made the code more concise? Had I made some almighty screw-up?
OK, do I look at my overall score or do I read through each question along with my tutor's comments? Oh heck, I can't wait - lets just look at the final score and then disect where I have gone wrong...

Ah, it says 98%. Perhaps I misread that - I'll double check - no, it does say 98%. So my code is OK, I had interpretted the requirements correctly and I hadn't made screw-up. There is hope for me yet.

Of course, deep-down inside, I am really satisfied with that score, and so is my tutor - but he has set me a challenge I think. He pointed out that it was still not quite 100% - how can I resist? I'll just have to try harder next time!

M254 - Not resting but not fretting either.

M254 TMA03 - Submitted!

I had to race a bit to get this one ready in time and for quite a while I thought I was going to end up leaving some questions unanswered - and then I suddendly had inspiration and knew how to answer the remaining questions - and that was quite a relief. And the funny thing is that I wasn't even working on the TMA when these ideas came to me. A few hurried scribbles on the back of an envelope (very traditional you know!) was enough to backup my intermittent memory. Soon had the lot commited to paper and software writing.

So thats it for now. Just have to wait the results of this one.

But, no rest allowed. I am still about one month behind schedule and am about to start Unit 6 when really I should be starting Unit 7. But at least there is no Maths course to be fretting about anymore!

OU - Just rambling really.

I am partway through my studies with the Open University here i the UK. I am working towards a degree in Computing, which I figure is well overdue having spent the last 30 years working in the industry programming (Fortran, IBM Assembler, REXX) with the last 25 years spent as a Senior Systems Programmer supporting IBM's VM Operating System.

But, alas, my mainframe days are over.

But to Uni - Last year I studued Object Oriented Programming and Design (M206) which I thoroughly enjoyed (so much so, that I managed to get a Distinction). This course was a real eye-opener, all the talk of O-O that I had heard previously was all fairly dismissive and the people that I had spoken to about it (all non O-O practitioners) considered it to be nothing more that the flavour of the month (albeit, a very LONG month!). But studying O-O seriously showed me just how useful and fully formed O-O really is.

Of course, not all O-O languages are fully Object Oriented (Java, for instance), but the language that we used for studying purposes was Smalltalk (which is fully O-O as far as I can tell - even numbers are objects (whereas is Java they are not)).

Anyway, this year I decided that I ought to get my maths up to speed and so studied MU120 which is really an introduction to maths and is worth 30 points - but I had to work much harder to get 30 points from this first level course (I'm tempting fate here - although I have finished the course, I don't actually have my results yet - perhaps I have failed!), than I did to get 60 points from M206!.
Suffice to say that I found MU120 a real slog and have really learned that maths is not really my thing - I also couldn't believe just how much writing there was to do!

Buts thats all behind me now.

My current course is M254 (Java). I'm about half way through and really enjoying it (I really do mean 'really'!). Its a funny thing, but I get a real kick out of writing software - always have and find it quite a natural sort of thing to do. Anyway, managed a 98% on my last TMA submission (TMA02) and am currently working on TMA03. In fact I am several weeks behind on this couse due to the amount of time I had to spend on MU120, but I seem to be making up for lost time quite quickly - which I what I figured would happen anyway.

This course finished in October 2006 and then I shall tae a break from studying until Jan 2007 when I think I will enroll for M359 (Relational Database - Theory and Practice) which sounds fairly interesting and useful. And then I will switch to doing a Science module for 60 points - probably S104 - just because I have an interest in science - and it will count towards my Computing degree.

More updates later...