SQL Database Test Result

Today I took a test for the IT and Professional Skills Module based around SQL. SQL stands for Structured Query Language and is the industry standard language for interacting with databases including Creating, reading, updating and deleting data — collectively known as CRUD interactions.

Due to it being an electronic test we got instant feedback and I was pleased to discover I got 88%.

I feel that I’m continuing to do well with my course, and I’m enjoying every moment of uni, so I’m happy! 😀

Danny

IT and Professional Skills Test Result

Today I took and got my result for the Professional Writing and Communication Skills test for the IT and Professional Skills Module. Due to the test being online, on eBridge, I got instant feedback and found I got 48/60, which is 80%, a pretty high first class grade so I’m really happy 🙂

Danny.

Got Some Results

Was feeling pretty ill today, so I didn’t manage to make it into University. Instead I did a bit of work at home, read the lecture notes and wrote my own for the lectures I missed, added sound effects to Evil Squash and Cleaned my room. I also looked up my results in a few modules, I got;

96% in programming

73.3% in Computer Systems Hardware

and 96% in IT and Professional Skills

All 1sts! Good times

Danny.

University of Hull Windows Phone Camp

(Above you can see my Windows Phone 7 Version of Programming 1 ACW2 game Evil Squash – The first screen shows the set up page where players select the number of human and computer players – The second screen shows the page where users enter their name and select the name of the AI player they want to play against. The third page is the actual Game UI)

Today was good fun, it all started with a somewhat boring IT and Professionalism lecture however which was about Computer Misuse & Software Liability and Contracts. After this we had a two hour break in which I worked on my Windows Phone 7 version of Evil Squash, which you can see above. After this break, which included a few well earn’t pints of coke, we had a computer systems lecture about multi-theading in the context of SPARC architectures, which Dr. Mike seemed rather animated about…

Welcome to Windows Phone Camp Slide (with motion blur, which I totally meant to add and isn't due to my lack of photography skills)

After Computer Systems Rob, James, Lewis, Louis and I headed over to Robert Blackburn Lecture Theatre D in which Ben Nunney and Joanna Tong were ready to present our Windows Phone Camp. The 2 hour or so lecture consisted of information on:

• How to develop Silverlight apps
• Information on the ideas behind Live Tiles and Hubs
• How to get add polish to applications and get them Marketplace Ready
• How to submit applications to the marketplace
• Requirements of the Marketplace
• Advantages and Disadvantages of Windows Phone
• The Convergence of Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox
• The Metro Design Language
• Using Blend and Visual Studio Side by Side
• Launchers and Choosers
• Making money on the Marketplace
• much much more I’m sure I’ve forgotten to write down
• and most importantly “Witty comments” by Ben 😉

Once the lecture had ended we all walked on to RB-312 for Tea (or in my case coke) and some programming time whilst we waited for our pizza (paid for by Microsoft!) to turn up. In this time I added custom counter functionality to my Evil Squash Application. My users can now use a “CameraChooser” to take a picture of themselves or an object to use as their counter on the gameboard, pretty cool I think!

Tonight I’ve been adding to the game.

Thats all for now,
Danny

PS: HTC updated all their phones, including my model – The HTC 7 Mozart – with Internet Sharing. Neat.

Maths & Windows Phone Development

(Showing off a few of the UI enhancments you can achieve using the Silverlight Toolbox — Most of which I think should be native to Windows Phone…)

Today wasn’t nearly as productive as yesterday, but I still think that I got quite a lot done in the end. I started my day off by improving my score of 41% in my ACW1 for Quantitative Methods for Computing to 56% — quite a good boost after just one extra night of revision I think. Its also worth noting that I’ve more than doubled my original score of 27% in under a month. 🙂

After this I wrote up notes on the subject of Software Infringement for IT and Professionalism and wrote up notes on the subject of Files and File Systems for Computer Systems, both of which are simple concepts to understand.

Today was also the start of our group “Micro-Project” which is worth 40% of our module grade for Computer Systems. My group has to do a 10 – 15 minute presentation on the Fetch Cycle. According to my Computer Science Operating Systems Lecturer we need to:

The fetch-cycle is a vital concept.  Why?  Illustrate your project presentation including a discussion of registers, cache memory (at various levels), RAM, and other memory options.

Though it may sound complicated I think this will actually be quite a simple topic to cover. The fetch cycle is simply the amount of time it takes for data to get to the CPU from the memory it is in — the shorter the better.

After attempting (and failing) to find any of my group colleges on Facebook I moved on to writing some more code for my Oracle ThinkQuest team, through which I stumpled across the single best resource for Windows Phone 7 I have found to date — The Silverlight Toolkit — this tool kit allows custom user interface elements such as the date picker and toggle switch you can see above in my application. These UI elements are used heavily in the Microsoft apps which come with Windows Phone, so it is a surprise to me that they are not included by default in visual studios toolbox, but seen as they’re not if you develop for Windows Phone you should definitely download and use the toolkit.

Whilst i found this what I was actually doing was attempting to get a local database to work in my application… still no luck there however 😦 Maybe tomorrow ill work it out! 🙂

Thats all for now
Danny

Fire Alarm!

Unfortunately this post starts with another rant about the bloody Railway Crossing in Cottingham which today decided to come down right in front of my morning bus to uni for about 6 minutes for a train with approximately 10 people on to go past.

Once I’d finally got to uni my 9:15 lecture was about Professional Conduct as an employee in the Information Technology Sector, most of it is common sense, like have a contract and stick to it and don’t do things which could be considered as illegal misuse of computers.After enduring that for an hour I had two hours to fill with eating in the Student Union and talking to Sean and Rob. Half way through this however the large magnet powered doors all shut, red lights started flashing and the fire alarm came on. This resulted in the entire SU being evacuated — you can see people leaving in the feature picture.

My next lecture was Computer Systems Operating Systems and was all about Memory Management which is a ridiculously complex process by which the OS allocated memory resources to individual processes and then feeds the addresses of the memory locations containing said processes to the processor. There are several methods which we have to learn about.

After that lecture I made my way to Cottingham to write angry letters to Student Finance, buy (extortionately priced)  envelope and stamps to send said angry letters and complete some OS homework as well as talk to Jess and eat Dinner.

My angry letter to Student Finance England - Hand Written!

That pretty much concludes my day

Thanks for Reading,
Danny