Archive for the 'education' Category

a good idea at the time

Published on 14/04/2008 in education and music. 2 Comments

This weekend I had friends over (a mixed group, gender-wise, before you ask), and what with one thing and another we ended up watching Deep Throat. Yes, alcohol was involved.

I bet you’ve heard of Deep Throat. You probably know that it’s a famous porn flick from the Seventies and one of the earliest to feature, well, deep throating.

But have you actually seen it? We hadn’t, and I doubt many people in their twenties today have.

All the ridiculous seventies porn clichés are there – big hair (all over), ridiculous music, a paper-thin façade of a plot that is doggedly maintained to the bitter end, obscene moustaches and hammy acting that is nevertheless an order of magnitude above anything from recent movies. Indeed, compared to modern porn the plotting and acting are all amazing (this is compared to modern porn, not an actual movie, I hasten to add).

Of course, what hasn’t stood the test of time is the sex. Hairy arses, flabby guts, tame positions, half-hearted erections (on the screen, none at all in the audience), did I mention the music? This gem is from the main theme:

Deep throat,
Deeper than deep your throat
Deep throat
Don’t row your boat
Don’t get your goat
That’s all she wrote
Deep throat

For a film that was banned in several territories it’s actually remarkably tame, only really crossing into what a modern audience might consider indecent in one scene where… well, you can watch it for yourselves. Seriously, go grab a torrent. If nothing else it’ll help you appreciate modern porn all the more.

can’t talk, jerking it to Phil Schiller

Published on 10/03/2008 in education and geek. 0 Comments

I’m a little late to the iPhone Roadmap event party, since I kind of dropped off the grid for the rest of the week last Wednesday (not that you’d know it, watching me paw at my feeds over public WiFi as I waited for a night bus somewhere in the Square Mile).

I’m not sure I have much orginal commentary to add, just that the demo of Activesync was fucking sexy. I’ve been harping on for a while now about the idea of one’s contacts, bookmarks, calendars and general everything living on a server somewhere and just being wirelessly accessed by a device, and here it is! Well, apart from bookmarks. Still, it was so cool. Hopefully this won’t stay suits-only, with Apple presenting consumers with OTA .Mac syncing.

Another Enterprise morsel: 802.1x, finally! Not that I’ll still be on campus by June when it actually rolls out, so I hope the beta escapes to bittorrent or similar.

Also super-sexy was the notion of gaming on the iPhone. They had Sega demo a version of Super Monkey Ball that they had rushed together in two weeks flat and it fucking rocked my socks. I’ve been playing Labyrinth on my jailbroken iPhone for some weeks now, and tilting my phone to manipulate monkeys in perspex balls rolling around OpenGL-rendered mazes is really a kind of logical conclusion to that.

monkeyball

that guy works for sega, if you couldn’t tell

In unrelated news: I finally saw Avenue Q – It rocks so fucking hard! I can safely assert that you haven’t really heard “The Internet Is For Porn” until you’ve seen it performed on stage by actors holding actual fucking muppets while the audience goes completely nuts for it.

all the small things

Published on 02/03/2008 in education, everything, geek and music. 2 Comments

- What the hell is the point of specially engineered footballs to allow for “more control, more goals”? Surely any advantage conferred by such a ball will be conferred to the other team as well?

- My blog is less green now, do you like it?

- It bothers me that children as young as seven roaming a shopping mall alone, dressed like they’re going out to get pissed. I think I’m getting old (at least they’re not on my lawn!).

- Why the fuck is it so fucking hard to find a comb? And where the hell did my comb go, exactly?

- I haven’t written a stupid play in ages, I totally should.

- As Oscar WIlde once said*, hell is other people. Coursework is also other people, therefore coursework is hell. Though this might just be because this particular coursework involves configuring and maintaining a Linux server…

- The new Hot Chip album makes it hard to walk normally in public. This is a good thing.

- I’m back with Safari, because Firefox 2 for Mac is ugly and generally slow. I have high hopes for version 3, but it doesn’t work with the Google sync-o-tron yet, so fuck that.

*He may or may not have also said that hell is going to prison for buggery, historical records are unclear.

Enterprise Level Computing

Published on 18/02/2008 in education, everything and web design. 1 Comment

I know I have been remiss in this duty, but I said I would, and so I will. Today’s I shall explore what I have made thus far out of ELC.

We’re 4 weeks in, which is about half the module, and I can’t really say there’s that much examinable content. Here are what I have identified as the key points:

Developiong applications and systems for enterprise use is really hard, and as such it is best attempted not alone, butwith the aid of tools (such as Ant, DOxygen and JUnit – not to be confused with Moon Unit) and “patterns”.

Yes, quotation marks. So, what the hell is a pattern? It’s not broad advice, and it’s not even a more specific practice like extreme programming, it’s kind of hard to pin down. As best I can tell it is some almost-standard for discussing how to approach, understand and solve a computing problem, generally laid out in a “traditional” manner (there is no formal standard for this) and with example code included. Also, they’re not new, but the result of some dude spotting a useful set of principles and solidifying them into some kind of formal description.

Patterns can be considered a design practice, much like agile development, SOA or UML.

So then we took a step sideways into the case study that will form the bulk of the course, the main thrust of which being “talk to everyone involved!” and “no, seriously, talk to them!” Everyone in this case including users, administrators and even marketing, so as to build up a really complete picture of what your system might be expected to achieve.

So suddenly we’re talking about web services and it’s acronym soup. SOAP, XML RPC, WSLD, UDDI, WTFBBQ and so on. The gist of it is that we’re hard for Java, and hard for XML, and web services should be asynchronous and largely client-independant, because client-independence is groovy and means at the very worst, all the client needs is a half-modern browser (IE need not apply). Not to mention less stuff is locked in, so you don’t end up with a small number of software engineers totally running the show and demanding to be paid accordingly. This also means it’s easier to change later. Yay for standards, but which standards? Well, all those acronyms mentioned above are neatly rolled together by Ant, Apache Tomcat and some simple Java, which makes running a web service the easiest thing in the world, apparently.

Ant? It’s like make but for java, and much simpler.

Join us next week as we decide that Pojos are an excellent idea, and then backtrack very quickly.

learn with mother

Published on 13/01/2008 in education. 5 Comments

It just occurred to me, as I was explaining the gist of one of my modules to a friend, that explaining things to others is an excellent way in which to assure oneself of having learned something.

Thus I resolve that I shall attempt to share here every new concept which I encounter over the last semester of my course, in as interesting and engaging a way as possible. I do this partly as an aid to my own learning, but mostly to prove what I have always suspected: that if I were only to understand a given subject I could d a much better job of explaining it to the uninitiated than my lecturers.

Join me next week for Strategic Management II… the Revenge~