Nameless Paraphernalia

Finally back from Germany

8-hour bus drive… OTL

An update (part III)

We’re going to Hannover! Coming Wednesday till Friday, I’ll be attending the Hannover CeBIT event, with the rest of my class. I’m pretty excited about it, sounds like it’ll be awesome!

We’re going by bus, it leaves at 6:30 in the morning, which means I’ll have to get up way too early (which is not that awesome)! On the other hand I’ve got plenty of time to catch up on sleep during the trip to Hameln, which is were we’ll be staying for the duration of the event, because it’ll be a long ride.

After arriving in Hameln, and dividing the rooms amongst students, we have the rest of the day off. We’re only attending the event on Thursday and Friday. I’m looking forward to it, though, because there are a lot of interesting things to be seen! And I’m not only talking about the games they have there, but also stuff like robotics and others.

Also, I’m attending Katholan this year! It’s my first LAN-party, and I’m also looking forward to this event! It’s two days of non-stop gaming! Kind of. You don’t have to game constantly, but it’s on big LAN-party and that’s just plain awesome!

An update (part II)

School’s been extremely busy lately, since the teachers gave us a lot of projects. Well, a lot compared to last year where we nearly didn’t get any. Here’s an overview of my current projects:

Project GUI, for the Java course, where we first have to make five smaller exercises before we make one big exercise on GUI. Last year, we only worked in BlueJ, which is a nice program because you can see what happens with the objects and methods you create.

This year, we’re working with NetBeans, which has a better auto-complete function so you don’t have to focus that much on type but more on actual coding. Sadly enough, you only see results when you run a main class (which you didn’t have to in BlueJ) or if you have a GUI, which is what we’re learning right now.

Project Software Maintenance and Support, which is a bit of a let down. Initially the purpose of this course was exactly as it says on the tin: Maintenance & support. Of an existing project. And you’re divided in groups of 3/4/5 people per project. However, apparently we have more students in our year than projects, so two of the groups have to make a new project from scratch instead of taking over an existing one.

Guess in which group I am? Correctly, I have to make a new project from scratch together with 3 other people. While it’s fun that I don’t have to search through tons of badly commentated and completely useless code, it’s a bit of a let down that I’m not doing what the course was made for. Either way, our group got 2 projects: Make a website & app for Katho Festival (or, rather, Dance On Tour) and redo the website for Kortrijk Studentenstad. I’m not going to link to the latter, because it’s an eyesore (both design and code-wise), but if you’re so curious then you can just Google it.

Project DVD, for the C#/ASP.net course, in which we have to design a DVD web-shop where you can internationally buy and rent DVD’s. It’s a bit of a multi-course project, because we had to design a domain model and a requirements analysis for System Analysis. There’s a whole bunch of requirements, but I’m not going to name them here because this post is already long and boring enough. This one, though, is done in groups of two people, so less chance on miscommunication.

Project DVD, again, this time for the VB.net course. I’m still not too sure on what we’re actually supposed to do here, sadly enough.

Project unnamed, for Business Process Modelling, in which we have to write a report and then present it. About Business Processes, of an existent company. I’ve only given 1 presentation in my life, and that was last semester. It didn’t go that well, I was too nervous, and it was in French. Half of the time I was trying not to shake, and the other half I was too busy trying not to mispronounce any words. Least to say, I wouldn’t watch myself presenting.

That’s about it. For most projects, there’s an interim evaluation to see how far along you are. For other projects, like Software Maintenance & Support, there’s a close deadline. For all of them, I’m cursing my teachers for thinking I have a time-turner. Or at least no need for sleep or no need for some me-time. Which I do.

At least my boyfriend’s being really supportive, while I’m being mostly stressed out and panicking about the deadlines. I shouldn’t even be writing blog posts, because I’ve got too much other stuff to do, but it’s Sunday and I’m a big procrastinator.

(someday, I’ll be paying for procrastinating so much)

An update (part I)

On the 16th of February, we (my class) went to the Microsoft Student to Business days, AKA Microsoft Tech Days, in Braine-l’Alleud. It was pretty boring for the most part (the speakers and most of the presented technologies didn’t quite interest me), but there were 2 notable presentations.

The first was the one on XNA Gaming by Rob Miles, he was simply awesome! Not only the subject of his presentation, but the whole thing itself, was fun! He’s a pretty funny guy too (his introduction went something like “Hi, I’m Rob Miles. That’s English for tall and handsome”).

The second one was on HTML5 by Kevin de Rudder. The presentation wasn’t as funny as Rob Miles’, but it was really interesting! I’ve been following the HTML5 development a little bit for a while now and, though I liked the new tags and attributes, I wasn’t too sure on the support in older browsers. However, Modernizr is a script that adds support for older browsers.

Which means that all new sites that I’m designing nowadays (which are only 2 or 3, but still), are being done in HTML5. It takes some getting used too, especially the part where you don’t have to declare 5 new divs with id’s, because HTML5 made tags out of the most often used ones like “header”, “nav”, “footer”, etc. For more information on HTML5, you should visit the W3C School’s section on it.

Also, those two good presentations have been uploaded on YouTube, so if you want to see them too then you can find Rob Miles’ session here and Kevin de Rudder’s session here.