crossedstreams.com

I tried the first couple of weeks of the Building Web Applications, but I won’t be continuing with the module.

I was hoping that there’d be some deep insight into the pros and cons of the Java web applications and the JSF framework and RESTful Web Services, but it was pretty clear that we weren’t going to cover enough ground to make the course worthwhile. There’s also some pretty idiosyncratic approaches to writing Java code going on too, so it was all a bit strange.

I could have carried on through the module as it should have been easy to get a good grade but then I’m doing the course for the challenge and opportunities to learn more than for the letters after my name. It’d be a shame to lose out on learning something else.

The software engineering modules have been a little disappointing, to be honest – where I found the Computer Science modules assumed a challenging knowledge of maths and computing, the software engineering modules seem to assume little or no prior knowledge. Maybe that’s just my perception, having been working on-and-off in software development for the past 4-5 years.

On the bright side, I did get a lead on what looks like an excellent book to get stuck into JSF 1.2 in Core JavaServer Faces by Geary and Horstmann.

That means that I just need to revise the Patterns for e-Business course foe this set of exams. In Autumn I’ll continue with Computer Science modules and it’ll be once more unto the breach with the whole logic thing, so I’ve pulled a couple of books out of the library to get started with that again.

Paul Brabban Computer Science, Development, MSc

When I chose Manchester University for my Computer Science MSc, it was partially because of its reputation but I realized I didn’t actually know anything specific about that legacy.

I thought I’d find out a little more about some of the computing cornerstones that were laid in Manchester’s labs. Did you know that the first Random Access Memory was created there? Fast, random access memory is a core part of computer systems today. Having enough of it is crucial to making your laptop or desktop run all those applications quickly for you.

The Williams (or Williams-Kilburn) Tube was the first random access memory that could access at speeds suitable for a computer. It was the ancestor of the multi-gigabyte cards you’ll find in your computer today.

Back in the days before TVs were two inches thick, the moving pictures on the screen were drawn by magnetic fields and streams of electrons in a glass tube called a Cathode Ray Tube, or CRT. Did you ever hold your hand near the screen of a CRT television and feel the static tingle? Somewhere around 1946, Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams at Manchester University used the charge on a CRT’s phosphorescent coating to store ones and zeroes (effectively as dots), where they could be detected by a ‘pickup plate’ which lay over the ’screen’.

As the electron beam hit the screen, a positive charge would be left behind at that position. Not for long mind you, as the charge would dissipate, but the information read by the pickup plate was used to refresh the tube before the charge had chance to leak away. This refreshing process is still required by the RAM chips in your computer today.

If you’re interested in knowing more, you can read all about it on Wikipedia and computer50.org, the sources I used to get this information.

To test the Williams Tube, the folks at Manchester built the first stored-program computer, a pretty important milestone in its own right. Maybe more on that some other time.

Paul Brabban Computer Science, history, manchester

The material for day 4 focussed on Business Process Modelling. This sits orthogonally to Patterns for e-Business, defining business functions over their architecture.

There are two notations for Business Processes put forward – BPMN and UML Use Case/Activity Diagrams. My part of the coursework assignment is to apply BPM to the johnlewis.com some processes on the website, for which I’ve chosen Activity Diagrams and Visual Paradigm for UML. I did take a look at the implementations of BPMN, but I found a familiar pattern – they either didn’t work or cost $$$. Fortunately, VP is still serving me well.

The lab session was spent working with my team on the coursework and setting up tasks for the rest of week. As we’re producing a large report and taking different sections, we’ve set up a Google Docs site to drop working drafts onto to help us collaborate. It’s the first time I’ve used Google Docs like this and so far I like it, it’s responsive, intuitive and it’s easy to share a folder with a group of people, so for this kind of work it’s looking good.

In other news, the marks for the Machine Learning module are in and I’m very happy to have passed! That’s two modules, or one-quarter of my MSc done.

Paul Brabban Computer Science, MSc