Exams finally over!

Woohoo...

finally I can get some rest...after the huge number of exams (10 in total) are finally over.

Now to get on with all the things that I planned for the holidays. I have a good 3.5 months to fill and I hope to develop a new site, learn Python and do a host of other stuff within that time. Luckily I don't need to get a job and so it means that I can do these things without hindrance.

The new site will be slow in developing as I don't have enough experience with Web Development. I have a few ideas for the direction in which to take the site, but I need to make some crappy test sites first to get me into this stuff. I actually find the prospect quite daunting as its not like writing a Java program where you build everything from the ground up with levels of sophistication so that each layer of the program gets added one at a time. Instead I see web development as more of a room makeover whereby you need to choose the right furniture to go with the wallpaper and choose the positioning of ornaments with great care.

Python looks like an interesting language as it is very much a hacking language. Hacking here in the non-malicious sense. I have read many arguments on the web about how Java should be less structure and more direct (arguments which talk about "Hello World!" taking huge amount of lines to write) but I see Python and Java as very different languages with different aims. To me Java is for the big stage, imagine for the moment the things we are taught at Uni about project management...things to do with how important it is to perform requirements engineering, use elicitation techniques, estimating, planning, go thru design phases, prototyping, blah,blah blah...

Now try applying that to a close knit 5 man team who all know each other. It would just hinder their progress. Small teams like that just need a good hour of talking to each other to come up with an overall plan and then off they go and do their stuff. They don't need all this formal process to make sure they work effectively.

Now that is Python... It gets results without fussing about with too much framework. U can call in the specialist packages to do extra work for you with import statements....no need to mount directories or anything else.

Java on the other hand is more like your big company who have a 2-3 year project and need to have lots of people working on smaller components of the project. This needs a lot more structure due to the scale of the project and the communication difficulties that arise due to larger groups.

But anyway I digress...I shall try to learn python...and then see what I can do to prepare for next year's modules. I'm thinking of taking the more AI based modules like Planning and NLP2 since the teaching quality is geared towards AI...most of the lecturers are AI researchers and so I guess its better to go with the strengths of the lecturers.

Why I don't like RSS!

RSS has its advantages in terms of updating readers on new stories, only dloading the latest posts for a blog, enabling all the content to be automagically downloaded onto a newsreader, etc etc.

My argument here is however that there is something special about each individual site that helps to separate one news story/one view from another. I gave RSS a try with blogs like Engadget but was turned off instantly when I discovered that no picture comes through. The blandness of the RSS reader put me off (Sage using Firefox) and therefore I switched back to just saving all the blogs as bookmarks and then using firefox to open all the bookmarks at once.

This also brings me onto a point about bookmarks. It would be an excellent addition to enable through the RSS link to highlight the bookmarks you have that have changed or updated since you last looked at the page. This would mean that you could then only open the pages that you know have been changed.

If I was to switch to RSS permanently I would hope to see 2 things. One - a better range of devices that can view these XML based pages... Such as a RSS loader for the PSP or a special RSS Viewer in Java for mobile phones...and secondly I would like to see style info being added like CSS to each RSS file so that it could look like the site of origin but still give the advantages of the traditional page view. If these two things were widely used then I guess this would finally switch me over to RSS.