Personal Blogs

Two things have happened this week. Firstly, TM470 opened up to let us look at the documentation so that we can start planning for our projects. Great! Secondly, today, the results came out for TM351. I am a little disappointed as, on the basis of my TMAs, where I scored an average of 75%, I was expecting (hoping) for at least 70% in the EMA, which would give me a level 2 pass. I have passed all of my computer courses with a 2, dropping to a 3 for my two electronics based units, so this would have sat nicely. 

I got 56%! So, I only get a level 3 pass. Booooooooo!!! I thought that I presented a well thought out presentation but obviously not. However, I think that I am lucky as there are an awful lot of people out there reporting results in the mid to low 40s, which just scrapes a level 4. I won't express my opinion of TM351 as a course except to say that, as a first year presentation, it was a bit of a shambles. The two things that I am noticing on the current course is the involvement of a super moderator (Richard Walker - liked by everyone who knows him but new to me) and also the involvement of the course team on the forums as well. This is really great. However, they need to be listening to the vibes regarding TMA01 part2 as the questions seem to be a little bit loose, shall I say. "Describe your understanding of using " is very open. Maybe my understanding is that I don't understand. That would be difficult to put into 360 words and would it get me anywhere - no it wouldn't but it would actually answer the question!

With regard to TM352, I am now reading up on HTTPS security as this is something that I have used before but never actually understood at a reasonable level - installing a certificate and getting HTTPS going is not the same as knowing what and why. Still, it is week 3 and I am reading week 6 in preparation for the TMA which is due on 17th November.

TM470 looks like it is going to be a lot of fun but hard work. The whole thing takes from January to August and finishes with a 10,000 word final report. Wow! It seems that we have to validate our project proposals through our tutor but we don't get our tutor until the course starts. In the meantime, they open up a forum for students to discuss their projects between themselves and hone them. You have to fill in a form which gives the project background to the course writers so that they can allocate a tutor who can actually help. As projects that I have heard of involve using Arduinos to transmit data by light and rewriting the NatWest iPad app, I can see why this would be needed.

My app will combine my interest in US railroad operation with my involvement in OO design, NoSQL databases and web/mobile technology. I can't wait.

I am just starting week three of the course and have had to give myself a reality check. I was looking through the forthcoming Tutor Marker Assignment (TMA) and was panicking a bit at what I was seeing.

Let's step back a bit. I have had a difficult week one way and another - lots of pain in my hips so lots of tiredness and lack of concentration. This has caused me to have to force concentrate on the learning part. I have weeks 1 and 2 put to bed. I have the first ICMA (computer marked assignment and more on that later) finished and I was finding it difficult to stick with reading the recommended research papers for week 3. I have never been a fan of using jargon and, having been away from studying so long, I find that the way a lot of academic papers are phrased strike me as opaque for not much reason. First off, I couldn't find the recommended papers in the OU library and then, when I did, I found them impenetrable. This was probably because of my concentration difficulties. Eventually, I sorted out what the week was about but I was still panicky about the TMA.

Remember that "lack of concentration" means that you don't read things and take in the import. Well, it seems that, with the TMA, the questions (from 3 onwards), I was panicking over had a rider in the title that I had missed. How about "You should be able to answer this question when you have completed Parts 1 to 6 of the module"? Suddenly, it dawned on me that I was only up to Part 3! Giant relaxation all round.

Then how about this one in Notebook 0.4 of week 3. "We cannot cover the cases where the user has created sentinel values to capture semantic variations in missing data." I even posted on the forum for some help here! A fine example of using words to demonstrate writer understanding rather than to promote the same in the reader. This came back from the Moderator in an attempt, I think, to clarify the issue: ""We're not going to look at cases where the user has different flag or signal values to denote different sorts of missing data." Sort of... ". Hmmm. Well, I think I get the message but I would have said that the course will ignore cases where special flags have been used to note dirty data rather than the Nan or NULL that we are going to look at.

Enough of my moaning. I finished Part 3 feeling that I will, maybe, have to come back and re-run the reading but that I knew enough to go on. Today, I started tackling Part 4 and have found this much more to my liking.

On a personal basis, I am ringing tomorrow to see what the delivery hopes are for my new electric desk and ergonomic chair. I think that this combination will help greatly with my concentration.

Now, I need to discuss the first ICMA. I find the whole issue of the ICMAs to be quite strange. They want us to do them but they tell us we only have to get 30% in 5 of the seven. They then tell us that we can have up to three goes at each question. From there, it seems that we can have multiple goes at the whole ICMA and, if the score of the latest submitted one is below that already achieved then it is ignored. It seems to be a scheme to let you get to a 100% score - eventually - so why have the 30% - 5 out of 7 - rule? I have done ICMA 41 (the first) just the once and got 75.11 out of 80 which I make 93.9%. This seems to me to be a good score so I will not be going back and having another go. Incidentally, the scores that are shown on my student record, when I add them up, come to 75.11 whilst the same scores on the Student home page are totalled there as 75.09. I can only guess that the actual scores are  calculated to 3 decimal places with only two shown thus giving a rounding error.

Right, I ought to finish as this is a very long post but I thought that I should mention Microsoft Dreamspark. This is a repository of Microsoft development tools and Operating Systems that can be free if you have the right student credentials. I tried signing up on the web site to find that they hadn't heard of the OU. I even gave them proof of my course but nothing happened. I then found out that the OU has a Dreamspark set up managed by them just for OU students. I sent an e-mail to mct-dreamspark@open.ac.uk and very quickly they had me registered. I was able to download a copy of Windows 10 (for my Windows Laptop which only had Windows 7 so no free upgrade) and Windows 2012 Server to replace the Windows 10 Home edition that I have running on my E-mail and Web Server. They even have MSDos 6.22 if you are so inclined. Try it. You could find something that you need.

Getting closer meant that I had to get more serious about learning Python. 

I run a web and e-mail server from home. The e-mail server is for the family domain and there are three web sites that are running on the machine as well. I thought that I had put together a reliable setup when I  purchased a brand new Lenovo desktop box running Windows 8 (which was fairly quickly upgraded to Windows 10). However, the box freezes occasionally. I can't find any reason for this so I just have to manage the situation. I find the the Pingdom service, which is supposed to e-mail me when my server goes down isn't as reliable as I need.

I was casting around for another program to write in Python to extend my knowledge of the language so I thought that I would write my own Ping software. Now a ping is something that gets sent to a web address and reports back if the server at that address responds or not. What my software had to do was to regularly connect to the server and, if the server failed to respond, send me an e-mail. There was a few problems with me doing this in Python.

1. I had no idea how to connect to a web server
2. I had no idea how to send an e-mail
3. I had no idea how to log these actions

So, this was going to test my ability to learn the inner details of Python. It was actually easier than I thought. Python has a rich set of libraries so I included the following in my program:

import smtplib
import requests
import time
import configparser
import os

My next progression towards the course is a giant backward step. We have decided to move apartments and the move takes place on 23rd January. We are only moving from one floor to another (the new apartment is much bigger than the existing one) but, for various reasons, we are to lose our broadband internet connection for about 10 days - which covers the date of the start of the course! I am hoping that I can use my iPhone as a router for my iMac in the meantime. As we have a nice 4G signal here, that shouldn't be a hardship.

Lastly, I have quite severe Arthritis in a lot of my body so I have registered, through the OU, as disabled. Following an assessment of my problems, I have been awarded a grant that will provide me with equipment that will help me in my studies. I have difficulty sitting for too long in one position and find concentrating for long periods a trial due to pain levels.  Yesterday, I had a visit from a representative of an Ergonomics company who has carried out an assessment for a new desk, chair and reading aids. It seems that I am to get a desk that is electrically height adjustable, a fully configurable chair, an iPad holding device and a footrest. All of this is designed to get me into the best possible position for sitting at my iMac for extended periods. It seems to take about 6 weeks for this to happen but it does mean that, soon after the course starts, I will be able to get on with more success. My existing hobby room is way to small to take the new desk along with my other stuff so it is good that I am moving to a bigger apartment as the 2nd bedroom in that one is substantially larger than now. I might even have room for a decent model railway - at last!!!

I last studied with the OU back in 1980 so all of my previous credits are from that time. I have an original E student code - which amazingly I still remember. Due to Student Loan requirements, I am unable (as explained later - also unwilling) to take the two required prerequisites for the course I have signed up for. This course is TM351 Data management and analysis. 

I studied computer subjects back in the 1970s previous to the advent of micro-computers but was prepared for them when they finally arrived around 1978. At the time I was a Foreign Exchange Dealer in the City and, up to them, had assumed that the OU course was a side show and not relevant to my daytime occupation. Having attended a one week summer school at Reading University for my T101 Mathematics course, I returned with a program to do some elementary calculations on Money Market problems. My boss liked what I had done and arranged for me to obtain one of the first Z80 micro-computers to design a suite of programs for the dealing room. This was a North Star Horizon. This, along with an Elbit VDU was used to build a good suite of software. The bank, eventually, bought an Horizon for me to have at home.

I moved jobs and arranged to keep the Horizon. From there I wrote a whole package of front office software for the bank - including a package for our branch in Greece - built in Microsoft Basic on an Apple II. Eventually, I left the City and formed my own software company - in 1985. For the next 20 years I spent my time developing software in the Smalltalk programming language. Smalltalk is the original Object Oriented language - designed at Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s.

Consequently, I saw no reason for me to study OO programming using Java (which was one of the prerequisites) as I was already very competent in this field. After me writing a CV and obtaining a reference from an insurance company in Connecticut, USA (I had been writing custom software for them for the last 20 years!) the course team agreed that I had sufficient background to take the course without the prereqs.

I will still need to get up to speed with Python. To assist this, I am currently working on the Future Learn three week course - “Learn to Code for Data Analysis” which uses Python to analyse spreadsheet data. Once this is complete, I have designed a few projects to fully understand Python - one of which is to convert my existing Smalltalk web program (using Seaside) which tests vocabulary knowledge for those learning Latin!

So. Onwards. More on the Data Analysis course and Python next time.