Personal Blogs

I managed it. Having said, last week, that there was only the last part to do, I didn't realise that that last part would take nearly a week. I hit a block and couldn't work out how to do it. I got stuck on the aggregation part where we had to calculate the mean, min, max and sum. I seriously couldn't see how to do this as I couldn't grasp the working difference between a dataframe and a group object. I fought this for a few days and, finally, decided that I had to get it cracked. I spent nearly all day Monday on the problem and suddenly it went "Bing!". I then got through to the end and went for dinner thinking that the TMA was over. Ha! Before sending it off, I thought that I had to make sure that everything was fine and, thus, went through the TMA again from the beginning. I not only found some silly mistakes but also found that there were two bits that I hadn't answered. So this killed off Tuesday. Finally, I couldn't do any more so sent it off, only to get it back as the screen shot names were too long. The OU only allows 50 characters, evidently. Did they tell me this first? No. It also seems that the OU cannot count because it rejected one file name that actually had 49 chars in it.  Still it is gone. I can do no more. As this is the first TMA I have done since 1979, I am concerned that I have written enough and that my coding meets their requirements. I wonder how long it will take to get my results?

Anyway, I now have a little time to get back into work. I have read half of unit 9 so if I can get the rest read by Sunday I will be back on track. I have had a quick look at unit 10 and the notebooks that come with that seem to be the biggest that we have had so far and it is all SQL stuff.

I thought that I might relate my previous computing experience at the OU as that was done in a different world. In 1977, I sat M251, An Algorithmic Approach to Computing. This was in the days before home computers so the arrangements were arcane to say the least. I was living in Billericay at the time and my local centre was in Chelmsford. In a room in Chelmsford there sat a teleprinter - think large electric typewriter with a punched tape attachment and a modem. There was no other storage than a punched tape and the modem ran an 300 baud (300 bits per second). The course was set around the BASIC language and to gain experience in running a program or doing an assignment, I had to travel up to Chelmsford having booked an hour slot, and studiously, and carefully, enter the program in from the keyboard. Once in and tested, I had to 1) make a clean print out of the program and its output and 2) make a punched tape.

Assignments were done by sending off the printout and the tape to Milton Keynes. I remember that one of the assignments was to turn numbers into Roman numerals. I got back a print out of the run that was about 20 feet long. I had to get on my hands and knees to read it all on the living room floor. I did that same thing at Reading Uni when I attended the M101 Maths foundation course summer school. At that time, I was free to choose a subject so I did some Foreign Exchange calculations comparing currency and interest rates. As a result of that, the bank I worked for bought me my first desktop computer and the rest, as they say, is history. 38 years later and I am still programming and enjoying every minute of it.