Personal Blogs

I have had a bad time over the last few weeks. I downloaded a new beta for El Capitan (the Mac OS current release) and found that Safari, Outlook and the App Store didn't work. This was a bit of a problem as the App Store is the only place that you can get a new version of the OS.

I went off to my Time Machine backup and asked it to recover the computer back to the day before the new version install. It told me that it would take 440 hours to complete! By now, it had zeroed out the hard disk so there was no going back. Discussing this with my son (IT director of a decent sized company in London) brought the suggestion that I should drop the wireless connection and connect the Mac directly to the router - giving me a 1GB transfer rate. In fact, I had a spare BT router so I set the Mac up with that on a closed network. It still took 3 1/2 days but it came back. The problem was that the good backup kept stopping so I switched to the latest copy (with the problems) and, at least, that worked. 

Of course, the problems were still there. I went looking on the internet as I assumed that others would have the same problem. They had and they had a solution. I had a clever bit of software installed on the recommendation of HSBC to ensure that I was always connecting directly to them and not some phishing site. It seems that it was this that was causing the problem. I deleted it from the Mac and - Bingo - everything worked. Well that was one week of my life that I won't get back again!

It left me somewhat behind in my efforts to get TMA 02 completed. In fact, it left me quite depressed as I had looked at of the MongoDB stuff and found that I couldn't make head nor tail of the code. This seems to be a general feeling. Asking us to do something new and tricky is what the course is about but presenting a solution that is over 20 lines long and has no comments within it is not how an OU course should be designed. This got me afeared of the TMA and when I saw that Q2 had some coding I, I have to admit, panicked a little (in spite of 30 years coding experience!). I even contacted my tutor to see if my strategy was reasonable - skip Q2 - do Q3 and probably get 40% ish. Add that to the 72% I got forTMA 01 and that would give me the "over 40%" for the two TMAs as required to pass. In fact, by the time that Joe (my tutor) got back to me, I had steadied down.

I did the whole of Q2 and the Q3 EMA prep in Excel - took me 2 1/2 hours. I then looked and thought "I can do this is Python" - having realised that there was no MongoDB in it! So, here I am with Q1 and 50% of Q3 done and 50% of Q2 sorted as well. Q2 so far has taken a long time as my Python is rusty again having left it behind a few weeks ago. I hope to get the rest of Q2 done over this weekend, get Q3 sorted on Monday and that will leave me a couple of weeks ahead of the reading once more. Phew!