Nick Jackson

Today our great and extraordinarily expensive VLE goes down for some upgrades to prepare it for the next academic year, where it’s taken out of the hands of the unfortunate computing students who have been giving it a thorough hammering and replaces the venerable and admittedly shit Virtual Campus.

Will we get features we have been asking for like RSS feeds of course content? Will we finally be able to use the message boards without Java? Will the university finally get it into its head that not everybody uses Word, and perhaps some form of PDF document would be far nicer? Will the academic staff decide on a single, sensible format for all the content so you don’t have to remember how each individual tutor stores their notes?

Probably not. Still, any update which requires the entire system to be taken offline for several hours is either going to be a nice improvement, a major behind-the-scenes set of tweaks, or a total cock-up. I await the results with great anticipation.

My magical questionnaire system has just earned me another first! Huzzah!

After writing 1500 words on it, I can safely say that Systems Thinking is yet another instance of consultants coming up with a set of convenient buzzwords and terms to explain something at £500 an hour that I could explain in 10 minutes for free.

I acknowledge that there is a need for people to sit back and look at things like processes and systems in order to better understand and improve them. What I don’t get is why it has to be wrapped up in endless diagrams, words that nobody else understands, and marketed as a silver bullet to solve all business woes.

Systems thinking is an approach to analysis that is based on the belief that the component parts of a system will act differently when isolated from its environment or other parts of the system.

That’s it in a nutshell. Wikipedia rules. I have somehow managed to drag that sentence into a 1500 word report. It’s like UML all over again, but with fewer boxes.

I’m off to submit 42 pages of work. Normally 42 pages would be a huge essay or report, perhaps extensive technical documentation. No.

I’m submitting 9 pages of report, and 33 pages of printed code. Almost 4/5 of my submission is something which does bugger all when printed, and would make far more sense to submit on a CD.

Stupidity rules.

I’m currently listening to some random Polish music on Siren FM, the University of Lincoln’s radio station (And the first UK university radio station to get an FM broadcast licence). It seems to be part of the Polish Programme, Mondays between 8pm and 9pm.

I love university, life can be so random sometimes.

If you’re not within Lincoln you won’t be able to tune in to Siren on 107.3 FM, but you can all listen online.

Apparently the wonderful University of Lincoln have acquired some bicycle storage huts, allowing students with everybody’s favourite two-wheeled transit method to lock them up securely. Students have to provide their own padlock, but this is only to be expected and is no more unusual than any other bicycle storage method. However, I spotted a slight problem in the message telling us about this.

There are three huts by the GCW Library and a further six by the Sports Centre on the Brayford campus.

So by my maths that’s a grand total of nine secure bicycle huts. For a student and staff body of somewhere in the region of 30,000. (more…)

I’d like to start with a genuine quote from the University of Lincoln’s Public Security Policy, available on the university’s internal Portal system under the first entry for a search on “security policy”:

The University has an obligation to balance these 2 requirements. Occassionally these requirements will conflict…..academic freedom…. blah

To which my only reply can be “dude”. It appears that the only publicly accessible version of the Public Security Policy is a draft.

(more…)

UML is horrible, cludgy, trying to be all things to all men, and all in all an over-complicated method of shoehorning an OO system into a non OO modelling framework.

It’s the kind of thing that actually gets in the way of real work, the type of thing generated by some consultant ’systems analyst’ to make the development team stop programming and document the system using a godawful syntax. Then the ‘consultant’ can look at the UML diagram and say “here’s your problem, this arrowhead should be filled in” when in fact the only reason it isn’t is because the developers couldn’t give two shits if the arrowhead is filled, hashed, open, closed or even pointing to the right place.

Seriously, I’ve spent longer trying to draw the UML than I would have taken to just write the damn program. Even in COBOL.