Over the last month it has mainly been a concern with the Mathematics exams that I’m in the middle of as well as preparing for the next wave of coursework. I obtained the grade for my other last coursework (Win32 & DirectX) which was an A18 (90%). I’m pretty happy with that considering the amount of work put in. It just goes to show really that my marks reflect the level of interest I have in their corresponding topics. This of course doesn’t bode well for Mathematics. I’ve revised a lot, but the content is pretty hard to get used too. Even with notes on me, some of the questions they gave in one of the open-note tests were pretty hard I found. Still have one small one and then a large Mathematics exam to do, neither of which I look forward too.

I took the time today to spend a large amount of time overhauling the underlying system that powers the site and adding some new (prettier) features. They’re fairly self explanatory, and I’m 100% happy with the way it is now. The only issue now is with my hosting provider (which is why sometimes people get a 404 error – although these are rare since I hassled them about it). Everything is in the right place and works as it should (as far as I know). Hopefully once this next small exam is out of the way, I can maybe start doing some drawing again which was the entire purpose of switching to an image-centric portfolio, but I’ll only know on-the-fly, work for one (my job, not university) is starting to get incredibly irritating.

Got two grades back, an A20 (100%) and an A19 (95%) for my Level Generation Tool and PS2 Project respectively. I decided to post an actual screen-capture from the Win32 application which I still haven’t gotten a grade back for yet. To be honest after this University year I’m probably just going to skip the Honours year and just take my degree and go for a job in the industry. Nothings decided yet though.

Went for a walk this morning and ended up stumbling across this just 10 minutes away from where I live. Worst part is I didn’t know about if before today having lived here just over two years.

Still haven’t gotten results back from lecturers yet, they’re still asking for more time.

Coursework was over a while ago (I say a while, the deadline was only 3 days ago), and I can’t really publish my reports online in case some people that missed the deadline decide to pinch it – and with some of the people on my course I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.

One thing most reports always miss is good presentation. I figure my reports always look quite good, without trying to sound too arrogant - but it really isn’t hard. There are plenty of software packages that have the ability to display very good headers, footers and cover pages with minimum ease. You can see my Virtual Memory report as an example. After they’ve been marked I will put them up, I know somebody currently in second year who will definitely need the help if he chooses to delude himself into continuing into third year whilst thinking he’s still on the right course.

The above picture is simply the cover pages of my reports. Full marks for guessing I wrote them on January the 10th. They look much better in PDF and on paper, but I ran out of ideas for an image post for coursework reports. Next few weeks, I’m taking it easy – aside from work.

Before the year is up I’m attempting to finish two set pieces for some of my University modules. The scene above is just a simple render, not what it will look like in the final applications. Thankfully I’ve actually already finished my PlayStation 2 coursework, to be honest it’s not really my sort of thing (neither is the Direct X) and it isn’t what I’d like to do when I leave University. Having said that I’ve given them a good shot, and with a bit more effort I’ll get the better looking DirectX implementation running.

I don’t really know what I was going for, but it looks decent enough after everything is polished. I hijacked some of my old code from last year for the PS2 project, to incorporate a nice ‘star field’ effect for the PS2 menus, as well as lock the camera in position for better viewing. From a more technical viewpoint, the majority of the work came from a major code restructuring which is what is most relevant to what I want to do after 3rd/4th year.

Hope everybody enjoys Christmas, isn’t really my sorta thing though.

As part of this years group project, I’m working on a generator and scripting language so that the gameplay can be tweaked, edited and displayed on a separate PC application without having to manually alter code, which of course also brings the problem of messing it up – especially on a large team.

I was playing around with the OpenGL viewport that I nested into an MFC application and it looked like above, I thought it looked clean and simple, and was worth a mention.

I’ve recently updated the ‘About’ page with my entire CV. Hopefully I’ll start posting more work-relevant stuff, including some Photoshop attempts.

I decided that I really needed to upload some examples of formal documentation, so here is a report I wrote for a relatively basic console application, which ultimately simulated how memory was allocated and used. Hopefully it isn’t too hard to follow – but in the end it was meant to be a technical report. Reading through it again, it definitely does get slightly convoluted in places, but this particular report was very well received by my lecturer and serves as a good example of my University coursework submissions (although most of those are longer).

You can view the PDF itself here.

Well I spent quite a bit of time removing the previous WordPress installation, and setting up my latest project – the new photo portfolio layout. Granted I used a considerable amount of plugins, and *all* of the old data from the previous blog was purged (quickly, search Googles cache!) but I think the end result is worth it. Expect less frequent posts, and for them to be more work-related.

As for the question ‘what is a favicon?’, have you ever wondered why some sites have images next to their addresses in your browser and/or in your bookmarks (like the ‘G’ logo for google)? Those logos are .ico (Icon) files, 95% of the time they are called favicon.ico, and are used by your browser as an additional visual image for you to associate with the website itself. You may see them day to day and think nothing of it, but in the end somebody sat down and thought about adding those little icons.