End of the Masters

Have been quite busy since my last post, mainly focusing on my Masters thesis. Lots of writing and some last minute changes later, and it was gradually printing out ready to be handed in. Printing took a while (lots of appendix pages), but it was all eventually done and handed in (I handed it in on the original deadline as it had been pushed back a few days) on the same day I moved out of the Hatfield flat. 

Semester B Grades

Grades for Semester B were released last night, I got an A1 in Software Engineering Practice and Experience, and an A3 in Human Computer Interaction (I think I had an A3 in that one as we got coursework marks back, it being a coursework only module meant I could work out what I thought I would get, and I was right). 


Very happy about the results, as they are added to the 3 A1's I got in Semester A, so it's looking good for the Masters. 


All I've got left to do is complete my Masters Thesis; I have the whole summer to do this, and then that is the entire course completed, in a week or so short of a whole year. 

Back to working again

Just finishing the end of the first week of starting my Masters thesis. Had a fairly basic specification to start working with, and after a meeting with my project tutor I started on a few basic UML diagrams [1]. Been sorting out other meetings with other people involved. Filled out an ethical approval form, which I didn't have to do last year as I wasn't going to be interacting with people outside my course, luckily as I'll only be conducting simple interviews, all answers I gave matched the 'automatic approval' answers, so that should get back to me with little delay. 


Found a load of potentially relevant journal articles about the subject I'll be working on. Have read 3 or 4 so far I think. Fairly in depth (I guess that's IEEE articles for you though), requires a lot of concentration to follow it properly, so I'm going to have to get back into a concentrating mind set (I've been doing not much for the last few weeks). Been going through with a highlighter pen so far. 


Basic outline of project is as follows: look into various technologies to allow the automation and digitization of some (currently paper-based) forms, to allow different parts to be completed by different people at different times etc. This means I'm going to be mainly looking at workflow systems, probably Sharepoint, probably X-Forms (which is a standard from the W3 yet to be fully completed, I think), maybe pdfforms or whatever the pdf version is, and I might look into Google Wave as that's been opened to the public recently. Will have to see as the project progresses. 




[1] Never been too keen on UML, I guess now I get to use it in an actual practical scenario to see if it useful or not

Masters year (Semester A and B)

Masters Year


This is going to cover what I've done so far during my Masters year, which should complete my 'trilogy' of posts catching up from when I used to write blogs.