Another part of uni life that I have loved this semester is having an awesome group of friends in both of my subjects. It makes such a huge difference when you’re in a fun environment! So to wrap up an awesome semester: Thank you Michael Rees for teaching us some really interesting new things – and encouraging us to take an interest in what we are learning – and thank you to the students in the class who have made a great subject even better

Cheers!

So at this stage, one of the main places that I would like to live is Varsity Lakes at the Reserve. There are a lot of students living there and being so close to uni makes it an awesome place to live. It is also very close to where my parents live too which would mean that calling in home from time to time wouldn’t be too much of an effort. They have two and three bedroom apartments there and they are relatively new and modern.

Which brings me to my next decision: whether to live on my own or to find people to flat with. There are so many pros and cons with both situations which makes it very difficult to decide! Living by yourself means that you can leave the place exactly as you want, and being the neat freak that I am, that situation would suit me perfectly. However living by yourself could get might lonely if you are a social type of person. So I guess living with people goes the same way, except the opposite applies.

So that is my goal for next year. I want to start seriously looking for an apartment by about April ’10 so I’d better start saving!

I never fully understood the concept of artist’s block until now, having realised that it is exactly what I’m suffering from. It goes so far beyond not being able to come up with an idea to paint. One of the big problems that I have with starting a new project is that I am always trying to come up with something bigger and better than my last piece – and because I’m always trying to better my previous work, I never feel like anything is going to live up to my own expectations.

So this is going to be my project for the summer holidays. I have bought myself a canvas that is even bigger than the one from my high school project and I am going to force myself to start something new. Who knows – maybe once I overcome this block I have about starting something new, I can start pursuing this as a full time hobby. Maybe even a career on the side

In California, there is an organisation set up called the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). In the words of IONS themselves: “The Institute is not a spiritual association, political-action group, or a single-cause institute. Rather, we honor open-minded approaches and multiple ways of knowing, bring discernment to our work, and support diversity of perspectives on social and scientific matters”. What I find the most interesting is that, from the amount that I have read about the whole thing, it completely aligns with my personal views on the power of thought and the way this affects our environment and physical circumstances.

The fact that there are people out there discovering amazing things like this makes me want to start something revolutionary myself. Maybe once I graduate from IT, I will pursue something along the lines of this

One of the more interesting articles that I read recently was 5 materials that will make the world as we know it obsolete. What I found particularly interesting was the section on ‘Programmable Matter’. According to Wikipedia: “Programmable matter refers to matter which has the ability to change its physical properties (shape, density, moduli, optical properties, etc.) in a programmable fashion, based upon user input or autonomous sensing. Programmable matter is thus linked to the concept of a material which inherently has the ability to perform information processing”. Before reading the article, I had no idea that this kind of thing even existed! And it opens up a whole wold of opportunities – from gadgets that can transform themselves to completely self sufficient, morphable robots.

Programmable matter, of course, hasn’t reach that much of an advanced level yet. However, it is only a matter of time until the technology is perfected to a level that means that we will start seeing it in our day to day lives. Intel has released a teaser video that shows some of the early possibilities of the technology:

I personally have mixed feelings about science reaching such an advanced level. Sure, this kind of thing can open up a lot of amazing possibilities, but like anything else this wonderful, if it reaches the wrong hands all sorts of things can go wrong. Like the cracked article, I’m picturing something along the lines of Terminator 2 which doesn’t look fun on any level!

Some of the main features of YUI include:
Utilities:

• Animation: Helps create “effects” by animating the position, size, opacity or other characteristics of page elements.
• Browser History Manager: Helps web applications use the browser’s back button and bookmarking functionality.
• Cookie: Allows you to manage browser cookies and subcookies through a simple API.
• Drag and drop: The YUI Drag and Drop Utility makes it easy to make elements draggable and to create drop targets that respond to drag events.

Controls:

• AutoComplete: Provides autocomplete feature (suggestion lists and type-ahead functionality) for user interactions involving text-entry. It supports a variety of data-source formats. It also supports server-side data-sources via XMLHttpRequest.
• Calendar: A graphical, dynamic control used for date selection.
• Charts: The Charts Control retrieves data via the DataSource Utility and displays the data in a variety of common chart formats (line, bar, pie, etc.).
• Colour Picker: The Colour Picker Control provides a rich visual interface for colour selection.
• DataTable: Simple yet powerful API to display screen-reader accessible tabular data on a web page. Notable features include sortable columns, pagination, scrolling, row selection, resizeable columns, and inline editing.
• ImageCropper: ImageCropper provides the UI and interactive elements for a client-side image cropper.
• Layout Manager: Allows you to create cross-browser, pixel perfect layouts with little effort by providing a fixed layout containing, top, bottom, left, right and center layout units.
• Menu: Provides an easy API for creating fly-out menus, menu bars, and context menus.
• Rich Text Editor: The YUI Rich Text Editor is a sophisticated client-side text-processor that is modular and highly configurable, suitable for any open-ended text-entry situation.
• Slider: Provides a generic slider element that enables the user to choose within a finite range of values on one or two axes.
• TabView: Provides navigable tabbed views of content; supports dynamic loading of tab content via XMLHttpRequest.
• TreeView: Produces a content tree whose nodes can be expanded and contracted.
• Uploader: Allows for multi-file file upload with feedback on upload progress.

YUI vs. jQuery
One of the main differences that I can tell is the existence of built in controls and more complicated features in YUI that do not seem to be as readily available in jQuery. Don’t get me wrong, jQuery has been an amazing leap forward, but when it comes to extended features you need to rely on community contributions which can potentially end up in having endless script libraries and unforeseen bugs. In terms of code comparison, they both seem quite similar in the way that the features are implemented, which ultimately means that it would be quite feasible to put the time into learning YUI as a new framework.

Based on finding out about just some of the above mentioned features of YUI, I am very interested in giving it a go. I am especially impressed by the ability to have controls such as calendars and colour pickers at your disposal – something that I have previously had to download and install completely separate libraries for in the past. Based on the fact that I am currently fairly well versed in jQuery, that would probably be my first preference when implementing a new project. I think, however, that if I had the time to sit down and teach myself how to use a new system, I would definitely give YUI a go.

Some main features include
- The URL fetch service: This allows applications to access resources on the Internet, such as web services or other data. The URL fetch service retrieves web resources using the same high-speed Google infrastructure that retrieves web pages for many other Google products.
- Mail service: Applications can send email messages using App Engine’s mail service. The mail service uses Google infrastructure to send email messages.
- Memcache: The Memcache service provides your application with a high performance in-memory key-value cache that is accessible by multiple instances of your application.
- Image manipulation: The Image service lets your application manipulate images. With this API, you can resize, crop, rotate and flip images in JPEG and PNG formats.

Google App Engine vs. Ruby on Rails
Google App Engine supports Python and Java programming languages, whereas Ruby on Rails is implemented using Ruby. This provides a lot more flexibility to programmers, especially those with little to no knowledge in Ruby. Also, Google App Engine provides the server space to host your application. Ruby on Rails, on the other hand, doesn’t have this feature included and therefore takes more effort to get going.

What I would choose
I would probably choose Google App Engine as apposed to Ruby on Rails. This has a lot to do with the fact that hosting is taken care of which, with the experience I’ve had with hosting large applications, is a huge plus. Also, google seems to be getting bigger and bigger so this has a lot of benefits in terms of reliability, etc.

MCV
Model-View-Controller architecture is a technique used to split application into parts: the business logic from input and presentation. I can tell you from personal experience that this has huge benefits when developing web applications. One of the main benefits being the fact that multiple people can work on a project, focusing on the areas that they are most skilled at. For instance, a graphic designer doesn’t need to think about the business logic of the software as they are able to work on the presentation layer alone. Another benefit is that when it comes time to update your software, it is easy to pinpoint the specific areas of the project with no need to affect the other layers of the app. For instance, you may need to change some calculations on the business logic layer, but there is no need to change anything to do with the presentation. Ruby on Rails implements this MVC architecture in order to, as mentioned above, organise application programming.

ActiveRecord
Ruby on Rails is separated into various packages, namely ActiveRecord. ActiveRecord is an object-relational mapping approach to accessing data in a database. ActiveRecord is the default model component that is used in Ruby on Rails

Stringent Naming Conventions
In Ruby on Rails, the use of “Convention over Configuration” means a developer only needs to specify unconventional aspects of the application. This takes out a lot of the effort required when designing a system by taking care of much of the naming and configuration for you. Generally, this leads to less code and less repetition which is an asset when it comes to developing and understanding code.

It is almost like comparing life now to before everyone started carrying around mobile phones. It seems crazy to imagine that when my parents were young they managed to plan their entire social lives without even being able to contact each other outside of the house. Even these days it is a major inconvenience if you accidentally leave your phone at home or lose battery!

I think it’s a good change though. Of course, apart from the fact that online privacy is absolutely going out the window, it is fun to be able to stay so connected to your friends. All I know is that I have been able to stay in contact with people so much easier than I could before this online revolution. I have even been able to reconnect with people that I knew when I was little in Sydney. It’s great to catch up with people you haven’t seen for 10+ years!

The only problem that I see with this whole new way of cataloging people online is that it has the potential to become really dangerous for reasons such as privacy, identity theft, etc. I think you have to just be smart about what kind of information you put out there because things can always get into the wrong hands!

To be fair, I have achieved enough in that time to not feel like I am being completely lazy – I have been doing uni part time so that I can also work and once I have graduated, I will have actually been completely deferred for a total of 2 years out of the 5. Also I will have a great business to count for it too  After all I don’t see the rush to be finished with uni – I’m self employed so it’s not like I need to get a degree so I can get a job. And to be honest, once you do start doing a job that you love, going to uni and more about the things you love is actually a lot of fun!

I do think though that I will look back once I am at the end of my degree and be sad that the whole experience is over. Apart from the exams which I obviously don’t enjoy, the rest of the Bond uni life is pretty fun – I love meeting new people and going to the various events throughout the semester. Even meeting up with friends from class to work on assignments is good! Who knows, maybe I will drag my sister back to do a Masters degree with me!