Dan Rooke’s Blog

I’ve now completed all of my Computing Science degree at the University of Huddersfield! That is assuming that I have passed everything this year which is a little questionable as it’s been a difficult year. I only have to wait until 14th June to find out my results so I will know either way soon enough.

As Chris has said, it’s like one phase of life is over with a new one ahead. This new phase will start next Tuesday morning when I arrive bright-eyed and bushy tailed at newmediaboutique in Leeds. Yesterday, Becca secured a job teaching Special Educational Needs (SEN) children at a specialist school in Barnsley. This is the perfect job for her and so we are both moving away from education together which is both exciting and scary at the same time. I think that we’re both ready though and we’re looking forward to it.

Of course there is the somewhat bigger occassion of mine and Becca’s marriage in late July for us to focus on. This is now just under two months away, so it’s creeping up fast. Prepartions are going well with about eighty people confirmed to attend. I now have all of my outfit sorted, I just need to start thinking about a speech (and the stag do )!

Anyway, I’d better be off to make the most of my week before starting work.

I have just noticed the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 hard disk drives have been added to OcUK’s store. These are among the first hard disk drives to utilise perpendicular recording technology allowing for larger capacity platters. The range topper from Seagate’s 7200.10 series is a breathtaking 750GB, from a previous industry high of 500GB.

This is quite a jump in capacity and excuses the seemingly stagnant nature of the hard drive storage market over the last few years. Needless to say, I am now after a couple of the 320GB drives for Kryten to run in a RAID 1 configuration.

I have being playing with the Ubuntu linux distribution which I am tempted to run on Kryten in place of Windows XP Pro. The drives as well as Ubuntu should make a nice responsive and secure web/database/print/file server for our home network.

Another advancement in the storage field as reported by The Register claims to be capable of storing 12.8m GB (notice the m) in a cubic centrimetre of ferroelectric memory. Now this would really blow current storage capacities out of the window! I’m thinking it may be 2015 before we see this type of storage in products coming to market.

The local election campaign saw very little mention of the state of the local roads. This may seem like a small issue however with the average price of petrol hitting an all time high of 96 pence per litre mainly due to government taxation I believe it is an important one. The state of the roads in the region, in my opinion, are poor topped off with the poor driving standards left to deteriorate with the lack of traffic police.

Being a regular reader of Auto Express, I have spotted some good news for Britain’s roads and road users:

1. Car share lane on the M62 heading east towards Leeds
   A controversial idea but it should benefit the car sharers, the environment as well as commuters using the main carriageway
2. Street lights which dim when not needed
   Ever thought what a waste of energy street lights can be when on at night with no road users? A new invention will see the end to this with lights dimming when not needed helping to reduce energy wastage and light pollution
3. Brake lights which are brighter and pulse when braking harder
   Very useful enabling following motorists to be aware of hard braking and to react appropriately

Despite these advances, I think there’s still a lot to do in terms of taxation of motorists. While I appreciate the fact that cars are polluting, I think there are many ways in which the tax collected from motorists should be used to help motorists as well as providing alternatives. Cars will be around for a long time to come, I think that the government should accept this and work with motorists rather than against them. Work should then be done to provide alternatives to ween motorists from their cars by their own choice, not by trying to price them out of the market with perpetually increasing taxes.

On 30th May ‘06 I shall be starting work at newmediaboutique over in Leeds. My job title is PHP/MySQL developer and as the title suggests, I shall be developing applications and sites using PHP and MySQL. The longer term view is to expand on this and look into Ruby on Rails as well as technologies such as AJAX. So basically a web development role, which is what I want to be doing!

The company is small and have a lot of potential. Hopefully the skills I bring will help go some way to fulfilling that potential! I’m looking forward to getting involved with new technologies and having the opportunity to expand my skills and experience. Thanks go to Tim and James for having me

It’s been a very busy few weeks since I last posted. I have now completed my coursework and my final year project investigating the use of agile software development methodologies for web development. I had my first exam yesterday leaving me with three more in the space of just over a week. I shall have finished my degree on 16th May ‘06.

Depending on how the rest of my exams go, I think that I should be on track for a 2:2 or with any luck a 2:1. My courseworks which have been marked have been at 87 and 84 percent. These are well into first territory but after yesterday’s exam I feel that the exams will be my weakpoint. I still don’t think I’ll be doing bad to come through this year in tact, let alone with a degree.

On a lighter note, it was my birthday on Monday. I’ve reached the grand old age of 22 - now I genuinely can be called a grumpy old man! I had a good weekend recouperating after my project was in on Friday. I got a few things done which had been left due to coursework deadlines and actually managed to venture outside to tidy the garden up and get some fresh air.

On Sunday, Becca and I went for a meal at Sole Mio. The set menu which was our favourite has now been increased to £10 for just the starter and main. This isn’t great considering we used to get this as well as a desert for £8.95. The food is good though and the prices are more inline with other restaurants.

On the Monday, we visited the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford. We saw a showing of Sharks 3D at the IMAX cinema there which was rather impressive on the whole. The actual museum was also impressive with booths showing TV programme classics of your choice as well as many interactive displays and actual sets used in animation films such as Wallace and Gromit in The Wrong Trousers. After our visit, we met up with Becca’s parents in Harrogate for some lunch. Good weather + bank holiday = busy! In the evening, Becca invited several friends round for drinks and pizza and I think a good time was had by all. All in all a good birthday