All 12 entries tagged PDP

Why do you study languages…

...to improve your English of course!

It is funny that when you learn a foreign language, especially if your first language is English (and even more especially if you're a science student and haven't done any English study since GCSEs!) is that you end up learning stuff not only about the foreign language you're studying, but English grammar as well. We were never taught the differences tenses in the latin–esque way at school (unless you actually did take latin), or even knew names existed for the different tenses! But what I'm saying is, the need for precision in your foreign language study requires a precise mother tongue, and hence they both improve! Win-Win situation!

English must be one of the hardest languages to learn (remember the old "ghoti"=fish comparision?). I mean there are so many "ifs" and "buts." It is probably one of the most argy–bargy pieced together hunk of latin/norsk/franco junk with soooo many exceptions. So anyone complaining about how "hard" learning French/German/Spanish/Italian etc. is just a sore loser. If other people can learn our language, why can't we learn theirs???

Nathaniel Ho : 05 Jun 2006 12:32 |  Tags: General PDP Revision |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Carbon Footprint coursework Booted!

Finally finished. When I heard we were supposed to spend 65 hrs on it, I didn't believe it. Now after spending 6 days in front of 2 computer screens (emitting 10.8kg of CO2 to power them!) I have finished. Rob has celebrated by turning on UD to burn even more energy (but saving lives in the process).

Conclusions I can draw, are that the sacrifices to reduce my personal Carbon footprint from 909kg to 243kg, aren't huge at all. No I don't have to eat lentils and drink water, I can keep my meat, I can even keep the car. Though the car has to be switched for a 47mpg Clio 1.2 that runs on LPG (and crammed full of ppl at all times).

This project has been so engulfing, I even calculated that my bath last night caused 85g of Carbon emissions! Yes, all the 2nd year engineers are now brainwashed into tree hugging lunatics.

Nathaniel Ho : 12 Dec 2005 16:49 |  Tags: Environment General PDP |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Geeky Moment

Not to sound big headed or anything. I'm trying to do the PDP thing, which is blab on about anything you've learnt or achieved. I have nothing to talk about except:

I managed to find out how to run Apache webserver in windows, ActivePerl, and I had a nice CGI program I wrote running from my spare box in my bedroom under uni.nathanielho.net (I turn it on only when I need it).

Must remember to code with #C:/windows/perl.exe and not #!/usr/bin/perl

I also installed IIS, but I have always hated it. Until I play with RDP over HTTP, i won't know if my resentment has changed.

I have also installed Suse 10.0 32-bit which I will try and play with, (hard to without a second monitor) tho it does have VNC remote login as standard and Linspire Linux shall follow shortly.

I found the easiest way to send files of 30–80MB to your friends, instead of the unusably slow-packet mangled file sends on MSN using NAT, is to host it on a webserver.

Nathaniel Ho : 15 Nov 2005 23:30 |  Tags: Computers PDP |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Careers Fair

PDP time: still don't know what PDP's are for, but I must do it (so others can get ideas here goes!

Right on tuesday I went to my first careers fair for scientists and engineers. It was good, full of companies who wanted undergrads for internships.

Most useless company was Siemens. Being probably the largest one there, the HR woman wasn't really approachable: "there's 1 placement for electronics in Southampton..." At least I got away with a pencil. Though last summer, my sister (who works for Siemens Business Services) pointed me at their recruitment site and its quite good. Tho for a large company, they don't actually have many jobs.

Bloomberg were very nice. I could understand what they do easily, cos I know the internals of BBC - TV media and information services - and all the back up behind it, programmers, support. They gave me a T-Shirt and pillow.

ARM were great, they had old Warwick students they poached to work at the stall. Very friendly, tonnes of interesting jobs. Top team! (Frisbee and radio)

The financial institutions were nice, they wanted Engineers as Consultants. Which is a well paid job for when I get bored with circuit boards…

Nathaniel Ho : 10 Nov 2005 13:38 |  Tags: PDP |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Redlining the CATS counter

So I thought I'd be sick and punish myself.

120 CATS sir?
No thanks, I think that'll still offer too much social life. I'll take an extra 30 thanks.

To be honest, a few hours of French every week isn't too strenuous. Philip (or Mr Philip) in the language centre told me it was ok to overload, "but" he said as he made me look directly into his eyes, "you must attended every lesson and must not drop out," otherwise, "I'll have to come find you and kill you!"

No pressure then.

Terry Vygus, the lovely lady in the EUO who knows everything about the whole Engineering department, says I can drop down to 24 later if I like.

Nathaniel Ho : 29 Sep 2005 20:03 |  Tags: PDP |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Life without a syllabus: Life without Limits

Whilst revising for my 1st year exams. I thought back on how I used to revise back at school – And that would be with a syllabus usually. And I did think at the time, it would be so much more useful if we had one for our uni modules.
But thinking about it now, it wouldn't have been such a good idea – against the point of university – it would have been restrictive.

(I am sorry if I'm bit slow to have picked this up/ stating the bleedin' obvious).

If you've lived with a syllabus all your life, you end up getting lost in your career. There's no teacher or list to tell you what to do. You don't know which way to turn, you lose intuition and creativity. The only thing you can do is go study some more books, but in every subject job area it ends, you run out. You don't get that final charted-esque status for just doing book-related study. There's a whole other side to it.

I was lucky in that, at school, my physics tutor Mr Bruce Dickson, used to teach without the syllabus. If anything, he'd make his own up. He was the master of thinking and learning beyond the confines of the subject course. Instead of the usual response from teachers when you pose a really complex question: "yes that's true, but let's not get carried away from what we're doing here." Mr Dickson would ALWAYS get sidetracked and carried away. He'd encourage it.

What I am trying to say is, that everyone needs to learn, how to learn on our own, and then we'll reach a level of knowledge as high as we personally want. Go all the way to a PhD! There are no confines in learning. If there was a syllabus, you knowledge level will always be under it.
Come revision time, you'll see that mountain of work in front of you. And you choose how high you increase that top peak to.

Nathaniel Ho : 27 Jul 2005 00:30 |  Tags: PDP |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Replay: Exam Results

Exam results day was going to be interesting. Cos I know the engineering stuff should have been ok. But it was the case of admin problems whether one of the following occured:
I would either fail Italian IT105 (which I don't do) or pass French LL127.

Luckily it was the latter. Fault on my part for not telling the EUO/Uni about switching from IT105 which clashed with everything, to French for Scientists/Engineers. The nice lady Ms Vygus in the EUO eventually found out I did French instead and thus didn't have to re-sit an exam for a module I never studied for.

I'm thinking about continuing French for 1 more year in spare time, or as more CATS and maybe even unassessed.

Nathaniel Ho : 28 Jun 2005 19:18 |  Tags: PDP |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Getting ready for the holidays on a budget

Rob and I are preparing ourselves for the holidays and living off campus, by taking tonnes of data with us when we leave.

So we got phat hard disks + DVD burners and shoving them in old computers.

Currently, we have harbouring in Rob's Celeron 900 1Tb. 3×250GB Maxtors with 16MB of Cache. 1×250GB Seagate, plus a dinky 8GB Seagate boot drive (bottleneck). Hooked up with a ATA133 RAID controller. Total data capacity in Rob's Heronbank room: 1318GB.

I meanwhile had trouble with 24-bit LBA with my external USB caddy, Windows XP SP2 reported only 128GB instead of 233. So my 250GB drive will be having a slumber party in someone elses desktop.

BTW stay from silver DVD-RW drives, they are so tacky and ewww. Take the oppourtunity to save £4 for a beige or black one. If you want silver, buy a can of spray from an art shop for a better finish.

Nathaniel Ho : 10 Jun 2005 17:02 |  Tags: PDP |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem

Halfway Through

The first year engineers are now halfway through their exams as of yesterday.
3 exams in 2 days leaves not much room for a good performance. But its not biggie.

ES1740: Difficult because they could have asked you anything in the course. Which is a lot of material and processes. With hindsight, it would have been better to know only selective topics in details, instead of bits of everything else but not in detail (which is what I did).

ES1801: Much better than the morning exam. Paper was good, I wish I knew how to fully complete the paper. Good nevertheless. My revision style is to do ALL of Wk 1 – Wk24 questions. This makes sure I'm ready for almost any scenario. (Ran out of time) but would have done a few more past papers.

ES1750: I'm not good with quesitions with divergent answers. With not much previous experience of divergent answer papers (last ones I did were GCSE English). I much prefer having 1 right or wrong answer. Didn't know what to put, where, when, how much. Need more practice with this.

Nathaniel Ho : 27 May 2005 10:21 |  Tags: PDP |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

And the Useless Book award goes to…

The course compulsory Foundations of Engineering is by far one of the worst reads ever. It seems incomprehensive in material and written in the wrong language (American). Its sooo useless in explaining the physics we need to know. It comes in paperback or hardback at same price – just depends on how heavy you require your paperweight to be.

There are much much better books. In fact you're better off getting a proper physics book.

Nathaniel Ho : 03 May 2005 16:40 |  Tags: PDP |  Comments (7) |  Close comments |  Report a problem