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Simon Willison’s Weblog

All Courseworked Out

I’m all courseworked out. After 4 hours sleep on Saturday night, I got up at 8am, headed in to Uni and spent the next consecutive 57 hours in the Library doing coursework (grabbing a total of about two hours sleep during that time). It was, with hindsight, a very stupid thing to do but I take heart in the fact that I was not alone: At least 20 other people from my course were there for almost the same amount of time I was (see Richard and Andy).

It would be easy to write this off as critical lazyness, but I’ve actually been working extremely hard on coursework for the past four weeks. The main problem was that one of our two grou courseworks involved implementing a personal organiser (calendar / todo list / notebook / address book) in PHP—just the kind of project that can take as long as you let it if your requirements are overly ambitious. As it was we didn’t quite implement everything we wanted to, but the resulting system is good enough for me to have already started using it to organise myself a bit better. Ironically the first thing I used it for was co-ordinating the rest of my coursework.

Anyway, I’ve spent the last 2 days catching up on sleep. I also took delivery of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for PC this morning, a day before the official release date (thanks to Gameplay.co.uk). Unfortunately it refuses point blank to install on my aging PC, complaining of a CRC error. It works fine on my house mate Paul’s though. Considering I still have a couple of small courseworks to go (not to mention exams) it’s probably a good thing that I haven’t got it working.

Posted 15th May 2003 at 11:02 pm

This is All Courseworked Out by Simon Willison, posted on 15th May 2003.

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7 comments

  1. I don't suppose you plan on releasing that organizer to the general public, do you?

    Brian Hamilton - 16th May 2003 04:40 - #

  2. Good question. I'd have to get permission from the rest of my group, and I should probably check with my lecturer first in case he plans to set the same coursework task again next year. It also needs a bit of cleaning up. To be honest, having worked on it flat out for the past 4 weeks I really don't want to look at it again for a while, but I'm determined to finish up some of the more interesting features (like the import/export to iCal bit which is only half written).

    Simon Willison - 16th May 2003 10:21 - #

  3. Fair enough. It seems like the open source world is grossly lacking in that field, and a well-developed calendar system would be of much use, I'm sure. Let us know if you do.

    By the way, what do you use to determine your related entries? It seems to be more than just category...

    Brian Hamilton - 16th May 2003 13:50 - #

  4. The related entries thing is done using mySQL's fulltext indexing - see this entry for more details.

    Simon Willison - 16th May 2003 17:03 - #

  5. I would check with your lecturer whether it is permissible to publish it. I don't know what your Uni is like, but our Uni retains copyright on all the work we do and we're not allowed to publish it without their permission. And I would use Outlook, I haven't come across a better calendar system than that (other than pen and paper!).

    Smiler - 17th May 2003 15:56 - #

  6. As a followup, may I also suggest you tell people they can't use & and should use & instead when posting comments as this kept me puzzled for 5 minutes when it was telling me "your xhtml is not well formed" ;)

    Smiler - 17th May 2003 15:58 - #

  7. You may also want to either tell people to convert < inside <code> tags (when it's actually used as "less than" comparison in the code) to &lt or just auto-convert it. That had me stumped for a while too.

    Mardeg - 29th July 2005 20:49 - #

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