james-ravenscroft.com

I’ve been doing some revision for my computing exam and I’m bloody sick of over-simplistic exam mark schemes. How is it possible to be marked down for using correct and proper terminology. Take for example the following question.

“Club members are concerned abotu carring oput financial transactions on the [gym club] website. Explain suitable methods of security to overcome these concerns.”

My response was to ensure that HTTPS encryption was used when communicating with the members’ computers – a score of one for me then. However, had I written “Use a secure connection shown by the padlock ’symbol’” I would have scored two marks.

Surely its better that the exam board account for people who actually know what they’re talking about rather than alienating them and giving all the marks to script-kiddie wannabes?

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So this week was the first week of my long exam leave/summer holiday and also the official half term. I’ve had a pretty eventful week, driving around visiting various friends and having lots of fun (not to mention having to put in hours and hours of revision for my exams).

Firstly, I went to the cinema to see Angels & Demons the other day. It was a reasonable film but I’ve never read the book. I can’t help feeling that I’d have been disappointed if I had.

I’ve been doing lots of parametric equations and calculus but who wants to know about that?

I’ve done a fair few social events, went to see my friends in Ludlow, the next town, yesterday and I’m going to have a jam with another friend tonight. Maybe I’ll upload some recordings.

Exploring, General, Music boring, driving, friends, Music, revision

Yesterday was my last day at college. It’s been fun and I’m kinda sad to be leaving. At the same time though, I know that I’ve got to move on and I’m off to Aberystwyth University in a few months time.

I’ve started writing a book/political manifesto about how super distributed power systems could be used to run the country. Just like torrenting and distributed processing are proving to be far more useful and efficient at their jobs than their centralized cousins, I hope to show that centralized power isabout as inefficient as a ZX-Spectrum trying to load “Skool Daze” off an old cassete tape. I’ve not decided how I’m going to publish my book yet, but the likelyhood is it will be free to read online.

Exploring, General, Politics book, manifesto, university, writing

I’ve been doing the rounds on Yahoo answers as of late, trying to put something back into the computing community. My handle is Ravey(ravenscroft.james) and I’m currently a level 2. I’m sure I’ll build my way up to being one of the top contributers sooner or later.

The main exciting news from today is that my Mom has just added me on her car insurance. That means I’m legally allowed to drive her car any time. I’m going to go out for a drive tomorrow evening, just to get used to the car, then I’ll be driving all sorts of places.

I also had a physics exam today. Got the feeling I did quite well, but you can never tell until you get your results.

General answers, driving, insurance, physics

Over the last year, I’ve been working on a game called Matris as part of my A-Level computing coursework. I’ve decided thatI’m going to release it to the general public and see what sort of response I get.

Matris is a hybrid number/arcade game where the playe’s objective is to keep the screen clear while blocks fall and create walls. It got its name from a well known 80s game of the same vain. The difference here is that rather than creating rows with no flaws in them, players have to add up the numbers on the side of the blocks to make a target number to get rid of the blocks.

It currently works on a very fundamental level and has 3 difficulties: easy, medium and hard. AThe game was originally designed to be played by primary (elementary) school children and so was designed to be very easy. However, the medium and hard difficulties make the game quite satisfying to play as an adult.

I’ll be releasing it when its finished and I might even open-source it too. I would appreciate any donations from players though because, quite frankly I put my heart and soul into writing it for months and I’m also skint.

I’ll post more about Matris again when it’s ready to go.

Programming coding, fun, game, java, matris, opensource

Well, it’s been a long time since I last updated this blog. now that the summer is here, my A-Levels are finally drawing to a close and I’m almost free of college, things are looking up again.

Firstly, I am an uncle! My sister gave birth yesterday to a healthy baby boy – Arthur. I’m thinking of calling him Arty for short. I haven’t seen him yet but that doesn’t stop me being proud From now on, it’s “Mad Uncle Jim” to him anyway.

Secondly, today I passed my driving test. That means more freedom and less alcohol (I can see me being the designated driver more often than I’d like anyway). It was my first attempt at the test and I got 9 minors (that means I was 5 marks away from failing -a fairish score). I’ve just got to get myself a car and more importantly insurance which is ridiculous around these parts.

Thridly, my 18th birthday was like 2 weeks ago. For all intents and purposes, that makes me an adult. Scary or what? I can’t wait to vote this useless government out of power.

I’ve got a few programming projects to work on over the summer so I’m going to be posting info about those hopefully. For now though, Jim out…

Uncategorized driving, family, General, stuff, update

Well, today I sat 2 exams: Maths Core 3 and Physics Practical. I’m getting pretty sick of them now and I’m looking forward to leaving college in the summer and having lots of time off to do loads of productive studying.. or maybe not…

Anyhow, I also had to pull out of the colleg musical today unfortunately. A couple of posts back I was raving about being part of The Little Shop of Horrors production with college. Unfortunately it clashes with a trip to Loughborough University, so, I’ve had to cancel and get my priorities right.

Hopefully, tomorrow will be a nicer day full of dossing around in coffee shops and easy lessons like computing

General crazy, exams, maths, Music, physics

WARNING: The Following Post Contains Techno-babble! If you are not a nerd, stop reading now!

I ordered a Compact Flash to SATA adapter off the internet a few days ago and it arrived yesterday. I was told that CF2SATA was the way to go for solid state drives because they are cheaper than a proper SSD and work just as well.

Sweet baby!

I basically just plugged it in like a normal SATA drive and presto! It all works! I installed Ubuntu amd64 onto it and I’ve got a boot time of about 10 seconds, I can start and run any application within a couple of seconds and hell, its Ubuntu. A Sweet OS if ever I saw one! I haven’t decided on a theme yet so I won’t post a screenshot, but, I’ll report more on this later on.

Exploring, General, Technology babble, compactflash, drive, linux, sata, solildstate, tech, ubuntu

So, Alot’s happened in 2 months! Well you would expect as much I mean, 2 months is a mighty long time! Happy Christmas and a happy new year and all that Pavlova!

Essentially I’ve been far too busy to even think about blogging over the last few weeks. I’ve got January exams coming up this week, I’ve got our college musical, an interpretation of “Little Shop of Horrors“, for which I’m playing the saxophone. I’m also busy on the programming side of things too!

I guess the big news is that as of today, I’m an official member of staff at the LibMTP project. I was trying to get it to work under windows so that I could mess around with my new creative zen. When I happened to send in a few fixes I made to the source code, I was delighted to be asked along to help! This could be a mixed blessing because although it will be good experience, working in another open source project, I’m already busy to the max! Oh well, we’ll see in the coming months.

So, Christmas? Pretty good turn out this year actually! I got a new 8GB Creative Zen, a Black Nintendo DS and some other goodies that I don’t have time to reel off. The point is I really did have a good time with my parents and friends alike.

New year’s? Also pretty good! We went out to the pub for a few beers and ended up carrying one of the guys home drunk. I managed to prevent myself from getting sozzled but hey, good times!

Final point. My last.fm profile might finally start looking a bit more interesting now because I’ve started scrobbling my zen data. I always listen to alot more music on the run than at home. That’s why its nice that my zen has that capability. I use mtp2lastfm which can be found here.

THat’s all for now folks, I’ll be back in a few days?/weeks?/years? to update you with more random stuff.

General, Programming christmas, exciting, lastfm, mtp, new year, opensource, Programming, zen

With the help of a few friends and a commenter, I decided to change my blog theme today. THe old one was getting a bit annoying to look at and it had lots of CSS bugs anyway! So here it is, my new look blog. I’m starting to learn how to use wordpress alot better now so I should be more able to write more useful content instead of just blabbering on about daily life etc etc. I’m working on a money-saving article at the moment so keep your eyes peeled for that one! Hope you guys like my new look!

Uncategorized cool, money, new, saving, theme