Week 11 in FIT2001

OK, its 4am and I'm just finishing up submitting my Assignment 2. One thing for sure is that I have a problem with perfection. Its a good thing but its also a bad thing, I've been at this assignment since i got back form the USA on Tuesday and I've been working on this assignment day and night ever since to meet this deadline in 5 hours time. I could have done it within a few days but I couldn't help myself and I have to design the whole thing. My report came out to be 203 pages mostly full of Interface designs for every possible page in the system. Its a full on system and does everything.. My reason for doing it this way was because i wanted to treat this as if it was a real project and wanted to take the opportunity to see how well i can do it i.e. how in depth I could go to design a system to get it developed and working perfectly. i think I mastered the user functionality of it. I really got into the mind of the golfer who just want to go online and book something in 2 seconds flat without getting confused on how to use the web application and how to navigate within it. I used many of the techniques described in our text book, which i find very usefull by the way.

I'm actually writitng this while im waiting form my assignment to be uploaded onto rapidshare since its too big to be submitted via MUSO since MUSO only takes 5M of files at a time. I separated the zip versions but sometime they go wrong and so i gave the markers a second option to get the file if the first fails.

right now, I'm going a bit nuts because i haven't slept for about 28 hours and I've been at this full on for the last 5 days. I NEED SLEEP... heheh.. one thing that makes me get in a good mood is Stewie form the family guy.. so here he is.. ill see you all at the exams (if you're in Sydney) and good luck with it to all the FIT2001 students..

Week 10 - FIT2001 Systems Anlysis & Design

Although im in Palo Alto (Silicon Valley) at the moment, I have been doing my best to listen to POD lectures via podcast. I am falling a bit behind on my schedules for doing assignment 2 but will get right onto it as soon as I get back to oz.. In case you are wondering what am I doing in Palo Alto, well I had a meeting with a Law firm here that represent Google and also most of the big name start up companies that have sprouted form Silicon Valley in the past 10 years. I have been able to appoint them to act as my advisor's in a new project that I'm about to initiate (called the Manhattan Project - Top Secret). They will be representing and advising me when it comes time to raise funds from VCs and also to look after all the legal aspects of start ups in Silicon Valley, such as incorporations types, founders shareholders structures, IPs, NDAs and much more, but more importantly they will be providing advice and valuable networking inputs to get the Manhattan Project off the ground and happening. On the project, my next step is to build a Systems Analysis and Design of the Manhattan Project which will be added to my Business Plan along with a non-functional mock up of the system to demonstrate to the VCs. This is the reason why I am undertaking this subject and funny enough, assignment 1 and assignment 2 along with PODs great lectures and teaching ability has given me the confidence and know how to be able to put together a FSR professionally.. But that said, assignment 2 is due in a few weeks so I better get cracking.

Also whilst here, I had the opportunity to visit Stanford University and visited the birthplace of the internet. You will find the school of computer science here a very inspiring place, with the names on the building of William Gates, David Packard, and Mr Hewlett on the buildings, representing just a few of what influences this place has had on the IT industry and the world. I'll post some photos up as soon as i get my SD card out of my camera. The other reason form me being here is to apply for their MBA program.. I was fortunate to sit in some classes and meet with a few students here and one of them being a fellow Australian, so that was nice.

Ohh and for the Space fans out there.. Before I leave this extraordinary place I will be visiting the NASA Ames Space Research Center which is just a short drive from Palo Alto in Mountain View. I love anything to do with space and hopefully I can buy a moon rock or something form them to take home..

More later..

Week 9 in FIT2001

Hey, its a little late but here is my week 9 blog.. Yes POD you were right, its silly season for uni assignment and its taken its toll on me too. Nevertheless i have pushed on and done my weekly readings and tasks and although a few days late I'm still on top of things.

OK now week 9 saw us looking into the Structured Design.

The following is a list of what we covered this week:

• We described the steps involved in traditional approach to designing a software application.
• Developed a system flowchart.
• Looked at understanding the process of transaction analysis and transform analysis.
• Looked at writing and using pseudocodes.
• Explained how to use the three-layer design with the traditional approach.
• Described the nature of structured design and how it is similar and
• different to object design.

So far i like the structures method but will need to get a little more comfortable with the object way of thing weather i like it or not, being that its the industry standard and we will be expected to be masters of it when were out in industry.

The first time i design an application was using Microsoft Access and building a database program out if it for a small business i had, having no programming experience prior. The access way of doing things is very much like the structured method as you build tables first which will hold all the attributes and then you have an Entity Relation Diagram that you use to link the primary keys together (which now i see is just an unique identifier for an object instance). Anyway this has always stayed in my head whilst learning IT at Monash and i can somehow digest Structured methods more easily then the object method. I guess I' better be wide away when POD does the OO method in week 10..

Anyhow enough serious stuff, here is the best of Stewie form the Family Guy, i love this little critter.. :-)