Student Blogs 05/06

UoP Blogs

http://talkinginpatterns.blogspot.com
http://pafsd06.blog.com/

http://developatterns.blog.com/
http://steveburt.blogspot.com/
http://haroldjclements.blogspot.com/
http://adamslthomas.blogspot.com/2006/05/lecture-ten-development-of-patterns.html

St Patricks

http://www.dpatterns-stpat-ravip.blogspot.com/
http://nellypafsd.blogspot.com/
http://www.lydia-patterns.blogspot.com/
http://paul-mchiela.livejournal.com/
http://manyozo-patterns.blogspot.com/
http://matutapauls.blogspot.com/
http://solomon-pattern.blogspot.com/
http://372857.blogspot.com/
http://lorrainesebatapafsd.blogspot.com/

Technical problems, coursework and the Visitor Pattern

Yesterday's lecture began badly. The classroom pc refused all attempts at logging in by me and then by a technician and had to be rebuilt (which takes up to 40 mins). Along the way I also discovered when trying to contact the technicians that the nearby phonehad had its adaptor stolen so wasn't working and earlier in the day my office pc threw a wobbly when I connected a new external hard-drive, refused to have anything to do with the new drive, trashed my zip drive connection and then sulked refusing me access to the system - turns out having admin rights on my pc only extends to installing software not hardware plus 'there is a known problem with pegasus mail on an XP machine and the usbs' but curiously this only is the case on the network not my home machine or my tablet. Oh well ...

Anyway the CAM office were stars and managed to find me a room we could move to so we all went off to a meeting room in Burnaby Terrace where the pc worked but the whiteboard was propped up against a chair - I've never before used a whiteboard by writing upside down while standing behind it and hopefully I never will again.

Somehow in the middle of all this we did manage some work on patterns, first of all considering generative processes and then ways of measuring software quality. After moving rooms I then answered questions about the coursework and we looked at the visitor pattern.

For next week I've asked people to read the Composite Pattern in advance and I've booked the classroom (LG2.1) for an extra hour so we can try to catch up.

Catching up ..

After a slow start the unit is now picking up. Since I last wrote a blog entry we have had 2 lectures at Portsmouth.

In the first I covered the 'Patterns Catalogue' exercise which I had previously run at St Patricks. This introduced the students to the idea of using a patterns catalogue to help solve a problem while at the same time giving a taster of Alexander's patterns. This lecture also covered the memento pattern and a substantial amount of time on the coursework. At the end of the lecture I asked the students to read pages 44-55 of Patterns of Software by Richard Gabriel in preparation for the next week...

However no one did the suggested reading - well one person was reading it online when I walked into the classroom. Wish they had - it would have helped them answer the seminar questions. We did however have an interesting discussion on whether coding was art or science or craft.

Paul Graham's book Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age" has some interesting discussion on the subject: amongst other things he talks about how Leonardo Da Vinci would make many attempts in a drawing to get a particular line right and the way open source software is improved by acknowledging problems and attempting to correct them. As well as parallels between software and art Graham discusses ways in which small start-ups can achieve significantly greater success than large multi-national software houses. if you are interested in thinking about the connections between art and software O'Reilly has handily placed Chapter Two online as a pdf file.

Following on this theme its also worth looking at Gabriel's proposal for a Masters of Fine Art in Software where he makes a very persuasive arguement for awarding what would be an MA in the UK rather than an MSc in Software Design.

In the second part of the lecture we considered the Template Method pattern in some detail. This caused a certain amount of confusion around the way it structures code in the superclass to call code in the subclasses, but I think everyone (no matter what their prefered language) was happy in the end.

Hopefully everyone is now reading happily ready for this weeks' lecture and will be able to discuss QWAN on Thursday having read “The Quality Without a Name” pp 33-43 & "The Bead Game, Rugs and Beauty" pp 71-95 from Gabriel's "Patterns of Software" (ibid).

The first week's lecture of the PAFSD unit at Portsmouth covered the admin of the unit, suggested reading and the introductory lecture on Patterns. Most of the students registered to do the unit appeared but I do wonder what happened to the rest.

The second week was missed because of illness and I will catch up on this over the next couple of weeks.

On Tuesday I went to St Patricks and did a tutorial with them on using a patterns catalogue - something I will do this week with the Portsmouth students. The turnout was good, around 30 students and when I gave out the coursework they asked a wide range of questions about it.

2005/6 PAFSD

Welcome to the 2005/6 PAFSD course.
This blog will be used to supplement the unit website at:
http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/chandlej/PAFSD.html
and to provide a forum for discussing the material covered in the lectures.