I had the final exam for M257 today, I feel that it went well as everything I revised seemed to appear in the exam, including Aglets (which I read about this morning!!).

What an experience though, I left my house an hour before the exam, headed into bristol and parked near the Wills memorial building (Bristol University) and arrived with about 20 minutes spare, only to find I was at the completely wrong building and I should be at Wills hall which is about 3 miles away. My heart sunk as I really thought I was going to miss the exam, all my previous exams had been in this building and when I saw the phrase wills again I wrongly assumed thats where it meant.

Luckily I had some money on me and I caught a cab, arriving in the exam literally as the announcer called "3 hours, begin now". Not the best way to start an exam but its over now! I also had to walk the 3 and a bit miles back to my car an unnecessary opportunity to reflect.

There is one lesson I will not be forgetting in a hurry, assume nothing!

M253

Well what can I say, it's certainly different from anything else I have studied with the Open University. The course ultimately revolves around a team of 6-7 people spread out across the UK coming together online to work through tasks following a weekly schedule towards each milestone.

The first 4 weeks leading to Milestone 0 were a bit strange. Picture 7 people turning up in a FirstClass forum, with the goal of evaluating a selection of websites which sell flights and deciding on a team standard to come to an overall ranking for these sites. You have the keen person kicking up a bit of a fuss from day one because they want to do all 4 weeks work by the first week so they don't get behind, you have the people who turn up in week 4 when the first milestone is due with their introductory posting about themselves and then you have everyone else sort of in the middle. Its err entertaining to watch! I'm not sure about anyone else out their studying this course, but I thought there would be some personality clashes judging by some of the posting that were flying around.

Fortunately it all seemed to calm itself down, with the exception of the people who just don't bother to do anything of course! We managed to get the work done and get our milestone submitted but purely because a few people put in extra work. I think it was because nobody thought to take the time to decide on roles and responsibilities for team members from the outset, however we have agreed on this now with a bit of democracy and a little less coup d'etat than I was expecting. Each member is taking turns as team leader to ensure everyone gets a chance to develop this skill and also so that nobody gets the unfortunate job of e-mailing the people who aren't bothering all the time.

To be fair the course has not been as bad as the reviews on the OU website however I don't know what to expect going forward. I'll try my best to keep you updated.

P.S. It does seem to take a lot of time for a 10 point course, so bare this in mind if you intend to study it at the same time as other courses.

Sorry for the lack of postings and replies to comments, I have been hard at work revising for M257 Exam and getting my M256 TMA02 submitted as well as keeping on top of M253. This TMA looked at Object Oriented Design principles and in particular design solutions for a hotel system and some of its use cases. It was a bit of a tricky one and I think some of the design methods covered could be used in various ways, therefore leaving TMA answers open to interpretation. Fingers crossed it comes in as a reasonable mark though!

I have been finding the study materials a little tedious to say the least, and sometimes I have re-read sections as the clarity has just not been there for me. Looking at the forums on FirstClass i'm not the only person to feel this way, hopefully it improves in the second half of the course. We appear to be taking the most drawn out approach to deciding which way something should be implemented in a design, and I completely appreciate that for large scale systems it may be more than necessary to take this approach but it feels a little drawn out for the examples we are using.

The exam for M257 is next Wednesday and I have taken a week off work to study and have a few days break afterwards. It should be an interesting one and I'm actually looking forward to the challenge... (now that is worrying!)

I received my results for TMA03 last week and acheived a respectable 94%. The exam is coming up on 17th June and I really need to get studying for it but M256 TMA 02 and M253 is taking up a fair bit of time aswell. I've taken a week off work to revise for the exam so hopefully this will leave me good stead!

I recently attended a day school to cover the exam and this was really good ably pointing out areas of strength and areas for improvement. I'd recommend attending a day school if the opportunity is there for any OU course.

Just had confirmation today that my late registration application for this course was accepted, enrolment ended on Saturday the 9th which I missed as I was away for a few days. I phoned 1st thing Monday so I'm glad I made it, it means I will be getting my Diploma this year!

I managed to get TMA03 off this evening, all present and correct, after battling with aa hang in my code on the last part of question 3. Ends up just printing the words +Ok solved it, which will mean nothing to anyone but I don't want to give away anything as the deadline isn't until tomorrow.

Its always the way with these things though, debugging code and not being able to spot the simplest of problems for a rediculous amount of time yet the 'complicated' code works straight away. The funny thing is I had my realisation just as I was putting a Jacket Patatoe in the oven (I had almost given up at that point) so I ran back up stairs and tried it out and all worked. Thank god!

I've just made the upgrade to the Windows 7 RC and I have 4 days to the deadline of TMA03 of M257 so I am frantically trying to install the old app that is netbeans 4.1. The upgrade took about 4.5 hours which is unbelievable but I wanted to keep all my Windows Vista config so it was worth it.

Everything seems to be working fine under the RC but the Open University netbeans install cd looks a little shocking. No checkboxes, or cool graphics for that matter, but I'll put that down to the new underpinnings of Windows 7. I couldn't install the mobility pack for netbeans 4 as it couldn't work out where the current install was in my hard drive. Great! (I don't really need though, why the OU can't let us use netbeans 6.5 is beyond me).

I'll keep you posted on the progress but so far everything seems to be working fine including firstclass v9.1 which is good to know.

This Saturday I have a day school for M257 then it will be revising time until the exam day. Unfortunately my M256 tutorial clashes with this so it will have to be missed.

P.s I've added a few blogs to the blogs of note section so take a look at them if you get a chance.

UPDATE: I spent a good 20 minutes trying to install netbeans 4.1 but Windows 7 was having none of it. I did manage to get it installed though by doing the following. Right click on the netbeans installation file and click troubleshoot compatability settings near the top. Once it tries and detects problems click "Troubleshoot Program". You will be presented with 4 checkboxes check the top one labelled "The program worked in an earlier version of Windows but won't install or run now". Then click next. You are now presented with a list of Operating systems, I tried these sequentially and the first one that worked was Windows 2000, which suprised me as windows xp sp2 and sp3 didn't work?? Hope this helps with netbeans or any other programs you have trouble installing on Windows 7.

I received the results for TMA01 of M256 and scored 84%. I'm dissapointed with this as I seemed to completely misunderstand Q4 and lost quite a few marks. It wasn't anything difficult just looking for Class Descriptions and variable names but I was on a completely different tangent. I'll have to pull the old socks up for the next TMA's to get my TMA average above 85%.

On a different note, for anybody trying to do Telnet work on M257 running windows Vista please see below. Microsoft removed Hyperterminal from Windows so in order to use telnet the following instructions need to be followed.

Start > Control Panel > Windows Programs and Features. On the left menu click Turn Windows features on or off. A list of features comes up, select Telnet Client and then click install. It may take a few minutes. Once its installed you can run it from C:\system32\telnet.exe

I hope this helps, its not obvious from the activity instructions what you need to do.