{"id":557,"date":"2009-10-24T15:50:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-24T15:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ecs.soton.ac.uk\/blogs\/chris_malton.php"},"modified":"2013-06-06T17:19:45","modified_gmt":"2013-06-06T17:19:45","slug":"24-october-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/24-october-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"Cup of Java anyone?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three weeks in, and it’s time to scribble a few more thoughts. I’ve just got back into my room in halls from doing everyone’s washing up, while they’ve all gone away for the weekend. Just Dan, one of my flatmates, and myself this weekend, so it’s quiet in halls and I can think about the blog post.<\/span><\/p>\n

The course is slowly but steadly progressing, and it’s beginning to teach me a few things. Yes, sure, I’ve taught myself a lot of it before, but for many, this course is the first time they’ve had to program. And the labs reflect the range of abilties. There’s a basic task for everyone to do, and then there’s the extensions for the whizz-kids, or as we prefer to call them, space cadets. There’s then the extra space cadets challenges which are designed to stretch people even further. It’s really quite good fun. If you’re really struggling, there’s also Ground Controllers, which provides a way for those with limited programming skills to rapidly advance.<\/p>\n

It’s taken a few weeks, but I’ll admit it now. At the start of the course, I did not like Java. To me, it was what happened when VB met C – there was a big bang and Java came out of the other side. However, the course has managed to ease me into Java a bit more gently than I perhaps tried to have a go at it before. I wanted fancy apps with UIs before I’d got a command line version of “Hello World” working. With a little coaxing through the command line stuff first, we’re getting to the GUI stuff – at least in Space Cadets.<\/p>\n

Among the vast number of lectures I have, I still manage find time for four clubs. The first of these is SUBB (The Southampton University Brass Band) rehearsing on a Sunday night. Tuesdays see StageSoc’s training sessions. Wednesday evening is Student Robotics, which is all about a competition for sixth form colleges. I’m now Treasurer of said society, and it’s going to be a bit of fun managing the finances there. Then there’s the ad-hoc meetings of the SUPC. SUPC being the Southampton University Paintball Club. I usually see at least one of the committee in the pub on a Thursday night at Karaoke.<\/p>\n

Enough of the chatter. It’s safe to say that I’m really enjoying my time here at Southampton. Hopefully another blog entry will appear in a few weeks assuming I get some time to myself – it’s rather limited when you’ve got 5 flatmates all wanting some IT help!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three weeks in, and it’s time to scribble a few more thoughts. I’ve just got back into my room in halls from doing everyone’s washing up, while they’ve all gone away for the weekend. Just Dan, one of my flatmates, and myself this weekend, so it’s quiet in halls and I can think about the blog post. The course is …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":301,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33308,33312],"tags":[16396,430794,366,430795,364,430796,430793],"class_list":["post-557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electronics-and-computer-science","category-living-in-southampton","tag-c","tag-gui","tag-java","tag-paitball","tag-programming","tag-socials","tag-vb","column","twocol"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3BSCk-8Z","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/301"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1173,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557\/revisions\/1173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/studentblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}