Life In General
Sorry, life has been getting on top of me lately. Mainly my university application for next year is taking up my time. UCAS, the company (yes, they appear to be a company) have employed the most incompetent web development team on the planet, meaning that one of the most important decisions of my life is reliant upon an unreliable, slow, poorly designed, un-navigable, poorly-supported website, backed by an air-headed support team.
Its a bit unfair to offer criticism without constructive comments, so here is my advice for the UCAS team:
- The theme and look of the site is good. Clear, easy to read, and appears to work in most browsers. Excellent.
- The help text is sparse to say the least. This is something we each do only once and have no experience with. Some help about what to fill in where and detailed information on what each field is for would be nice.
- A help section dedicated to how to fill in your qualifications would also help. They’re incredibly important to our applications and getting it wrong could be disastrous. I’ve already filled mine in 3 or 4 different times, following different advice.
- Make sure the staff on the phones have detailed knowledge of the UK education system. The guy I spoke to tried his best, but didn’t have any understanding of what an A-level was or how that differed from an AS-level, what certificating meant or how to fill in subjects correctly.
- Make sure the lists of AS and A2 subjects match. Last time I checked I was doing Salters Horners Physics and Salters Chemistry. They both appear at A2 level, but not in the AS subject list. Why?
- Increase the server power. I know its a busy time at UCAS, but surely you anticipated a bit of a rush as people complete their applications? If the recent problems around Oxbridge and medical degrees have caused this, I dread to think what it will be like around Christmas and January.
Right, rant over 
The remainder of my time has been split between two projects: my physics coursework and Pandect.
My physics project is to drill holes in CDs to see what you need to do to break them. Odd, yes. Interesting, maybe. Fun, possibly. I’m mainly interested in trying to prove my last text book wrong, which said you could drill a 2.2mm hole and it would still read all the data. We shall see.
The other project, Pandect, is far more useful. I am working with Freddie Witherden to develop a PHP (and increasingly, XML) based system for conducting questionnaires and surveys on computers. Hopefully it’ll be all-singing-all-dancing but going by the rate of most FOSS projects, that goal will be reached around 2099, if ever. Still, I am sure someone will find a use for it. If not, I have still learnt how to write XML schemas, which seems to be one of the least used skills apart from possibly Microsoft Bob Tech Support.
Oh, the theme. Yeah, going slower than I thought, but never mind 
Half term is coming up and I might get a chance to do some work on it then.