20 Apr

kfm, stuff

I’m currently listening to Nine Inch Nails’ new album, Year Zero. There are some cool songs on it – “Me, I’m not”, “God-given” and “My Violent Heart” for example. “The Beginning Of The End” sounds just like the cover they did of Gary Numan’s “Metal” a few years back. I guess the beat was difficult to get out of the head. Anyway – good album.

KFM is coming along steadily. version 0.9 is about three weeks away, I think, and the big 1.0 will only be a few weeks past that. I’m thinking of 0.9 as “feature complete”, and a release candidate, but I want to give it a few weeks of bug testing before officially announcing it as 1.0. 0.9 has a few new things, the most interesting of which (in my opinion) is the ability to upload multiple files, using SWFUpload. Also, there’s a new Slideshow trick, and other stuff.

Just got online again at home. Using digiweb‘s “wireless” broadband. What they mean by “wireless” is that the DSL comes in through an aerial instead of the phoneline, and is then “wired” from that point. So, I got a wireless router today to replace the wired one they had provided (which was causing amusing trips by the kids etc) and am just setting up this machine’s wifi as I type.

Next week, I’m heading down to the big smoke (Dublin) to do the final exam for my course. I was hoping to attend the monthly PHPUG pub-crawl, but my wife has other plans (her plans are to stop me from attending it).

30 Sep

materials arrived for my college course

Yesterday, a package arrived for me from Open University – a load of handbooks covering diverse database subjects, and a cd with copy of IBM’s DB2 on it.

Unfortunately for me, they seem to have neglected the Linux installation of DB2. It’s mentioned in the readme.txt file, but the installation files are simply not there. I feel a complaint coming on.

So, yeah… me doing college!? My highest qualification so far was my Junior Certificate. I didn’t bother with the Leaving Cert. – got bored, then got a job. That was a bad decision on my part, but hopefully it’s not too late to rectify that.

M877 is “Advanced Database Technology”, a post-graduate course, which I hope to use as a stepping stone to an MSc or even MBA.

The tutor contacted me to ask if I was actually qualified to do this course. I gave him my job history, and he was satisfied – I’ve been working with databases professionally for at least 7 years, and if I don’t know something straight-out, I’ve at least used it or read about it it.

So yesterday (Jareth’s 3rd birthday by the way), I had a quick glance through the handbooks and was relieved to find that I understood what I read, and was able to answer some of the sample exam questions correctly.

I’m looking forward to this -and eventually being called “Dr Kae” 🙂