Thursday, March 27, 2008

MU120: Finished!

Last night I had a tutorial and was able to hand my completed TMA04 over to my tutor, just under 3 months ahead of the course schedule.  This means that I have finally finished MU120 and I can now fully concentrate on M450.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Phorm - Family friendly?

Over the last week there has been a lot of talk about Phorm.

A system that matches users' web surfing habits to adverts must ensure sensitive sites are black-listed from tracking, a privacy report has said.

Phorm's online technology is set to be rolled out by three of the UK's biggest ISPs, BT, Virgin and Talk Talk.

ref: BBC News

Even Sir Tim Berners-Lee has concerns about it.

The creator of the web has said consumers need to be protected against systems which can track their activity on the internet.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee told BBC News he would change his Internet provider if it introduced such a system.

ref:  BBC News

Now I am wondering if such a system is family friendly.  What I mean by this is that my home PC / Internet connection is used by the whole family, and I visit sites, such as adult humour, that I do not allow my daughter to go to, for example b3ta.com.  So if my ISP was to implement Phorm could it distinguish between different users going over the same Internet connection.  Would my daughter start to see adverts relating to my surfing habits?  Like any responsible parent I monitor and guide my daughter on what she watches on television and what she sees on the Internet, yet it appears to me that an ISP using  Phorm could well take some of this control away from me.

Off to travel the stars

British science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90.

 

ref: BBC News

Thursday, March 13, 2008

CMAs and TMAs

On Tuesday I got the results back for my MU120 CMA43.  I got a very pleasing 96% and lost a couple of marks due to silly mistakes.  These mistakes I believe are due to the nature of CMA's in that being multiple choice I tend to go through them a lot quicker than I would a TMA thus resulting in not studying a question as thoroughly as perhaps I should.

Yesterday morning I got the results for my first TMA for M450.  Even though I got 80% I was disappointed in my tutor's comments, in that they were very brief and in some instances cryptic.  This left me feeling frustrated and confused, but after a lengthy telephone conversation with him last night I feel a lot better.  He enlightened me to what he actually meant, thus I now understand where my TMA was lacking and how it could have been improved.  I now realise that one of my biggest problems with my project is that I have had tunnel vision, in that I knew what the problem was (difficulty in sending bank statements) and how I wanted to solve it.  This has meant that when I was looking for research I was basing my investigation on the solution rather than the problem and finding alternative solutions to it.  In fact I now appreciate that my whole project is based around my solution, even it's title "Automated archiving and electronic transmission (via SMTP) of customer bank statements", as opposed to describing the problem, followed by looking for any solutions, discussing their strengthens and weaknesses, and then selecting a viable one.  With this in mind I now feel more confident that for my next TMA I should be able to produce a superior paper.

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

MU120: All that is remaining...

All that I have remaining for MU120 if TMA04 as I have just submitted CMA45.  It took a bit longer to complete than the other CMA's as it went through the whole course and on a number of occasions I had to refer back to my notes.  Rather annoyed with myself though, as after submitting the CMA I had a look at my submitted answers and realised that I have done a typo on one of the them.  It's a shame that submitted CMA's cannot be amended.