Work work work

We're in week 3 of the spring term (also known as week 17 and week 13, which can get confusing), and this is definitely shaping up to be a very full-on term.

We had three exams at the beginning of last week, then a Prolog assignment due in on Friday morning. I only started learning the language on Wednesday, but it seemed to turn out well.

The biggest thing this term is a Java GUI group project (argh! Co-ordinating with other people?) for which we have to do the whole shebang — use case models, UML, static and dynamic state diagrams... gah. Any time that isn't gobbled up by other courseworks this term is likely to be gobbled up by this. (Why do things take longer to do when there are more people to do them?)

This is also the term to start thinking about my 3rd year project, since I believe we have to submit a proposal in term 3. By some miracle I actually had a (not terribly original) idea before Christmas, so I'm all set to meet with a potential supervisor next week to chat about me writing a... YARAA (Yet Another RSS/Atom Aggregator). Web-based. I might need to learn some more Python over the summer (and Javascript!), but I do have eight months before I start working on it.

My aim is to incorporate scoring filters, where (eg.) a particular feed/author can be scored highly, but individual posts with a tag of "cat pictures" could be given a negative score. Then you can filter out stuff with a score below the lower bound, or just read everything sorted by score and not bother about the few dozen at the bottom that you didn't get time to read. It's all about the metadata... Hopefully I might even end up with something useable :-)