A Level results

It's the 14th of August and this morning I went with friends to college to pick up our final A Level results. After two years I got:

  • Computing - A
  • Mathematics - A
  • Physics - A

and also an A in General Studies as well.

Very pleased since I got into Manchester University to study computer science for a masters degree. Off for celebrations tonight. :)

David Sides - Brilliant

I have to share the work of this great pianist and cover artist on YouTube.

He does exclusively piano covers of modern songs, and below is probably one of my favourite ones.

Coldplay's "The Scientist" was covered here, done completely by ear. If you look at his other work, he's also done a cover of their other song Fix You as well as Clocks which are also worth looks.

Left college

Yesterday I had my last day of college before we broke up for study leave. I only have 7 exams, one of which is a resit for a module that I have an A in, and the other is an optional exam that I got put in for that won't affect my A Levels at all.

Tonight's also the night of the leaver's ball at the Reebok stadium, will now have to get ready. Bye!

Upgrading Drupal

I'm currently migrating the site over to the new version of Drupal, 6.2. I've been quite behind with the releases, with the latest 5.x release being 5.7, I had 5.2 installed.

Note to self: when next migrating content over, don't accidentally delete the directory that has content file attachments.

Unfortunately the previous greeny theme that I liked hasn't been ported to 6.2 yet, so I'm using the default Bluemarine theme for now.

Ruby on Rails

I've not done PHP in a long while, since my last hand coded site that was operating back in 2006/early 2007. While it was a worthwhile experience, and for my needs it worked well, I think I need to move onto a more web 2.0 style of web development.

I just used a term which no one really knows what it means. Marketing buzz-word? Definitely. Anyhow, the general gist is that a more sophisticated paradigm should be used (oops, another marketing buzzword) for future developments.

Drupal, which runs the site currently is excellent and I have no problem with it. This stuff will just be for my own benefit, getting to grips with using a more robust system. One of the concepts which is generally new to me is MVC, Model-View-Controller. I've heard of it, but never used it since all my code was application specific tying the data and GUI implementation together into one.

Prima developing nicely

I've been developing an Amarok-like clone for the Windows platform over the past few months as part of a college project. Recently as the deadline nears I've been going on more and more bughunts and the applications now become usable by myself as a proper player.

The codebase is still very simplistic in comparison to the likes of Amarok and iTunes obviously, but it has a central playlist with drag and drop reordering as well as lyrics fetching support and a tree based display of the collection. While I'll probably make a major overhaul of the database backend and structure for now the single table approach will have to do.