January 17

I finally got two of my textbooks (one of them is the book for this class) on Friday afternoon, and I am reading like crazy to catch up. The other members of my group met Saturday to discuss candidates for our group project this semester. I was unable to meet with them because I had a prior engagement that prevented me from attending the meeting.

When we met in class on the 13th, we came up with a list of attributes that we would like to find in a project. We came up with several, but the top two that we decided on were: no projects that use C or low-level languages (each member of the group has had problems with C in the past, and none of us want to use it again if we can avoid it); and find a project that has recently been updated and looked at by the the creators/user. The project that has really caught my eye is XBMC (Xbox Media Center). I like the versatility of it (it will run on Linux, OSX and Windows) and I think that will be useful when working on the project. It is widely used and  has a variety of functions.

Dr. Bowring also asked us to start looking at articles in computer science magazines that will be the focus of a blog post in the next few weeks. I chose an issue of IEEE Software and examined the table of contents to see what article would catch my eye. I have found one that seems very interesting, so I will be reading it later to decided whether or not this will be the article I will write about.