Victim Number 1

I met my first testing volunteer today in a somewhat strange arrangement that consisted of a series of emails exchanged with regards to our respective appearances so that we could identify one another outside the library where we had agreed to meet. I was slightly concerned that the testing session would go horribly wrong and that it wouldn't be very beneficial but that couldn't have been further from the truth.

In fact, the session was very helpful indeed. Once again I return with a page of bugs that need fixing before the next session and some improvements to the UI for the quiz tool as well. The biggest problem that we came across was that computers are incapable of doing simple decimal arithmetic. Adding 0.2 to a number gets very tricky after a couple of goes and you start getting odd answers such as 3.4+0.2=3.596799999. I have heard about this problem before but never actually come across it in a program. You'd have thought the people who invented the programming language would have included a feature to compensate for this somehow but no, apparently it is up to the programmer to sort it out. As such, I have to convert all my decimal numbers into integers before I perform any calculations on them which to be seems utterly ludicrous but there you go.

The only other task of the day was to get myself put on the TSC payroll so that I can start receiving some of the small monetary rewards that we get. I reckon I must be up to nearly £20 which is nice.

The rest of the evening was taken over by my Modelling and Simulation of Natural Systems report. I have been avoiding this since it was released before Easter but the deadline is Friday and I haven't actually made a start on it yet despite the warning to start early. I was quickly baffled by the questions and so proceeded to do the easier (in my option) Matlab stuff first. The notes for this module really are appalling and so a lot of this will be blagged via researching Wikipedia and trying to remember what happened during the lectures.