It has been a bad couple of weeks. I have been to 2 funerals. My other relatives had a couple of more. It has been a rough Thanksgiving. Things are better now. I have a short week this week also. I will take a couple of days off and try to get a class to teach this winter to fund holiday expenses. I am learning in my studies of UML that it may have been difficult for the graders to understand my UML diagrams. From an inheritance and interface point of view I did not label some of my classes with stereotypes. This may have lead to some confusion on the part of the grader and it may have made my class diagrams look un-intelligible. At any rate the language for implementation may take a toll on UML. I may have to make adjustments to my design on the test because one or more of the graders may think in an implementation language that taints the interpretation of the diagram. If one thinks in C++ and the other thinks in Java a view of "realization" may be different. I have to be careful.

Not much has happend in recent weeks. I continue to study as much as I can. The possibility of a ZED question is still very real. It is such a large language. I will find it difficult to be successful with ZED. I have to spend more time on it but it will take away from other things I need to study. It may be better if I can just choose that question to skip. ...5 questions choose 4 on the test. I now have the dates. Exam Application Due Date is Friday, March 16, 2007. Examination Date is Friday, April 13, 2007 at 10:00 AM. I plan on taking vacation from work for preparation. The PLuS program director has been notified of the dates. He will be making requests about the exam and how it will be administered in the future closer to the exam dates. I believe he will be asking for a reader, no time limit, and a private exam room. All of which I think will help me succeed. I still believe that the ZED question should be thrown out but am not sure how to get that accomplished. I have requested it from the PLuS program director. ZED has never been taught in any depth at DePaul. I have either audited or taken the formal methods class a couple of times and ZED is only mentioned as a formal method. I think that it is not right that you have to know ZED in depth for a PhD exam at a school that does not think highly enough of ZED to teach it that way. Whether or not it is a specialty of you adviser should be no concern.

In my study I am starting to find more evidence that I did pass that last test reviewed with my adviser. The first question had to do with design patterns and UML. I remember that during the test I thought that I had seen the answer before. Not the exact answer but something very similar. So I used the exact same patterns and diagrams. The answer comes from the book "Applying UML and Patterns by Craig Larman." In that book on page 346 is where I took the data for my answer. It starts out with the Factory pattern and the book goes on and talks about how it may or may not be a concrete factory. It goes on to say that it returns an adapter. The adapter is an interface where you return the real type cast to the type of the adapter so that the object can be handled polymorphicaly. Later it talks about implementing the Factor as a singleton because you only need one of them. ...3 patterns portrayed to fulfill the requirements of the question. I believe that I used the exact same patterns and drew a very similar diagram. The answer is on page 346-348 of the book. I will have it perfect next time. It will not be a soft memory that I try to mimic but a hard one that I study just for this kind of question.