I have been waiting to write this for some time. I know that you all have been waiting for me to give an update. I am sorry if I have not replied to your emails. I thank you all for your patience. I know that many of you have been waiting to make decisions based on my experiences. Thank you for your understanding of this painful process I have been going through. I have tried to be fair to all parties involved. My latest posts were right after I took the test. I heard that one of my study partners had passed the test. Not long after that I received my letter reporting that I had failed. I was pretty upset. The letter said that none of my answers were sufficient. I thought that the wording was rather strange. "NONE of your answers were sufficient." I don`t believe the letter. The wording is not believable. The structure of the letter is one of vindictiveness. I could feel the rage in which it was written. I made someone upset, I didn`t fail. It sounded to me as if I had bruised the ego of someone in the glass house. The evidence against them is significant and real. I have been told that I could win a court case against them. At this time I choose not to proceed with that. They have yet to prove there significance. I won. It is evident in the letter. I may have spent a significant amount of money and time but I did not loose the fight. They cheated. They will have to live with that the rest of their lives. I worked hard for years, especially the last eight months. DePaul University will get what is coming to them. It is evident. Many people have ask me how they cheated. I had been concentrating on an area of study. A study guide was published for the test from with material from before the year 2000. The last test had material from later than any of the material on the study guide, at least a 3 year difference. Some of that material was even outside of my area of interest. It doesn`t matter now. The test was designed for their desired outcome. I had published the answers for nearly all of the similar tests up to that time. Change the test, ask for material that would not have been studied, ask it in a way that can take advantage of a disability...get the desired outcome. They cheated. Others ask me, they say, "Maybe the person that they are looking for would be the kind of person that could answer those kinds of questions." I say, "I am a researcher, I work with cutting edge technology every day. My research is not on the reading list. I am not sure they could answer anything about it. DePaul does not teach classes pertaining to my professional research. The company I work for was just purchased based on some of the work I have done. I am not sure many of the professors at DePaul could say as much." DePaul has not done me any favors with their actions but I am glad I am done with working for people I do not respect. Greater force applied to a rock sometimes produces a diamond but, then again, sometimes it just produces a harder rock. DePaul is just a rock. At some point it may be a time to apply more force but at this time I choose to leave them as just a rock. My point of view is better said by Mother Teresa. Here is what she wrote. People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway. If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway. What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway. Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway. In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.

So I am back from my trip. My family went with me this time. We had a great time. It was a vacation for us. Just before we left I had heard that one of my study partner passed the exam. I think my chances just went up. If he passed it I surely did. I feel we are at least equal in our understanding of the subject. It has sure taken a long time to get my results. On Friday it will have been 9 weeks. You are usually told 4 to 6 weeks. My study partner would have been told in 7 weeks. I wonder how long it takes to grade these tests. I have complained in the past that it should not be so subjective. With my trouble with memory and writing and reading I hope that it is easy for them to see that I know this stuff. I hope that I get my results this week. I hope and pray I passed.

I was thinking more about what I said about patterns. I was thinking about another example of how my comments last time about them were justified in frameworks that I have seen. The BREW API strives for consistency but it uses a couple of different patterns for callbacks from methods. These amount to style. The language that a developers uses to talk with each other never covers style. We always just talk about the callback and worry about the implementation later. The implementation has different names for the pattern used for the callbacks in the API. In fact even in our shop we give a name to the style based on the project it came from. That may be unusual but it works. We say something like, "You should use the style of callback used in the GIR project." We never use the pattern names for this stuff. Pattern names are confusing they don`t clue a developer into an implementation of a pattern. Different languages and different implementations of languages is MS C++ or GNU C++, is it on Solaris, is it on the emulator, is it on the device...all these things muddy the waters about patterns. On Solaris we use roguewave. On the device we use BREW. In windows we have to deal with what part of emulation. All affect patterns. It is to difficult to talk about patterns of implementations. So patterns like in the GOF book are not used. This is like discussing style at a time when you need to dispense with the structure and talk about the high level behavior. So API structure like in the GOF book is not practical for use as a communication mechanism or for reuse of well known implementations because these things depend on too many other things. The objective is to have one codebase with conditional compiles for different environments. This is so that the same code used for load generation on Solaris, is the same code used for handset emulation on windows, is the same code used for firmware implementations on the handset device even though the implementation of some of the behavior is different and conditionally compiled in. GOF patterns are not used the way that they are taught they are used in the real world. They are not as generic as they seem they have implementation dependencies even though they may seem that they don`t. This is evident in the multiple implementations I saw for `Visitor` and the arguing over what was better. GOF cannot be the definitive reference on patterns. Patterns of implementation don`t make sense. Patterns of behavior do make sense but with different implementations. As I said in the last post you would not talk about the sentence structure of a message that you were trying to relay to another person when you could say that sentence in a couple of million different ways. Look at your SPAM folder sometime. Did they say that message in a couple of different ways? Did they come of with those sentences on their own or did they have to look in a book for them? Did the first caveman read about the wheel in a book or did he slip on a log and it rolled? I am sure implementation of a wheel does not mean you talk about the spokes. So saying a singleton is a class that only every has one instance is sufficient to talk about. You don`t have to go into that it has a private member with a reference to itself and a private constructor and a static get instance method that returns a new reference to a new instance on the first request and the same reference on subsequent requests. The implementation may be different in other environments. For instance in BREW you are not allowed to have static data. Singletons look totally different but the idea of a singleton looks the same. An yes a developer can come up with an implementation on his own. I like the first caveman creating a wheel have had times where I wanted to use a pattern but had to come up with my own implementation because of the restrictions of the environment.

Study has been impossible to do for these last couple of weeks as you know from my previous posts. I still intend to put up the questions from the test on my website. I have notes on them and plan to do that. The problem is that my work station has been disrupted at home. The room that was my work space is now to be by sons room. We have cleared it out an are preparing for new carpet. I have to fix some floor squeaks etc before that carpet gets put in. Since next week I will be away on business it looks like this month will be a wash. I am not going to get anything done. The website and my reading on `R` and the planning for my dissertation will have to go on hold. It is summer so breaks are kind of expected. I still get upset at the impact to my routine. There are other things that just have to get done in my life I guess.

Work is going really well. The patent needed my signature yesterday to move ahead. This is the last stage. The lawyers just needed our signatures as inventors to put the final touches on this. I have been involved with patents in the past but the patent search always showed prior art. This is the first one that will actually go all the way through and be recorded. I am kind of excited to be on the inventors list.

The API for the government is also going well. I started the domain model yesterday showing the division of responsibilities. I needed to show the deferred decision line since the firmware development will not be done by our company but will be done by the hardware manufacturer. It seems kind of funny that the term `deferred decision` is still popping up after all these years since my work at IBM. The framework development experience then is so helpful now. This is stuff you don`t get in school. The black art of framework development. This will just be an API from our point of view as application developers but I still have to publish the whole framework. It all depends on your point of view. Framework design is kind of like visually represented as a sort of Venn Diagram where the work that is created by the applications developer is put in the middle surrounded on all sides by the framework and the framework calls into the application developer provided code. From the point of view of the application developer it may still be seen as an API or class library. The analogous diagram would be a layered diagram not a Venn Diagram of sorts. When I talked about deferred decision that is usually thought of in the context of layers and is very much more complicated when talking about things from the context of a framework. What was a line becomes a circle. The question is `At what level do you make the decision to defer the implementation to your users?` So I make this kind of decision several times during the day shifting classes or interfaces over this boundary of concern. Strictly speaking frameworks call into the code provided by the application developer and class libraries are used in the opposite manner where the application developer calls down into the library. Just looking at the implementation of Java will show you that both characteristics exist in different parts of the SDK. The important part of the domain model diagram needs to show what they need to implement and what I as an application developer need to implement. I have done that. The design document will help in our effort to work with the hardware manufacturer.

Well I don`t expect to have a post for a while. I will be gone on business for some time and will have to be working on getting ready for our new edition. I expect to restart and continue my school work in a few weeks.

Spent the week working on new API for protocols for a government project. The protocols are for QOS. I have tried to make these very object oriented because this time is unusual and we get to use c++ on the embedded side of things. Usually we use c. We nearly always get to use the protocol of choice, c++, on top of the embedded firmware but this time the hardware vendor must have a micro kernel that allows for c++ at a much lower level. So I started the API. I have employed more patterns because of the nature of the object oriented API. I used listeners to work with events of retry reservations and events of the reservations themselves. I also used the visitor pattern to be able to have a double dispatch as you put options on a specification for reservation. The visitable is implemented as an interface and therefore the hardware vendor can unpack a reservation and tell those objects received to set things on the object of there choice. It is turning out to be a pretty good work. I am removing enumerations an replacing that functionality with objects. I think in the end I will get a speedup because there will not have to be any searching, sorting or inspecting of operands or events to understand what to do with them. Beautiful.

As I was working on my API last week a few times I looked up implementations of the patterns I was using. The number of different ways to implement a pattern often times makes me wonder how can you call each of them the same pattern. The GOF book can not be the definitive reference. The number of things written about the quality of patterns in that book is enormous. Everybody has got a better way. The reasoning why one implementation is better than another really comes down to quibbles. In the end it is a way to solve a problem. When doing embedded devices you always want to eek out that last little bit of performance because everything real-time can depend on it. I tried a couple of the different patterns that are similar. The profiler could not pick up the difference. It was a bit time consuming to write the examples but in most cases the efficiency gains were minimal. Why would knowing these differences make a difference in anyones life?

So I thought about the test. I thought about how many questions I could ask about these quibbles I spoke of earlier. The test wasn`t like this but it did ask to compare two different GOF patterns. Patterns are usually thought of as being architectural pieces and naming them for better communications among different people on a development team. The architect writes a pattern name on some classes on a class diagram and the end developer reads that class diagram and implements something well known. Well in my experience, somewhat loosely exemplified by what I wrote above, is that pattern implementation is not the well known thing that a door or a window is in building architecture. First the pattern is not something that is implemented every time the same exact way. Also, generally a seasoned developer can come to a similar implementation without knowing that they used a pattern and may have never heard its name anyway. I think that patterns are really a better way to teach software programming concepts. But, after you learn say...what double dispatch is, and how it is used in the pattern then you can forget the pattern name and just continue to do that unnamed concept. People don`t really talk in patterns. The confusion that that would generate is too great. I have an example.

I was reading my son some children`s books yesterday before bed. He got the bright idea to have me read the books backwards. So I did. The first few pages were easy to read but I started to try and understand the story also. To think in reverse is kind of easy for me. I have some affinity for it probably because of how information is stored in my learning disabled brain...in the form of unnamed objects and not word networks. So it took me a few pages to get the structure of sentences but after getting the structure I could understand the story in reverse and see how it went from the whole to the part. Pieces of the story work removed for each page that I read one after the other until I came to the first page. I even made mistakes like guessing words and reading them in the wrong order because the sentence idea would come to me before the words would. I do this reading forward. Reading forward gets me into trouble because I don`t read carefully enough and often get the wrong idea after reading something. Therefore my comprehension goes down because I have interpreted something that was not there. This was similar but because I had to go through a translation of reverse I think I actually read better. This would be a good technique for understanding. It would be better than me typing my entire texts to slow the interpretation process and gain understanding that way. Now I have noticed some of my learning traits in my son. During this reading backwards I wondered if he was getting the story. I think that he was because he had no complaints and enjoyed the reading just as well as I did. I kind of did this on the fly. It made me realize that patterns are not something that we use for communications it is something we use for understanding. To be able to recognize pieces of code and how they are joined together to get an overall picture of a program or system. This idea that somehow they add in reuse and better design through well worked algorithms is false...at least for me...and I think for others. I understood the sentence structure in reverse quite quickly. The pattern of English sentence structure in reverse is not something that I will use to share an idea to others. I am not even sure I could articulate the pattern. But in my head I understand that pattern well and can recognize it and understand the meaning of the text....I will say that part again for emphasis....I can understand the `TEXT`...paragraphs, plot, genre. So unnamed patterns of understanding reused over different software systems is how we use patterns. Clever implementations are not as the result of using patterns. They are the result of good programming skills. Skills that are unnamed. We don`t really talk in pattern names. You would not talk about sentence structure to get your point across about a concept you wanted to convey to another person, would you? Don`t use software patterns for that either. Naming a pattern is useless.

Picking a new swim locations is coming down to 2. I will be able to keep swimming this summer. Three years and I have only missed a handful of MWF`s. I will be able to keep my regimen. Running is going well also. You know not in the winter but summer is always good.

There were so many things that I have neglected during my study. We are expecting a new edition to our family in August. I can tell that my study has been a bit delayed. My desk is covered with books. The reason is that I have been cleaning a room in our house getting ready to move my son from the room that is the babies room. We need to fix some floor boards and lay new carpet, paint and get some furniture. Before we do that we need to get some things out of the way. That means me going through my endless array of books, notes, and saved papers. I also have a great deal of old equipment. I got rid of all of my old Sun equipment, recycled it through work. I may regret that but it is done now. If I do a networking dissertation I may want those extra machines. I neglected to go through the content also. There wasn`t any financial information or anything like that but I probably have gotten ride of some of the software that I have written in the past. At any rate I have had a great deal to clean.

Lab continues to be fruitful but in very small increments. My protocol EVDO Rev A enhancements have been working since December. The problem is that the lab infrastructure software is a moving target. The latest is a timer that keeps going off in the network that causes QOS reservations to not be granted. I have had things working in emulators since December. It is just a slow process. My client in an emulator has been talking to non QOS handsets off our server and talking to other emulators since last year. I have moved on to working on productizing until more tests are passing in the lab...when the infrastructure starts working better. I was told yesterday some good news that Qualcomm wants us in their lab in the near future...weeks away, not months. The HSUPA/HSDPA handsets are on hold but RevA may be the priority.

My father has been in a semi-retired working state for some time. He is a pharmacist and has been working in a small pharmacy to make extra money...actually a lot of extra money. This small town has a number of ADD people. So much that it prompted him to buy some books on the subject because a pharmacist has to be able to council patients on their medications. It has been good for him to start to study this condition. He has read many aspects of the condition and classifications of the condition. It is interesting because he has started to see the characteristics in my mother. Funny I have never thought that ADD was my label but some autistic spectrum disorder. ADD is what I was diagnosed as having. ADD and how it is acted upon by stress was the focus for my petition for taking the exam again. It is kind of funny to hear my father talk about things. He even said that one classification does not have a sense of smell. I have not had a sense of smell for as long as I can remember. He has always denied that I have had any condition. Maybe he is starting to understand or maybe he always thought that it would be better physiologically for me to think that he thought I was not affected. Anyway this past mothers day it came up. He showed me the books. These were very heavy books, not your usual Barnes and Knoble special. These were medical type books. Books I am sure he ordered. I am sure that this may even help him understand her better. It was a terribly stressful weekend with this kind of talk even though it was not very long...only over the course of an hour or so...partially dinner conversation. I am glad that it has become a subject of conversation. It is just painful to talk about in relation to me or my mother. Talking about someone else is easier.

I have neglected my website. I think that It will have to wait until I am finished with the babies room. I don`t have that much free time. It is important to keep up my workouts over the summer to avoid a depression. I need to find a place to swim in the morning. Only two more weeks to go. We really don`t have the money to join a health club with a pool. Three years of MWF, lets hope I don`t have to quit. Our park district stinks for dis-continuing the morning swim sessions. There is talk that they won`t start up again in the fall. I am running 5-6 miles at lunch with the guys from work. So MWF I do 2 workouts. It is really good for my head. I feel great. Vacation in 2 weeks. I cannot wait.

Still no word on my test results. I know that the graders must be involved in finals week. I hope for the results before I go on vacation.

Several years ago I saw Vincent Cerf at the DePaul Lecturer series. He said at the end of the talk to a reply from a question from me that he thought that the best vehicle for learning would be to study packet radio. That has always stuck in my mind. I have followed Cerf since that time right up to the point he joined Google and beyond. I have been thinking about networking and the PhD since about that time in my life. Networking before that time it was just basic TCP and before that it was the first teacher workstation environment I had in my house on the TRS-80. I was doing development way back then in a sort of networked environment. But, until the Cerf talk I had not thought of it as a possible research area. Because of my work at my current company I often think about things like net neutrality, QOS etc. My current research at work has to do with QOS. I have had some trouble figuring out who it benefits. To me QOS has been a way that a telco can charge more for a service and not actually getting better service. Because of the way the network is setup preemption is not part of the design in wireless. So you ask, "What does QOS actually mean in that situation?" There are several problems of which I don`t want to go into them here. The point here is I am torn in what area to do a dissertation. In the last couple of days I have learned that the gyration at work has been because we are going to be acquired. There are several suiters. We have a banker that is handling the work. I am excited that my research will be a point of focus for this acquisition. Because I am the single person on a large part of it I hope that means good things are coming my way. My thoughts of dissertation topic were compounded by some video watching over the last couple of days. Van Jacobson Google Talk - Aug 30th, 2006 It is a really good talk about the history, current state and future of networking. Lots of the ideas given I have been thinking about myself. Things like integrity and trust are properties of the data and not the source of the data and the definition of networking or "The Network" is a function depending on your religious fundamentalism...are you a telco or a TCP person. Van Jacobson said something that I liked especially. He said is QOS to benefit the small tales of connectivity between you an the larger network, as it should be, or is it to benefit the charging by the telco for bandwidth used by big entities with money like Google. He suggested the telco intent is the later....I kind of concur because of my experience with QOS...But, it remains to be seen. So I am torn about what my dissertation should be even though I have been heading into formal methods and software engineering. My thoughts continue to bring less focus.

It has been about 5 days since my last post. I said that I would post my annual progress report to the PhD subcommittee. It is attached at the bottom of this post. I did not include the time line. It is in a previous post.

There has been a shakeup at work. Projects come and go. One of our larger project hopefuls from Homeland Security we lost. A few other projects have been delayed as is the norm at the beginning of the summer. So, we are experiencing some belt tightening during the time before our next project. My projects are generally unaffected. Oh, my research was to go into those other projects. It was especially going into Homeland Security project. Even so, I continue to work on the technology because it is vital to other similar projects to that one. My research is central to a lot of projects. Since I am the only one in some parts I think that my efforts will continue to go unchanged during the belt tightening. It is just uncomfortable to see others in discomfort. New projects are coming. It is just a stressful time for me seeing everything that is happening. The rumor that IBM will layoff 130,000 US employees is also alarming. As a stock holder I don`t like it much. As a member of that industry I am especially uncomfortable. This comes from a report by Robert Cringely on the PBS website. It seems unlikely but it shakes worker confidence in the economy and jobs reports.

So I have not been working on my website. I am planning for our vacation in a few weeks and reading. I have to find a new place to swim for the summer. The park district will be closing the indoor pools at the high school. I am kind of upset about this. They say it is not cost effective. It is not a matter of cost effectiveness. The park district has said in the past that it is there to provide recreation to all in the city. If that is so then it should be like AT&T in the early days of the telephone levying a tax to cover wiring rural areas. It was not cost effective to wire rural areas but they found a way to make it work for everyone. That meant that everyone had telephone. Everyone should be able to take advantage of something that they are taxed for. If it only works for people that are home during the day then that does not work for everyone. I need to recreate. I pay taxes. I expect to be able to use the facilities.

Below is what I published to the PhD status subcommittee:

PhD Progress Report 2006-2007

Student: TheStudent

Adviser: TheSudent`s Adviser

Dr. {head of progress report subcommittee}, I am writing this to inform you of my progress for the past year and to discuss my plans for the next year. You have ask for me to discuss my progress in 3 specific areas:

1) Discuss any significant progress towards the completion of your dissertation proposal or defense.

2) List any significant publications or other research activity during last year.

3) Describe your plans of the upcoming year.

I trust that this document will fulfill the requirements of me. The last year has been a frustrating year. One in which I look back over the amount of work that I did to get to today and am overwhelmed by what has happened. Without the materials I have kept along the way to tell me what has happened and this very exercise of writing this review I would not have believed it myself. Although, today I feel that I could do it all again based on my feelings about the situation, I still look in disbelief back at what I have done. You can see a time line of events at the end of this document.

Going into the last Candidacy Exam of April 2005 I had completed about 8 months of survey work over my intended area of research. I had not written anything for publication because I feel that this area is a new twist on old ideas and had not gotten my advisers direction on any of it. I have talked to {TheStudent`s Adviser} and presented my ideas at his student gatherings. I still think that there is work to be done before any of it is written for publication. I intend to do something with Financial Engineering models and Model Driven Development. I`d like to bring Formal Language Constructs to the "R Language". But, more on that later. I have not been able to proceed because of my position in the program. I hope to explain in this paper. I have been many times turned away for my request to continue working with my adviser on my dissertation, publications or just taking classes. Because of your request I still feel a need to explain myself and my plans for the next year.

To explain myself I need to give you some history. The history leading up to the 2005 exam is known by the PhD committee in my petition for continuance after the 2005 exam. For a little review, after the 2005 exam I waited for my results. When I had learned I failed I was very upset. Since I had prior job experience as a Software Architect for the largest bank in the world and had management and technical control over one of the largest architectural departments and projects there, I believed back then that I had done what was on the test in the real world. I had also done a very thorough study for both of my past exams. I, some time before the test, had lost my job, had a very sick son born and had an uncle die and waked on the day of the test. But, I also believed that it was because of a learning disability and the affects on it by stress where I was influenced to failure by circumstances in my life. You can see this information in that document for petition on file with DePaul University. Through the DePaul PLuS Program I began my appeal.

After the test I acted very quickly to petition. It took a little time to get an answer for my petition for appeal and an action plan from my adviser. I needed the information from my adviser on how to carry out the results of the appeal and what should be done to return to school. After getting that appeal action plan I needed to find a doctor and setup the assessment of my learning disability. By the beginning of 2006 I was attending doctor visits to gain an assessment of my learning disability and also working with the PLuS program. I had already been working with the PLuS program from years before. Both of these activities are emotionally painful, exhausting, and costly visits. I have been evaluated many times but every time it is just as painful. With the assessment and submission back to my adviser and the advisement office sometime during the fail quarter, either very near or after the fall exam date, I was granted the right to take the exam again. This right was given based on the PLuS program and the results of the testing and doctor`s analysis.

Since I had not gotten the desired results on the other two exams, this time was going to be different. I planned on studying the same way and duration I had before but this time I would make everything public. I had nothing to hide and everyone needed to know the effort. I had been told that after the second exam it was difficult for the committee to gain any information about me because I had no website. I have recently looked at other students of my adviser and haven`t found their websites. I didn`t know this at the time but, back then I started a website to be published near the test date. I also started a blog of my experience. They sites are: http://endofdayexperience.blogspot.com/ http://thestudent.fateback.com. They were published on April 9th, 2007. The sites were up before then but I had not told anyone about them until April 9th. They were not google-able until about that time either. I am working to get a link off of digg.com. I also plan on putting up the answers to the questions I remember from the 2007 exam.

In my website I have done every answer on every pre-test exam back to April 2003. In my blog I talk about my experience with each question. There are things in the blog like, how I emailed the authors of the books and papers on the testing portion of the reading list about Equivalence Term Testing. Equivalence Term Testing is a term that is difficult or near impossible to find. The authors of the literature on the reading lists think that this is a DePaul colloquialism. They have never heard of it. I eventually took the answer given to me by others obtained from a DePaul staffer. Another example is the question about Structured Analysis versus OO analysis from previous exams. The information is not in the reading list. The depth needed for the Structured Analysis question meant that I had to get a book written by Tom De Marco. The book is out of print from 1978. I had to get it from a guy in Canada off of the Amazon used books list. I was unable to answer the question before getting this book, the depth I needed could not be obtained by using the books on the reading list or any other books at my disposal. I have other examples of problems with the test written about in the blog.

My website and blog in some respects mirrors an experience with the test. The way that it mirrors it is the 2007 test has several questions not on the reading list, actually considerably more than the pre-tests. As I wrote before, "It was like taking a 14 century literature exam and getting Ian Fleming and Clive Barker, I would have at least done a littler better if you had chosen Neil Stephenson." That analogy is "right on" in its variance of era, genre, and expression of selectivity of vast knowledge. The expression of selectivity warrants another example. This example is not on the test. Lets say the question on the test asks what is the "Third Manifesto"? Are you clued into what to write about? If I ask you about the authors Christopher J. Date or Hugh Darwen are you clued into what to write about? If I told you that the authors book is widely regarded as the standard text on the subject and has sold over 700,000 copies do you know what to write about? If I told you that the authors worked with the father of an associated technology at IBM are you clued into what to write about? If the section on the test is Object Oriented Programming are you clued into what to write about? If I ask you about Object-relational Impedance Mismatch are you clued into what to write about? You get the idea. I am not clued in by those early questions but maybe you are, especially if the questions were not on the reading list. These questions were not on the reading list, including the last question. I and the test writers can ask a question in a way or make it obscure enough that it cannot be answered. The question could be on or off the reading list. If it is on the reading list there is a better chance that the student will be clued into what is being ask. That extra piece of information makes the test more appropriate because the knowledge breadth is finite. In the 2007 exam things like AOP, the Open Closed Principal and Fragile Base Class, as well as others were clearly not on the reading list. The questions either came from another decade and/or the books on the reading list were exceptionally rudimentary to cover those topics in the needed depth. This was echoed in emails and other sentiments from people that I know that took the 2007 exam.

My website and blog in some respects don`t mirror the exam in some way. The way that the site is different than the 2007 exam was that tests from at least 2003 up through 2006 were very consistent. The exams were asking similar questions with similar answers over consistent specific narrow parts of topics. Most questions have come from the reading list provided in 2002. I have been collecting test since the beginning of my masters degree at DePaul. I have the pre-tests that go back from the present to 2003 and farther and the change to have consistent tests is very apparent with consistency of the tests in 2003 to September of 2006. I, and others I have talked with, did not expect the in-consistency of the 2007 exam. The consistencies we expected because of the pre-tests were not there. The topics and depth of topics that we were prepared to be tested over were not what we were tested over. One of my friends left after the first 20 minutes of the exam. He was at least prepared for some portion of the exam but was not asked those questions. The exam was so different with data that was either so new or obscure that I can see his frustration. With his concentration in Software Management, I would not have expected the breadth he would have needed for the 2007 Software Engineering exam.

Enough about my website and study, during 2006 I spent time strategizing about the program. I needed a way to continue progress. I have now been doing research at my current job of doing embedded device development and Push-To-Talk protocols for nearly 3 years. That information is in my website too. I thought that with all of the trouble with DePaul and my situation that in the end I may need to change advisers. {TheStudent`s Adviser} may be wounded in this process of petitioning. Also, I thought that my current job may bring resources to a networking dissertation. I worked hard to make contact in the networking program. I had work contacts that had people that worked for them at Bell Labs and now working for DePaul. Through {Work Contact} a former Bell Labs/Lucent executive manager and {Second Work Contact} a former Bell Labs/Lucent engineer`s wife I met {Networking Professor}. {Work Contact} thought I was perfect for the PhD and thought {Networking Professor} would be a good match. {Second Work Contact} didn`t know {Networking Professor} personally but gave reference to my work ethics and professional research. I contacted {Networking Professor} in networking but he could not work with me until I had passed the third exam. With this experience I decided to not make my problems known when working through future directions and just to plow ahead. I learned enough to know that to pursue this option was going to be difficult. I was told that I was not allowed to switch tests to the networking exam. I was told that I must take the Software Engineering exam for the third time. I decided this would just be an option if other options didn`t work out. This side track took three to four months of diligent talking to people and followup.

With my original work with {TheStudent`s Adviser} I had done 8 months or so of work on MDD/Financial Models/Formal Methods direction. I am very much still interested in doing this. For me to do this I will need to take some more classes in Financial Engineering. {TheStudent`s Adviser} never really was excited about this. I am not sure he ever really understood it. He kept trying to link it back to {formal methods programming language name} project. It looks like {formal methods programming language name} is dead. The website has not been updated since 2003/2004. His students do not have websites of there own that show there current work on the project. Maybe he will be more interested now.

After the networking side trip, for me to plow ahead, my plan was to make contacts inside quantitative analysis and begin there. Having worked in an investment bank in Foreign Exchange and Historical Data I know something about this area. When I saw that ISP 121 was in need of lecturers I jumped at the chance. I had repeated false starts in getting into teaching a section. I did make contact with {Quantitative Analysis Professor}. He may be a useful contact in the future, I thought. I saw in the hallway one day while waiting for something a post of a group doing quantitative finance with a contact {Quantitative Finance Professor}. I thought, now this is the contact that I want. Later, while doing a sample lecture for ISP 121 I met Dr. {Quantitative Finance Professor}. I am glad I made the attempt at ISP 121. The pain of preparing for multiple sample lectures paid off. I have since sent email to {Quantitative Finance Professor} asking to see him when I have finished my exam. I think that this is really where I want to be. Math and Formal Methods really turn my crank. To put these disciplines together for a dissertation in Software Engineering will be the right place for me to finish. I think working with {TheStudent`s Adviser} and {Quantitative Finance Professor} could possibly work.

The R Language is the foundation for starting my research. Adding formal methods to it is the simplest macro idea. The idea is that financial modelers want to devise strategies for trading. Be careful here the word model is used two ways. There is a model that describes the software system and a model that describes a trading scenario. We are talking about a model of a software system implemented in an augmented `R` to describe a model of a trading scenario. The models would be fashioned together in a single unit. This is my new definition of model. The reason for pursuing this augmented `R` angle for dissertation is financial modelers need a framework for specifying, developing and verifying systems in a systematic rather than ad hoc way. They need a formal basis for precisely expressing consistency and completeness, specification and correctness. They would like to realize a financial mathematical model without the necessity of running a system to determine the systems behavior. The ability to specify behavioral and structural properties without the need for a running system cannot be stressed enough. Financial Modelers want to compare multiple models against each other without needing running systems. They want to reuse their models across different environments such as a spreadsheet for pricing and a real-time system for settlement. Financial modelers want to be assured that the models in different environments behave the same and be able to prove it with some mathematical rigor if needed. With formal methods, Model Driven Development, model checkers and theorem provers these things can be done. By using formal methods a mathematical foundation in set theory can be applied to the R language for reasoning about system level concerns. The R language already uses set theory for developing financial models. My ideas pertain to the augmentation of the R language to include formalisms to apply rigor to the properties of the system and not just properties of the data.

My intent is not to write my dissertation proposal right here. My intent is to talk about what I have been thinking about and doing over the last year preparing for my dissertation. I have many books on the subject of `R`. Over the years I have been working through the language for a complete understanding. But, the distraction of the test this last year has been enough to consume a great deal of my time. I am a part time student. I have been studying and preparing a website since September of 2006. Three to Four hours a day since September have been spent preparing for a test that didn`t even have the information that I studied. I have a great deal of breadth and depth that I cannot even show. Even though I have positive feelings about the exam, once again the exam failed to test my knowledge. This was my complaint on previous exams. The time spent away from the real work reminds me of a story called "The Big Brag" by Dr. Seuss. Lets get to the real work. I have done this work over the last year because I believe that it is valuable to continue in the program. T.S. Elliott once wrote, "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." I hope I have provided the information you require for assessment of my progress.

{TheStudent}

I responded today to the status report request from the DePaul PhD Committee. It seems like I have been working on this forever. It was a bit consuming. My wife was getting a little upset. She would say, "Aren`t you finished with those early morning yet." Well I sent it today. I sent an email to my adviser to see if he would send a report about me. He said that he would send it on May 2nd. I think he will. I am not sure what he will write about me. I am not sure it matters. I have all the data that shows my progress. I guess he could say that I did not keep him informed. Conversation is a 2 way street. I am sure that he knows about most things. I am not sure he knows about my social networking. That`s ok. He does not really need to know that stuff. I will post my status report as soon as I remove peoples names etc so that everyone remains anonymous. I think that it is better that way.

I plan on working on the html for the answers to the 2007 exam questions next. It is summer, I am slowing a bit. I started running with the guys at work again. It will be 2 weeks on Friday since I started. Running and swimming, two a day work outs 3 times a week. These first couple of weeks I am a bit run down. It will pick up here in the middle of the month. These guys go 6 miles at lunch. I am doing good just to stay up with one of them near the end ever day. I think that I will catch up to his fitness level here soon. It remains to be seen whether I can do that or not.

I think that my blogs will become more infrequent for a while. I need to see how this will play out. I will keep you all posted as to my progress as things prevail.

I have started looking at "R" again. I spend less and less time on the 2007 html. I am going to get the "R" installation on my laptop up to date and start looking at source code. I know that I need to explain to you guys what I am doing with this but you have to just know that it is pertinent to the PhD.

I polished up my time-line this morning. It looks pretty good but pretty long. As I look back over it I am overwhelmed by the amount of work that I had to do to get to today. It does not feel like a lot of work but this time-line shows my daily persistence in the program. The amount of paralyzing worry that I worked through and the documents I have written over days and days of revisions are enormous. The lengthy emails and management of the situation with getting back to people and providing what was needed. It was like a full time software project. I have managed larger software projects with many more involved individuals that were less work. The amount of time that I had for other things in my life suffered. But, I know that It will be all worth it in the end. I post the time line at the end of this blog entry.

I am now working on the meat of the document. I have been making little notes to myself and organizing this text for a few days. Now organizing the little notes will be the task. Getting them all on one piece of paper and then ordering that same piece of paper over a couple of other pieces of paper. Then making a PDF and sending the document. I have one week until the document is due. I think that I can handle one more week of 4am mornings. By now it is old hat. I am productive at that time. The lack of sleep thing seems to be counteracted by the fact that I am waking for the day not extending the day beyond some already worked number of hours. All the best brain cells get used first in the morning when I am fresh.

The Time Line of the Last Year

Date	Description
02/09/2005	Ask for past exams examples to discovery anything new?
02/16/2005	Ask the graduate advisement office to view my past exam failure, told to contact my adviser
02/17/2005	A refusal by my adviser to help with an exam question because it was not in his area of expertise.
03/10/2005	Notified my exam application was received
04/08/2005	Day of 2005 Software Engineering Exam
06/08/2005	Notified that my exam results have been mailed to me
08/15/2005	Notified my adviser that my deadline for appeal was August 31st
08/17/2005	Told to send my appeal to the PhD committee...but I don`t know who that is?
08/17/2005	Request my adviser to send my appeal.
08/17/2005	Notified that my appeal of the exam will be handled after the fall quarter begins.
08/24/2005	Received contact information for PluS program (Director)
11/03/2005	First of multiple Visits to Doctor for Assessment
04/14/2006	Request report from doctor to be mailed to PluS, Advisement Office, Adviser
05/02/2006	Contacted PluS program about my doctor results of learning disability
05/05/2006	Doctor reply about delay in sending report because of office move.
05/26/2006	Release Form request from doctor
08/04/2006	Requested alternate way for reviewing the exams and was denied
08/28/2006	Notified by my adviser that he will be away from school during the summer and unable to work with me.
09/09/2006	First BLOG entry of DePaul Experience on http://endofdayexperience.blogspot.com/
09/12/2006	Finally, able meeting with director of PLuS program to create a plan
10/09/2006	Advisers refusal to work with me until there is a PluS program recommendation.
10/09/2006	PluS program suggests my adviser and I meet. Adviser refuses without a PluS program recommendation.
10/10/2006	Begin Daily Study Regimen starting at 3-4am for 3-4 hours before work
10/10/2006	Request to meet with my adviser on reviewing exam copied PluS program
10/10/2006	PluS program asks for the adviser to push forward on with a limited recommendation of test review.
10/12/2006	No response from adviser copied contact PluS program
10/17/2006	No response from adviser copied contact PluS program
10/19/2006	PluS program contacts adviser directly.
10/19/2006	Reminded my adviser of our meeting and that my intent was to go over BOTH exams
10/20/2006	Attended first meeting on teaching ISP121, first announced my interest.
10/21/2006	Visited adviser to review both exams. Told first exam was too old to review.
10/24/2006	Email thanking my adviser for reviewing my single exam with me.
10/24/2006	Contacted advisement office about exam being too old
10/24/2006	Academic Advisements responds that they DO have my first test.
10/25/2006	Adviser states that he believes we are finished reviewing exams and that there would be no more review.
10/25/2006	Notified my interest in teach ISP 121 was accepted/ask for Thursday night session
10/26/2006	Offered to pass on the review of the first test as an olive branch.
10/30/2006	Phone meeting with PluS program director
11/07/2006	Notify PluS program director of exam dates.
11/09/2006	Notified of my lab classroom assignment
11/14/2006	Ask PluS program to get ZED question thrown out on the basis that it has never been taught in any depth in any class at DePaul
11/30/2006	Attended Orientation for Teach ISP121 I do a sample lecture but not the right audience
12/13/2006	Sent Resume to office of employment
12/15/2006	Notified that I would be used for spring quarter rather than winder quarter ISP 121
01/03/2007	Told I was select to teach ISP121
01/15/2007	First contact with Study Group/Start of weekly meetings
01/21/2007	Study Group for 4 hours
01/24/2007	Told to contact employment office to do another sample lecture.
01/28/2007	Study Group for 4 hours
02/02/2007	Made contact with Computational Finance Professor before giving Sample ISP 121 Lecture.
02/02/2007	Second sample lecture with correct audience but I was then not selected
02/04/2007	Study Group for 4 hours
02/11/2007	Study Group for 4 hours
02/18/2007	Study Group for 4 hours
02/22/2007	Told I am scheduled for section 902 of ISP 121
02/25/2007	Study Group for 4 hours
02/26/2007	Told my section of ISP121 was can celled
03/03/2007	Emailed my exam application for my 3rd attempt at the exam.
03/04/2007	Study Group for 4 hours
03/06/2007	Notified advisement that of special requests for the exam in the absence of the PluS program director on my behalf.
03/06/2007	Told of new PLuS contact for working on my behalf
03/06/2007	Notified that the PluS program director would be `Out of the office for a while`
03/07/2007	Made contact with new PluS program contact
03/11/2007	Study Group for 4 hours
03/13/2007	New PluS program contact makes special requests for accommodation on exam
03/18/2007	Study Group for 4 hours
03/25/2007	Study Group for 4 hours
04/01/2007	Study Group for 4 hours
04/09/2007	Announce http://thestudent.fateback.com and http://endofdayexperience.blogspot.com to The World/Office of Advisement/PLuS/My Adviser
04/13/2007	Third Exam 2007 for Software Engineering

I have been working on the report for a few days now. I have organized my thoughts around my research and what I will be doing going forward. For the history I have prepared a timeline of what incidents have happend since the 2005 test. The appeal, the doctor, the review of tests, study and study group are all part of the timeline. I am working to tell a story about the last year. I will publish my timeline here upon sending my report before the 5th. This has been sort of a big undertaking. I find it very important to tell my story acuratly and without biased, just the facts. So the timeline dates and my experiences are taken direclty from my emails and logs. Often times I used the exact words used in the emails. I am nearly finished. What is left to do is write the meat of the paper. Since this is possibly my last celebration if I don`t have a favorable outcome to the test I want to say it perfectly. I have spent 8 months or more on the chosen research topic before the distraction of failing the second exam and subsuquent giration to stay in school. Nothing has changed about the research. My feelings about the department and how best to complete the degree have been in flux. I still believe I have a great topic. I still believe that I have a great plan. I just need to continue. The lack of interest in my topic and plan by others should be no reflection on my intentions. Until I am able to produce the vocabulary in the right context to describe my research others will be confused and bewildered. That is just how it is going to be. Understanding is what the PhD is all about. If they don`t understand it is not nescesarrily that you are wrong you may just not be complete yet. Being complete is a function of bandwidth and execution. If you are set on paths that are less than fruitful because of requirments you should not be held accountable for a delay. I am a part time student. I can only work on this so many hours. Since September I have done something every single day for at least 2-4 hours. I work out for 1-2 more and attend work for 9 more hours. At a minimum that leaves only 8 hours for sleeping and eating. So you know I am getting less than that for sleeping. I don`t know how I can do better than that. I do have a family. Generally, in my research at my work I work more than 8 hours and 1 hour of travel so I really am quite a juggler. I don`t really have time for much in the way of academic publications. As I have said before, these activities are a must with my learning disability. I have to study longer and work out harder to maintain a level of excellence. So it is a matter of execution and bandwith.

I got back more information about the other guys in the study group. One guy left after 20 minutes. I really comes down to the information ask for what not on the reading list or it was ask in such a way as to not use the correct vocabulary to clue you into what is being ask. I have other independent corroborations to these ideas from others that have taken this past exam. It was not representative of any of the other exams nor was it designed to test the knowledge of the students. Don`t tell the students to study one thing and them ask them about another.

So I have started thinking about this report I am going to write to the PhD subcommittee on my progress. I think that this should be my highest priority. Putting up the questions from the exam, I am not sure what that proves. It does prove that I can remember them. I am not sure that it proves that they prove what the testers want them to prove. I remember them, I looked them up, I know something about them even before, now I started turning them into web pages. Does it prove that I am any more of a PhD, No. Obscure references defined, misdirected study refocused, but, what did they test of me? Even some of these definitions like "What is architecture?" does it really prove anything about what the person taking the test is all about. A nebulous questions defined, void of all context, relates to nothing. It is like saying "Tell me what you know, but be specific." The word "specific" does not clue you into a granularity or a topic. The testers indirectly ask a macroeconomic question when what they really wanted to know was about a guys taxes. Both would be specific questions. I thrash every time I think about it. At least the long questions at the end of the test were specific skills.

The last year has been all about this test. I am not sure my adviser knows me well enough to be able to write anything about me anyway. I have not been happy with the DePaul relationship. I am optimistic that it will get better. I really think that this school has potential. The PhD program from 2001- 2007 has not grown in maturity much. I see the same lax ability to service the students. Some really care, some don`t. Some just want to guard there existence and limit there workload. Some are really good. Some work hard to get people enthusiastic about programs. I am excited about the Computational Finance masters program. It is about time for that program.

I have material for this report. I have made progress outside of the test. I expect that others have no idea. The fact that they don`t should signify something. It does not signify that I have not been active. It does signify the level of interest of others. It does signify the level of help of others. The fact that I can make progress without direction says a lot for me. The fact that I am slowed by other hoops without concern for the real work means I have real, set in stone, signposts of my progress. I just need to put these on paper. I have made contacts over the last year. They are significant. I want to learn not just complete. At this point I am not learning anything. In fact, I have been teaching something. Read "The Big Brag" by Dr. Seuss.

Let us spend some time on this report. This is a part time endeavor.

Had a great weekend. The weather was great, sunny and warm. We were baby sitters on Sunday. I had put the patio furniture out on Sunday. I sat and watched the kids from under the umbrella for a few hours and read a couple of old Linux Journals. It was very pleasant. It has not happened in a very long time. I have read nothing in my spare time but information pertaining to the PhD for the last 12 months. I was glad to finally read something I was interested in and it not be a publication off of the reading list.

I received an email this past Wednesday from a PhD in the administration that is writing a paper about educational research at DePaul University. It seemed kind of funny that this would come now at a time I am taking advantage of the PLuS programs opportunities. I did respond with my website. I don`t know if she will get much response. She is asking for past work so that she can write a summary. Is there any past work? If there is I have never heard of it. I read those things mailed to me having to do with research but none were memorable about educational research.

I also got back an email from my study partner that took the test also. He said he was very surprised at the content of the test. It seems that his surprise at the questions and the fact they were not on the reading list were right in line with what I thought. He is optimistic as am I. It is funny he would say about one question that "We probably know that one...it is just a naming convention thing." Well that naming convention thing made me upset.

Yesterday was mailed out a memo to all PhD students from a professor of the administration with a new assignment of chair of the PhD review subcommittee. DePaul is implementing a new PhD review process. It seems that the deadline for submitting an assessment is May 5th, 2007. Looks like my putting up of my questions this week will have to wait. I need to write a document. Wow, wonder what my adviser will write about me. He doesn`t have much to write because he has kept me in the dark since this process began. I have not been unable to work with him since he said that this test thing had to be completed first. I have tried to move forward taking classes and writing papers but he had limited my progress because of how the current test was handled. Granted I can understand that I am closer to being released from the program than probably any of his other students and therefore he gives me less time.

Well, I will write this thing. I will talk about the contacts I have made over the last year and what I will do next in the program. They have ask for these three things.

1) discuss any significant progress towards the completion of your dissertation proposal or defense,

2) list any significant publications or other research activity during last year,

3) and describe your plans of the upcoming year.

I can do that.

It has nearly been a week since the exam. Yesterday I got up early also. I am still having trouble adjusting back to regular time. In trying to sleep longer I forgot to put my watch on. When I got ready to go and swim I forgot to put it on also. Messed up my swim because I forgot my watch which I swim by the time. It kind of disrupted my morning. I was off. The switching back to regular time is tough. It is kind of like jet lag. It is more disruptive than the making time to study. I have decided to just go with it for a while. I cannot proceed with the PhD thing until they come back with my results. The last time it took them 8 months to return my results. They have said that it should take 4-6 weeks. We will see what it takes this time. In the mean time I wait for an email from one of my study group members. I am wanting to know if he had the same test as I did. I want to know if the questions were similar. It seems that they have gone on vacation. I got the how did you do emails but did not get email back from them about what there tests looked like? I suspect that they are waiting until they think that time enough has passed before they talk about the tests. His reply message said he would return on the 19th, that is today. Since I am getting up so early I plan on doing a deep dive on each of the questions I remember from the exam. I am going to put a new section called "2007" on my website. Those answers will be put there. They will not have the questions since I don`t think that would be proper nor do I think that I could remember them exactly word for word. I expect that I will publish them 2 weeks after the exam. So, the publishing will be next week on Friday. That should have given enough time for others to have taken the exam. The list is up to 8 points now. 5 of the 8 I know are not on the reading list. I will publish which are and are not on the reading list. Preparing of the web page will probably take longer than to just write an answer. I want to have more information about each question. I want to have the quotes of where the information is and the history of it. For instance I know that A*P came about some time after 1999. We were talking about it at work and how that it might help our projects. One of the other things that we talked about was "Spring". I can find a start date of about 2002 for that one. Anyway I think that A****j, a programming language, was released in 2001. The "Software Architecture in Practice" book has a copyright of 2003. That kind of explains how there can be a reference in the index but when you go to that section there is not text describing such a reference. That is the newest book that I have. The others on the reading list are earlier. This book mentioned is on the reading list in an earlier version so that version could not have possibly had a reference to A*P. The book version on the reading list has a copyright of 1997. The first papers on the A*P subject are in 1997. The first books on the A*P subject don`t start showing up until 2004. So this one is definitely not on the latest reading list from November of 2002 with the latest book on that list being from Kent Beck, "Extreme Programming Explained" from 2000. This is just the beginning of my deep dive into each question. Since I have time on my hands and an inability to sleep at the proper times I am going to put these on my website.

On the day that I publish my results of my deep dive I will stop using the asterisks to hide the names of the subjects of questions. I am doing this so that I don`t give any information to the people reading my website that may have not taken the exam. The other answers I have posted they have access to if they are taking the exam because the information is freely available to students taking the exam. So since the current test information does not show on any previous practice tests and does not show in any previous clues to those topics I will not provide them for at least 2 weeks following the test.

I once joked with my adviser that they would run out of test questions if I kept taking the exams. Maybe they have and that is why we get new questions. I expected to have the deadlock questions and the "City of Plaistow" question at least. They were on the past exams many times. Spring is a great time for new beginnings and the learning of new information. This is not a matter of understanding. This is not a matter of knowing a certain area of knowledge after being told that you will be tested of that area and you need to be able to exhibit a certain depth. This is a matter of exposure. I have heard professors in reference to the test say, "That is not my area of expertise." Well, these questions may have not been in mine either. If they were in my line of exposure would I have the depth to be able to say that I am an expert in them. I find these kind of new questions reprehensible. They are worse than the archeology type questions. At least the archeology type questions were ones I would have known about and been prepared to explain deeply. Given the work that I go through to prepare to explain something deeply I am really quite angry. This is not a memorization kind of thing this the Socrates type thing I mentioned in a previous post. Think of it like a speech where you prepare and go to the podium and are ask to speak on a different subject at the last second. This test is not Toast Masters International. As I said before, "Don`t say you are going to give me a 14th century literature test and then give me a test with Clive Barker and Ian Fleming, I would do better with Neil Stephenson." I am upset the more I think about it. If I cannot find these questions in the reading list provided, they should not be on the exam.

One more thing about the exam: It is a contradiction to say don`t put down a memorized answer when you ask for quotes. Also, don`t say avoid opinion and conjecture if you are asking for a general answer from a student. Student answers are opinion and conjecture. Remember the movie "Back to School" when a paper was turned in by the student main character written by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. about Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. as his own work. The teacher says that the student main character knows nothing about Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. By the way, Kurt Vonnegut passed 2 days before the test on April 11th, 2007 at the age of 84. Vonnegut played himself in a cameo appearance in that 1986 movie.

I am still trying to shift my sleep patterns back. It is still early but I could not sleep. I am starting to get a better picture of the story around the test. I have gotten email from the others that they have now finished there tests. Up to now they have not heard from me. Besides they have not seen my website nor my blog. As I said I got email from one of them yesterday evening. I think that it is probably ok to discuss parts of the test with him now that he has taken it. I want to know if he took a test that is more like the tests in the past or a test more like the one I just took that is completely different. The test that I just took had several questions that I have learned now were not on the reading list. In fact one of the questions on the test A*P comes from a different era of software engineering not covered by the books and papers on the reading list. So I have put the questions to the guy that says he has taken the exam. Even if he comes back and says that the exams were similar I still believe it was unfair because of the questions that were not on the reading list. I know of at least 4 parts that were not on the reading list. These were either whole questions are parts of questions. One question that was on the reading list was combined with another to make it longer than it was in the past. Another that was on the reading list was more complex. The test was very different from the point of view of complete-ability, complexity, and material. The material is the one that makes me most upset. I can understand how shooting sprees like the one in the news now gets started. I don`t condone that king of thing but I understand how some nut being treated unfairly does something awful like that.

I have now looked up all the material that I remember from the test that seemed out of place. I now definitely know that they were not on the reading list. I will know sometime today if these questions were just for me or not. I don`t know what good this does for me but DePaul Reputational Risk was never a concern. I have only wanted to make the program better. I have been completely honest. To spring something like this on me was not honest. Integrity, integrity, integrity, lets have some integrity. If I had had a book on the reading list with this information, I would have read it. Even if I did know something about each and every one of these before the exam I would not have prepared in-depth for them because I did not think that I would be tested over them. As I have said before people get out of the masters program, and PhD for that matter, all the time without knowing the difference between Moore Machines and Mealy Machines. Did I expect to have them covered on the exam, No. I did expect to have to draw state machines with UML. I do this in my job. I expect to do this well, it has been in a past exam. Change the reading list if you expect to ask questions about a different area of Software Engineering. I did notice how a good deal of the questions that were not on the reading list were language questions. That was a different flavor than the information on the reading list today. Most of the information on the reading list is language agnostic. The "Java Programming Language" book is only about basic constructs. Would you expect to get language questions, no. I would only expect to have minimal OO language questions. Some of these questions I mention were labeled architecture questions. Ah, another overloaded term architecture. The quote from the book, "Software Architecture encompasses the structure of large software systems. The architectural view of a system is abstract, distilling away details of implementation, algorithm, and data representation and concentrating on the behavior and interaction of "black box" elements. A software architecture is developed as the first step toward designing a system that has a collection of desired properties." So, these questions are not architecture questions even though some of them were labeled that way. They are not part of design either. They may be related to tool design but not to system design. OO analysis and design lend themselves to OO languages better than procedural languages but I would think, though it crazy, you could do OO analysis and design and end up using a procedural language. If they were architecture and design questions would they not come form the architecture and design section on the reading list. Design Patterns, SEI software architecture, RUP, Scenario architecture analysis, and a pre-RUP about RUP paper were on the reading list. It does not seem that these would cover O***/C*** P**** in OO design, and in fact they don`t. They don`t cover A*P either. The don`t cover the F****** B**** C**** problem either. I would not expect to have them on the exam.

It still remains to be seen what will happen. I don`t think anyone is visiting my site yet.

Still getting up early. I have not made the shift yet back to reality. So I blog. Had a great weekend. My in-laws 40th wedding anniversary. Many aunts and uncles. We played hours of double-deck penuckle. If was good weekend. I have many family members asking me about how the test went. I was telling them the same story as the previous post. I have mixed feelings.

This morning I looked up 2 more questions from the test. This brings the count to a total of 4 that I have looked up that I believe were not in the books on the reading list. The two questions I looked up today were O***/Cl*** ****** and Fr*** B***. These were object oriented questions so that narrows it to a few books on the reading list. They either have to be in the "Java Programming and Concurrency" section, the "Object Oriented Modeling section" or the "Object Oriented Design and Architecture" section. I already know that they are not in any of these books. Anyway, this is how my thought process went. Lets start with the book on Java Programming it is to basic to have this kind of stuff in it but lets try anyway. Nope, not in that book. Lets look in "Concurrent Programming in Java". Nope, to specialized. Well there is a paragraph under re-usability on o*** and c*** systems. I understand this principal but did not get this idea from the question. It would have been a shame to miss this question because of how it was worded. Anyway I dismissed this as a topic for a question because Lea mentions this in passing not as a topic. I am still looking of the Fr*** B*** question answer location in the reading list.

Off to swim.

So my feelings about the test are mixed. I liked the new format. There were definitions and the space was limited to the number of words that you could write. The definitions were supposed to be contained withing a few sentences. I also like how a question about one thing is broken into multiple pieces. The focus of each piece helped me clue into what to write about. This was all very good. What I didn`t like was even though I had extra time I also had extra material. There is no way that someone else could have gotten that test done in 3 hours. In a way it was not fair. I was supposed to get the same test but have more time. The test was twice as long as any pre-test. In previous tests there were similar test questions that were combined into 1 question on the test that I took. Maybe you are not supposed to get done and they figured that by adding the length for a normal person that they would guarantee that I would not get done. What they did was successfully give me a philological disadvantage from the start. I had to overcome the idea and the paranoia that somehow this test was meant to make me fail. It was like preparing for a 16 century literature exam and getting Cliver Barker and Ian Flemming. I would have done better if I had gotten Neil Stephenson. I have written down some of the test questions. I remember them verbatim. I know that I can recall them because the memory is linked to that little cold room at the PLuS program that I had only been in 2 other times in 1993. I can remember pictures of the room then and I can remember pictures of the test pages now. The question about A**P. You know this one if you have had the test. I came home and checked. A**P is mentioned in the index of one book Software Architecture In Practice. All the other books on the reading list are too old to have had A**P. I checked them also. When I went to look up the section mentioned in the index of the book mentioning this topic that section of the book must have been removed. The section pointed to is Fault Detection and Fault Recovery. Another section pointed to for A**P is 2 pages before the end of the book and that section is about Architectural Style. I did not read about A**P in either of these two sections. That means that for all the books on the reading list none of them contain the detailed information ask for about A**P. You can guess how I feel about this question. I do know something about this. I remember presenting the early stages of this technology to my professors group of students. I don`t remember the detail required by the test. There were other questions on the test that are on my website in some form. These questions were combined into one question in some cases. I was not able to get to some of the questions on the test that I have done in the past on my website. Even the cyclomatic complexity question was more complex than on the exams I have seen in the past. I handled it. The greater complexity meant more chance for error. I was also worried that maybe the reading list had changed. I checked the webite this morning and it is the same one from 2002. I find it difficult to believe, given the endless amount of information, you can be expected to know it all without being clued into some section of it to study. I looked up to see if I could find S***c and Dy*** Ver** in any book on the reading list. I cannot. I can only conclude that by publishing my website on Monday of this week I was asked questions that were not on the reading list so as to provide questions that I had not prepared for. I don`t know if this was malicious or not. It could have been done just to stretch me to see how far I could go with the test. I hope that the graders have such insight into my website. Maybe they do. Maybe they don`t. I know that the guys from my study group would not have been able to answer these questions. They did not study this stuff. The stuff that I could answer was contextually specific to me. Hmmm, a tailored test, maybe? How could it be that people from a testing background or from other departments needing to take 3 exams could possibly have answered some of these questions? They would have only read the books on the reading list. One of the guys in my study group had barely written any Java and knew little about OO. One of the other guys is also from another background. If they pass I will be upset. Again, they have only read what was on the reading list. I have done my best let God sort out what happened when he sorts us all at the end of our lives.

I am not hurt about this if I pass. I will be able to continue doing what I do best, trying. Hurt too shall go away after a time if I do not pass. I know the criticality of what these guys do for the program.

It has been a good day. I have fixed about 60 typos in the my web notes. I put up the new phone state machine. I also found that I had missed a significant piece of my notes in the website. The Chidamber and Kemerer OO metrics and the data from the Critique of Software Defect Models paper. I put them on the OO page but maybe they should have gotten there own page. I will fix this sometime in the future. I just wanted to have them in my printouts. It was easiest to just put them in an existing page rather than make a whole new one. So there is where they are right now. It is right that I have up that data. It completes the reading list material. I also added the notes from the Test Data Adequacy Criteria paper. I put it on the testing page. That is appropriate. I have updated my printouts.

Wife and son went to the mall to get out of my hair. It is now just before 8pm. We should have stared my son`s bed time activities 30 minutes ago. I hope everything is OK. Kind of scared the guys at the oil change place messed with the throttle cable. I hope she is going to be home soon. This kind of disrupts my study. It would have been bad either way. If they were here it would have been the same disruption.

Start working again on the mnemonics. I am going to skip my swim tomorrow. Traveling down town. Don`t want to have any problems.

It is early in the morning on the day before the test. I have been reviewing. I noticed a question that had to do with architecture. I have had some problems with how this question is worded. See my previous posts. Anyway, I have in my notes a number of things that pertain to this question but not to it in the way it is worded. Since I felt so uneasy about it I decided to add a section to my website that just took those parts of my notes that were pertinent in some way and add them to the bottom of the question. I have some precedence of doing this kind of thing. So I decided to add the information. I took the information for various places in my notes and organized them around architecture. This was the drive in the question. The question almost ask about personal opinion but you know how I hate to answer any of these questions with personal option. See my previous posts. Anyway, I organized different parts of my notes into a coherent single document and added it below the question with a quick line about "These were from my notes". Hopefully the questions on tomorrows test are not as badly worded. A question this badly worded does not clue me into what is really wanted and I have trouble accessing the correct information in my memory. Just look at this one. It took me until the very last day to do this. If this is what they want on the question I would have missed it. Anyway, having done this exercise I have linked the revised architecture answer document to this question. Hopefully it will not be a problem. Hmmm, lets see it has been a problem for the years that I have been doing this thing. My instructor could not even clue me into this kind of answer. It all started with an implication...."Do you mean ....measuring?" The guys in the study group got this one wrong if this is the kind of answer they really want. It is a shame. I know the guys in the study group may not be able to talk about specific methods but I think that intuitively they know questioning/measuring thing. I wish that I knew the real answer.

I spent yesterday reviewing before my swim. It was a good swim. One of the guys that came after I started 4 years ago, we had a little race of sorts. I held him off for several laps until he pulled ahead on one lap and stopped. I continued right through his stop and went on to complete my normal 45 minute workout. It felt really good to be able to push him that hard. I am becoming a better swimmer.

Yesterday, was a tough day at work. I had gotten the email back from the PLuS program explaining the arrangements for tomorrow. It made me feel good that she was prepared for me to come and do this thing. A day later, yesterday, the director of graduate advisement passed a contradictory email about the accommodations to me and her. They don`t seem to have a handle on the situation. The way I understand it from the PLuS program director, "What the PLuS program says is what goes." At an rate, I will do what the administration asks. They don`t really have their act together. They probably have never been in this situation before. It is OK. If I decided to do something about the unfamiliar way they are handling the problem it would be a good excuse but probably not good enough. Anyway, I don`t think there is going to be any problem. I know this stuff. My website says so. I have read every shred of literature they have ask me to, multiple times for this test and others. I know all the contradictions. I know every mistake they ever made in formulating the tests. I have documented them all in this blog. I expect to pass.

Today I will spend the day looking over my notes and trying to put to memory the lists that are in them. From the lists put to memory I can then link those lists to the memories of the entire body of knowledge. I just have to get the organization right. It is like figuring out what street to go down to get to a house in a culdesac. After you get to the house everything in the house is at your disposal. You know how the house is laid out and you can get to anything in any of the rooms. You just have to get down the right street. This is a technique used by Socrates when doing public speaking. He would walk into a room in his mind and pick up objects in the room that would clue him into the right memory to talk about. He just had to enter the right room. For me I have a paper or book represented as a color cover layout. I know that the Larmen book is a white cover with green letters. I know the title by looking at the book on the floor next to my desk in my mind. I can get to the information on architecture because it is a chapter in the 30`s, I think chapter 33. I remember a page where the text on the left side of the page was talking about a document. That document was not happy it was the SAD document. That is how I remember stuff.

I have done this with all sorts of memories about this test. The rooms come in several sorts; folders on my PC, pages in my subject notebooks, the actual books themselves. It works. It is reported that Socrates would speak for several hours continuously. He could repeat the same speech several times for different audiences giving the same information in the same way. It works fairly well for teaching he found out. I think that for modern day teachers to use this method it is more difficult. There is to much variability in the students and students are disruptive. In Socrates day, students wanted to be there and came from several miles just to listen. If they were unruly they were ask to leave forever. If they could not keep up they were ask to leave forever. Try that in your classroom.

This will probably be my last post before the test tomorrow. I will continue if I pass and not continue if I don`t.