Today I spent 3 or 4 hours trying to get my scanner to work so that I could send in my candidacy exam application. It is actually due on March 16th but I thought that I should just get it out of the way. I have done this process in the past where I fill out the form and email it to my adviser. This time was no different. It just took longer to get an image of my signed form. I finally had my wife take a picture of it with her digital camera so that I could mail the image. I copied the director of the plus program and the director of academic advisement. The last time my adviser in inadvertently lost my application the director of graduate advisement had to remind him where it was. This time I put him on the copy-to list.

My latest rant about the test is that it seems as if they may be migrating away from zed, which is good. The problem is that OCL is on the sample test but there is no reference in the reading list or in any book on the reading list to OCL. I looked again to day to see if the reading list had been updated. It has not been updated since 2002. The formal methods section is all out of wack. I see that OCL could be associated to more than one question but how would you even learn it if you only had the books from the reading list. I looked at the lecture notes for one of the classes that touches on OCL. With the information given in the notes for that class you would not be able to complete any of the questions that require OCL to answer. It is even worse if you were to try and answer them with ZED. So, read the book: "The Object Constraint Language Second Edition". If you don`t you cannot possible answer these questions. Also, if you only do UML and OCL and not UML2 and OCL2 your answers could be wrong.

I am going to revisit the questions on patterns. These questions I will apply the reviewed information on OCL2. I think that it is important to draw accurate diagrams with proper syntax. Without good diagrams I will not be showing what I know. Damed the time limit. I think that the plus program plans on lobbying for an unlimited timed test for me and my learning disability. So maybe the point about a time limit is not so significant.