I wrote the Validation Methods for Distributed Systems exam today. Overall, I quite liked the course, though, as always, I will reserve the final judgement for after I receive my grade. It was the first CS course I took in a long time, the last one being FORTRAN77. In any case, it gave me a pretty good glimpse into an area of research I was not familiar with before.

I still have an exam and a project for the other course I am taking this year, Distributed Systems Engineering. This course is a polar opposite, it is very engineeringy in a sense of let’s try a few things and implement the one that seems to work most optimally. I like the project so far. I’ve used Poisedon UML tool and so far I am quite impressed with it. It is a lot easier to use that the Rational Rose tool I used last year. Right now I am using the free basic version, though I might consider buying the actual software (they have student prices) if I have to use UML again. One of the drawbacks of the free basic version is that images are exported with a giant Poisedon watermark on it and you can’t print directly from the application. I was also considered using Eclipse as I’ve heard it was quite good, but with limited time that I have, I was willing to pilot only one new software application at the time so I stuck with the trusty Netbeans.

Geek out.