The second chapter is finished….

The second chapter of my enrollment at the EuMI programme at the University of Trento is finished. I earned 36 ECTS during this second semester which makes the total of 66 ECTS I’ve earned so far. It seems like I’m going on the right track, but then I really need to pay attention to the requirements of Media Informatics programme in Bonn/Aachen. But I believe everything will be fine.

The second semester in Trento was a real pain for me since I came to Trento when the courses had begun for about 1 month (i.e. I missed 1-month courses). And upon arrival I still didn’t know which subjects I should take. The course mapping stuffs of Trento and Bonn/Aachen limit my choices, and the compulsory subjects were very new to me which only made things worse. The whole semester was packed with project milestone deadlines, and since 3 of 5 courses I took were project-based, they were really killing my time severely.

So I took 5 courses during the second semester:

• Data Mining for Knowledge Management — 6 ECTS
• Logics for Data and Knowledge Representation — 6 ECTS
• Nomadic Communications — 6 ECTS
• Organizational Information Systems — 6 ECTS
• Web Languages (Service-oriented Architecture) — 12 ECTS

The data mining course was interesting since it covered many aspects: association rules, clusterings, classifications, outlier detections, data streams. For the final project I teamed up with Mu and Elda focusing on blog clustering topic. The project consumed a lot of time especially in the coding phase, and as I didn’t have many experiences with coding stuffs, it was a real hard work to me. But then I got a good grade for this course.

I had a logics course about 5 years ago and I still remember some basics of logics. But then this course dealt with more advanced logics stuffs and I became quite frustrated with it. And since I’m not interested in logics (I took this course because it’s MANDATORY), I found this course pretty boring. And yes, I passed with the minimum passing score on the first try of the exam. But fortunately this course offers 5 exam sessions which are independent from one another. So I took the second exam and I passed with the best score on that exam session for this particular course. Thanks to Mr. Tizar and Ms. Yusi for giving me some very useful tips. Also thanks to Mr. Yudis for suggesting me to contact them for help The course covered 3 famous classical logics: Propositional logic, First-order logic, Modal logic. And modern logics: Description logic, Context logic, Default logic.

Nomadic Communications was my favourite course during the 2nd semester. Not only because I like data communications topics, but also because this course offered a practical approach in the form of labs. There were 4 bi-weekly labs and for each lab I needed to write a report. I teamed up with Suzie and Kumar for the labs. I played with several Cisco access points during the labs and also Linux terminals. The fourth lab was pretty interesting to me. It was cracking WPA PSK using dictionary-based approach (it’s a form of brute-force attack) with aircrack-ng tool. Too bad my Fedora Core 7 box hadn’t been tuned to support the monitor mode for the wireless interface due to the lack of free-time, which required me to use Linux terminals at the university for gathering the data needed (i.e. the 4-way handshake).

Organizational Information Systems initially looked easy, but then the 3 project milestones consumed most of my early-weeks of the semester. I teamed up with Mu for the Chinese Restaurant project. I didn’t know a thing about Chinese cookings (except that they are delicious ), I didn’t even know about cooking in general, but yet we decided to choose a Chinese Restaurant project. I relied on my luck pretty much for this course For the organizational modeling we used mainly the i* diagrams, but other diagrams were used as well, and for the business process modeling and simulation we used the ADONIS software. Thanks to this project, the Windows Vista operating system residing inside the harddisk of my laptop was used which otherwise would be left untouched since I used its Linux counterpart for the rest of the courses’ projects (and daily needs).

I had a little background knowledge of web services since I dealt with them for my bachelor’s final report. But then the composite services using the BPEL was a very new thing to me which in the end put this course at the bottom list of the courses I have taken so far (grade-wise) alongside the German exam which I did pretty badly . The ODE-BPEL engine running on top of Apache-Tomcat on my Linux box was damn problematic (I didn’t try using the Windows operating system. There was just not enough time). Everytime I modified a service in Axis which required the Apache-Tomcat daemon to be restarted caused a crash to the ODE-BPEL engine. The only solution I found was deleting the ODE directory and re-explode (the way used for installing the ODE-BPEL engine) the ODE archive file. I had to do this each time I made a change to a service, even the slightest one. Another nightmare was that the ODE-BPEL engine couldn’t support the RPC-encoded styled SOAP services. So I needed to change the services I created initially using RPC-encoded style to Document/literal. But anyway, I learned a lot about the Service-oriented Architecture through the final project of this course though the final grade was very disappointing.

OK, so the new chapter, the third chapter, of the four-chaptered EuMI programme is about to begin. I should really get back on track and do my best. I hope this time everything will be better.