Happy New Year! I had my one and only exam for last semester yesterday – Forensic Science Theory 1. It went ok, I definitely think I passed. The exam has very little theory in it compared to previous years surprisingly: no chemical presumptive tests or questions about microscopes or Bayes Theory and likelihood ratios. The questions were also fairly essay-like, i.e. all the marks for answering one question rather than in parts so I really can’t tell if I did alright or very well.

I have a 2 week gap now before term restarts, and I have to write a 5,000 word essay for next Friday. I’ve chosen to do mine on a review of the Dutch Police’s Open Computer Forensics Architecture from a list of 5 topics we had to choose from. It’s basically a huge open-source framework the Dutch Police came up with for SuSe/Ubuntu to automate a lot of the digital analysis. The lecturer mentioned this was a pain to install and run and no one has yet managed successfully. I had a go last week on my Kubuntu partition and it took me three hours to install (15 page installation PDF) and it didn’t work. Steven managed to fix it by actually editing the sourcecode(!) and eventually it was ready for action. I’m experimenting with the hardrive image from semester 1’s labs and it seems to work fine so far! It’s a huge mess of a system though, and awful documentation with random Dutch words dispersed with the English (lucky I can read Dutch!). I’ll summarise my essay as a blog post when I’ve done it.

Other random news: I bought a new pair of shoes! They are 2.5inch red heels and I can’t walk in them yet. Schuh’s website lists them as ‘low’ heels but they are bloody high for me lol. I am walking about wobbling all over the place. They are so pretty though ♥!