Since my last posting,  Christmas and New Years happened… *sigh*. As much as I enjoy the time off (haha, we all know a university student never gets time off), I hate having those “what have you been up to?” conversations with friends that lets face it, I don’t have time to talk to every week. Why can’t they just follow me on twitter? haha.

Anyway, I’ve had a recent techy upgrade. I don’t often treat myself with larger items, I tend to spend most of my money on spur of the moment purchases or spending time with my friends however since I’m finally getting back into the swing of working full time (it’s only taken 10 weeks). I find myself with extra cash, my first purchase was a lovely 23″ monitor (http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/23-Digimate-L-2362WD-Black-Wide-Full-HD-1080P-VGA-DVI-1920×1080-10001-300cd-m-5-ms-Speakers), it is very nice and replaced one of the screens I had before. I then got another for christmas from my parents, which completed the set.

My desk is messy in this picture, this is how is always is. I live at this desk for around 10 hours a day, It’s not great but it’s my student life. Whenever I see any of the workspace pictures on lifehacker, I always wonder how these people have the time to keep their desks to clear. Mine is usually got paper and books all over it. It really could use some re-organisation at some point.

What else has happened? Well I’ve been working on my courseworks, I’ve currently handed in 2 of the 3 that are in before the exams and one of those was my third year project progress report. For those of you interested, this document gives the markers an idea of how far we have gotten in 10 weeks. We include initial designs, gantt charts etc as well as literary review. Mine was a little too long :s, I wrote 10 pages of text… which is not approximately 3000 words as the specification said. Oh well, I hope my supervisor enjoys the read.

Finally, as anyone in the UK or knows anyone in the UK knows. We’ve had snow! It’s really not as great as people made out… university was closed today because there was supposed to be a big storm last night. Luckily it’s starting to thaw and won’t snow again any time soon.

Darius Out!

It’s been a little while since I updated, I’ve not had time to update my blog with anything useful in a while. Next week I break for Christmas so I should have more time to talk about my plans for my PC, which is taking Karmic and customising it with the Openbox WM and many of the other features I have come to like in Crunchbang. So a couple of memorable moments from the last few weeks is:

• Planning the christmas party
• IBM Innovation Day
• Coursework (*sigh*)

The IBM Innovation Day is probably the only fun I’ve had in the last few weeks and It really was a great day out. If your university does one, I really suggest you go! I hope to have something more tech related soon.

Darius

Well my summer holiday is coming to an end and I’m looking forward to get back into my studies and the upcoming society work. This is probably going to be my busiest year at university so far, even though my timetable is much lighter I have a large piece of year long coursework to complete that is worth 4 modules (out of 12). The third year is also worth a lot more towards my final degree classification but I’m confident I can live up to my potential.

I find the worst thing about summer ending is my friends leaving to university however luckily my best mate works full time in Southampton so It’s not too bad! I’m also looking forward to seeing my University friends again, people who share my love of technology.

Well to end, I’ll just mention what I’m doing at the moment. I’m currently preparing my veg patch for winter. Weeding, Building the raised beds and picking out seeds and varieties to grow over the year. I’m also really looking forward to Halo 3: ODST, I’m finding I seek games to play less and less these days. My World of Warcraft playing has dwindled to a hour or so every couple of weeks. I don’t plan on paying for the subscription any longer. It’s become very disappointing but there are some new MMO’s that look good like TOR. Lets hope they get the star wars MMO right this time, eh?

Darius

Well anyone wondering what a tatty, its a potato. It’s nothing terrible and yes it was just something to get a catchy title with . Can’t blame me thought, can you?

Well its been weird to get back into blogging, I’ve had some blogs every so often. Never many people reading them and I’ve grown to  not care too much about that and more about doing it. Firstly I’m going to talk about my tatties and then move onto some of the tech news thats interested me the last few days.

Well thats me outside, the fire has since died down and my potatoes are done. I was planning to blog while I cooked but found I got far to distracted. So I just enjoyed myself instead. I don’t know how many of us that gave up the bright scary world for things that go beep know the subtle art of trying to get a fire going but to tell the truth two days ago I didn’t either. My girlfriend however seemed to know what shes doing and now I’m pretty good at it myself. Some things to remember, at least in Britain. If your burning wood from the garden, chances are its dampish and is going to smoke like anything so use firelighters to get it going because at the end of the day you’ll only end up with a headache from smoke inhalation if you don’t. Another tip, stick some larger pieces by the sides when you’re getting started to let it get warm and toasty.  Now this stuff is obvious but when you’re getting going and only want to see stuff burn it doesn’t always come to mind.

Well the end result was some tasty baked potatoes, I enjoyed them and will defiantly be doing this again. For these medium sized potatoes it took only an hour to get them nicely done however the smokey wood has caused some carbon on the skin but its all goodness from the garden .

Nom Nom Nom

Away from the world to tasty treats to the world of beeps and gadgets. Lots of things to pick, as like everything in computing the news is fast paced. Well the biggest story of the last day and a bit would be that Snow Leopard, I don’t like macs really. It’s Linux on extremely expensive hardware and as my friend put it yesterday it combines the worst aspects of windows and Linux, you don’t get the open, flexible working environment of Linux and you don’t get the software and hardware support of windows. Now I would agree with that but I’m not mac expert, anyway if you’d like to read more about that then I’d check out http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/08/25/preview_os_apple_snow_leopard/ . Another Mac/Snow Leopard related story that is quite interesting is that Apple are releasing an Anti-virus with their newest OS. I’m considering this prudent planning rather than expecting a lot of virus’ on their platform, Mac’s are becoming more popular and thus may be the target of malicious users however just to point out the obvious, this is all speculations I haven’t seen apple confirm it yet but It’s not difficult to imagine (http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/08/25/1839246/Report-That-OS-X-Snow-Leopard-May-Include-Antivirus).

Well speaking of virus’ it seems that Jessica Biel is now in the lead nfor the most dangerous malware celebrity, so if your thinking about getting a sexy screensaver then think again! (http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2009/08/obsessions-with-jessica-biel-lead-to-a-world-of-malware-hurt.ars). These things honestly make me wonder why people would think to download these, then again we live in a world where computer literacy has large divides and some people just seem unable to learn or keep up. Linux is always a good solution to your virus worries apart from the quite major security holes in it over the last few months it is relatively safe from attack and a good linux to start with is Ubuntu. Interesting stuff happing with Ubuntu these days as Thursday is the feature freeze (http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Thursday-is-Feature-Freeze-for-Ubuntu-9.10) and as always there are a few changes to be made. It was announced a while back that banshee would become the default media player for Ubuntu which caused the “Mono Wars” to burn a little harder and now it seems they’re sacking Pidgin for Empathy.

I’m going to end on a funny, It seems that Microsoft have had a little blunder in a photo (http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/25/microsoft-sucks-at-photoshop/). I’ll leave it up too you to see whats happened but lets just say that a company worth as much as Microsoft could have at least taken more than one photo for different regions.

Until next time

Darius

Firstly I’m gonna post this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urNyg1ftMIU&feature=fvhl

It made me lol, I hope it makes you lol too.

So I guess you guys in the linux community have heard of that 8 year undiscovered kernel exploit, It has however meant that the ECS computer science department has just closed its walls until Red Hat push a bloody update and they’ve had time to rebuild the countless linux machines they have. Never the less I’m starting to feel the strain of not having a server on which I can host my screen sessions and not have to worry about shutting them down etc. So I decided to grab one of my old machines and stripped the latest version of Ubuntu down by removing all software. I kept Gnome etc because on occasion I find it easier and quicker just to use GUI solutions to solve problems like mounting drives but yeah, so thats been my day today.

A flash developing 1/2 wizard friend of mine has recently been having many computing problems, I would personally blame this on his use of windows but who wants to develop flash in linux? Let alone use it… Small digression, I was admiring the ogv player on the gnu website while watching http://www.gnu.org/fry/happy-birthday-to-gnu.html and correct me or wrong but isn’t that a mac book air, you know the really thin one?

Anyway back to magic man, one of his drives died and he lost data. In his case that costs him money but In my case, especially next year where I will be working on my largest single coding project to date I really don’t want to lose it. So i’ve set up an SVN on Gaius and some rsync backups from Husker (my desktop) to it using cron jobs. I really need to get an off site backup for my machines for everything, not just the stuff I would feel comfortable putting into other peoples hands.

If anyone has any suggestions on doing that I’d greatly appreciate it, I’m not talking Illegal content by the way. Just work and private data that I don’t want out of my sight.

Finally before I sign off and get ready to see Inglorious Basterds, I just wanted to mention that me and a few friends might be starting a podcast nearer the start of university. It’s going to be a kinda discussion show with 4-5 of us talking about whatever in the tech world catches out fancy. If anyone has some advice on recording and editing I’d really love to hear about it, one of us has some experience but I want to spread the workload.

I’m going to try and post at least once a week, I’m really busy with society stuff and enjoying myself in the sun so I’m sure i’ll find the time =D.

Darius