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!

So I want to pass on some advice to those in the same situation or are facing it in the future, I think this subject is widely opinion based. I don’t know any facts, I just know what works for me. So lets set the scene, your a dashingly handsome computer science student studying 4 modules a semester. You also have a rather large individual project to do this year.

Rule One

Rule One: Know your working habits. I get easily distracted when I’m doing something that I find boring. Example, I am doing this instead of writing a Management Essay (well this is a break from it)don’t. I have lectures and then a meeting on Mondays, I know through experience that anything I assign myself to do when I get back probably won’t be done at 100% because I’m tired. So If I assign something, I do something that I know is either right or wrong. This tends to be coding practice, there is no ifs or maybes when it comes to writing a program. It either works how you want it to or it doesn’t.

Schedules

I’ve already mentioned it but I think it is important to schedule things in advance. I drew out a table on OpenOffice with hour blocks and just printed them out. It’s stuck on my wall, it is so easy to lose an hour just deciding what to do.  You will end up regretting that as coursework deadlines come up. I schedule my day from 9:00am – 22:00pm, now this sounds a little long but I do take time off during the day and try my hardest to get my work done during weekdays. Looking at this week, I’m taking 3 hours off a day for lunch and dinner and then stopping at 10pm to spend some time with my girlfriend before we go to sleep.

You may be thinking “wow, how does he keep to that everyday” by now. Simple answer is I really don’t, this is why I tend to over schedule a task. Add an hour to it, if anything it just means you get your stuff for the day done before you expected and you get longer in the evening to enjoy yourself. A word of warning: don’t go over the top with over scheduling because you do still need to complete your goals for the week.

Creating the Schedule

How do you know what you need to do? I tend to use to-do lists for this, whenever I get a coursework deadline I put it on the to-do list and simply order it by hand in date. When it comes to writing my schedule for the next week I can simply look at what I have done that week and pick off the top few “to-do’s”. I would suggest using toodledo.com, It has a great iPhone application that doesn’t require you to have a premium account with them.

What to do on those days “when you can’t be bothered”

Well if I had a good answer to this one I would be a much more productive man. On days like this the battle is already over really, your the only one that can make you work.  You may want to retouch the schedule to space out the work for that day.  Remember that means you will need to make it up later. You may want to try changing subject or working on something else to get yourself to concentrate. I just try to force myself to do as much as I can, I usually find I get very little done but it is better than nothing.

Now to the interesting part, making use of Technology!

Doing stuff on the move

Yes, I’m talking about my iPhone.  It makes email, social networking and general life easier. I am so much more organise since I got this thing. I spend around 45 minutes traveling to university on the days I go in and about an hour on the way home. I usually take this time to do things like emails and catch up on facebook/twitter. This is an extra 30 minutes I gain when I get home, these small things really do mount up.

Dual Screens

Currently, I’m running a dual screen setup along with my netbook as a terminal pc (just a single terminal on the screen, usually sshed into my main machine). This additional workspace makes you more productive, this is a simple fact. I even make use of the additional desktops provided to me by openbox. What I would really like is to be able to have separate desktops on each screen but no Window Managers or even operating systems seem to make use of dual screens properly.

I tend to have my left hand screen as my main screen, I usually have the document I’m editing or the code I’m focused on displayed on this one and use the other screen for reference material. It does take a little while to get productive in a Dual Screen system but you will really miss them when you work on another machine.

Working Environment

Now there are several things you need to consider when creating your Working Environment:-

• File Organisation
• File Distribution
• Software

File Organisation

Okay, now everyone says this but actually doing it is really important. It’s more about finding something in a year or two’s time. You need to keep it consistent, if your at home most of the time but are using a machine in University to work on now and then you’ll want to be able to know where something will be regardless of the machine.

File Distribution

I’ll be honest, emailing yourself a file doesn’t really cut it. Check out Dropbox or Ubuntu One, I personally use Dropbox because at university I can’t always use a Linux Machine and even the Linux machines don’t run Ubuntu. You could consider other types of cloud storage too but Dropbox is also intelligent enough to detect symbolic links so it doesn’t need to disrupt your Filing System.

Software

When running windows software was painful, you have to download them all and then install them separately. With Linux you can just go ahead and sudo apt-get install list of awesome open source software. You can even copy across your dot files with Dropbox using symbolic links.

Finally

Your working environment is something very personal, I would be interested to hear about what you guys do. Please leave a comment about it.

Thanks,

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

Just a follow on report from the crunchbang install. So the plan was to install crunchbang on my second HD and leave the windows HD intact, the fact that i’ve reiterated this is probably telling you. “oh my what went wrong?”, I swear that i checked and double checked which HD was the windows HD but yes I managed to install linux over my windows parition however I did back everything up! Go me, proactive backuping is the way to go!

Crunchbang Review (Full)

So i’ve been spending the day or so setting up my crunchbang distro on the desktop (trying to come up with a funny name for it) and generally playing around with the full version. I’m  used to the limited set of applications that comes with Cruncheee, the crunchbang iso was a good 200MB larger than the cruncheee one but however only took me a few minutes to download from the labs (using the crunchbang official list not the mirror), got to love that internet connection! I’ve got to hand it to phillip (corenominal) he has put together a fantastic list of starting applications, pretty much anything you want to do you can straight out off the box! Speaking of box, it also runs openbox as well as cruncheee (kind of crunchbangs selling point) and I have to say that my system is more responsive and quicker to boot than it ever was on windows.

Crunchbang is also very “fuss free” meaning that nothing required any real knowledge of linux to get working, my USB wireless adaptor worked straight out of the box with no problems. I was always having problems with it in windows and I swear I get a better more constant signal off it that I did before. I’m a relatively unexperienced linux user and the only real problem i’ve come across is nitrogen crashing when i try to set the image for my two screens to be different however its working fine for the few dual screens desktop wallpapers I have. If anyone knows of anygood 2560×1024 wallpapers let me know .

Semester 2

Well this post has taken me a few days (what i wrote above was from nearly 2 days ago). Since hten the gf has installed crunchbang as her primary OS too (shes also a computer scientist) and we are both finding it quite nice to use linux as our only operating system. Semester 2 is here (as you may guess from the sub-title) and anyone who’s been following the weather in england can tell it was a perfect begining, it was a total nightmare getting in today and I’m really worried about tomorrow and the ice :s.

I’m going to leave it there, i’ll post up some off my idea’s for the arcade script in a few days. See what you guys think

Darius