Blog: The Life Of A Supreme Ruler

Lots of stuff

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• General

— orudge @ 07/04/2008 10:48 pm

Well, the past few weeks have been busy. Lots of things done in terms of coursework (and lots more to do), as well as a good few events put on in the union. When I’ve managed to get a bit of spare time, I’ve been playing through Half-Life 2, and subsequently HL2: Episode One, and HL2: Episode Two. (With a few more games to play in future, too… “whoops”). I’ve also been busy with bits of PHP work, and other projects, such as a game I worked on back in 2001 that I’ve resurrected. Keep your eyes peeled for more, I hope to release some sort of beta later in the year. If you’re any good at pixel art, I may want to hear from you, too. Leave a comment if you’re interested. 😉

My new server obiwan arrived a couple of weeks ago, and has been working nicely. I have it set up as RAID-1 with LVM on top, for some measure of redundancy, and to enable easy upgrading in the future. I bunged the latest Debian stable onto it, and got it set up with a basic set of services – its primary function is a storage server, but it also performs some additional functions, such as web and database server for a few things. I even wrote a little PHP script the other day that, with a bit of .htaccess magic, makes it act as a “converter layer” for Apache, whereby you can browse through my music collection using the standard Apache autoindex system, and if you select a FLAC file, it transcodes it (or checks its cache for a previously transcoded file) to Vorbis and sends it through. Handy if I want to access my music away from home, as my ADSL upstream isn’t really good enough to send FLAC, unfortunately.

I’m currently on my “Easter holiday” (Easter actually fell before the holiday, this year, so it’s more of a “Spring holiday”… let’s ignore the fact it was snowing this weekend, shall we?). I’m down in North Wales at the moment, at my Grandad’s. I’m currently on the lookout for a new car (well, a “new old car”, to be more precise), as it would have cost a bit too much to get my old Escort through its MOT again. It’s a bit annoying being without a car, particularly seeing as train prices seem to have gone up a huge amount – for me to buy a ticket on the day from Flint to Leuchars (my standard journey from Wales to St Andrews) would cost over £80! Even with a railcard, the cost is still £70-75 (that’s including the £25-ish purchase cost of the railcard). A few years ago, I could walk up and get a return for £35… madness.

Anyway, I have one more week of this holiday, and then it’s straight back into a pretty hectic week at St Andrews. Project tests and demos need to be done, reports need to be finished, and the whole Junior Honours project needs to be completed and submitted within a couple of weeks of our return. I also have a couple of events to coordinate for Ents, as well as normal lectures and suchlike. It won’t be all that long after that until exam time, in mid-May. Only three exams this time round, which is nice, and so far, the provisional exam timetable looks reasonable. Hopefully it won’t be made “unreasonable” when it’s finalised! At the moment, I’m not sure what I’ll be doing this summer – I’ve applied for a couple of things, which I’m waiting to hear back on. I did have a fairly major thing lined up a few months back, but unfortunately, that fell through, which is rather a shame, as it would have been a fantastic experience. But never mind, I shall perhaps try again next year on that score. It’s looking this summer like I’ll be in St Andrews for most of the time, probably going to North Wales for July when I’m in-between leases. Hopefully it’ll give me some time to get various projects done – I’d like to get the new Saved Game Repository finished (it WILL be done in 2008, honest!), and also if I can get my game complete, to some degree, then that’d be great. I also have some patches for OpenTTD I’d like to finish – the new sound engine and music playing system in particular.

All in all, lots to do over the next little while! Nothing new there, then!