Blog: The Life Of A Supreme Ruler

Tahoe

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— orudge @ 05/02/2009 12:34 am

So, I’ve spent the past couple of weeks staying with Rachel at Incline Village, Lake Tahoe, just over the border in Nevada. It’s rather nice here, with Lake Tahoe being rather large and picturesque (and many photos will follow once I get home and upload them all). It’s been surprisingly warm and sunny here (considering it would normally be quite snowy) – in fact, a lot of the snow has been melting. Tahoe is one of the best places for skiing in the US, so I figured it was something I had to try. Before last week, the first (and last) time I had skied was in 2000, when I was on a school trip to Edinburgh. I seem to recall that I only began to feel vaguely comfortable when it was time to leave…

This time, though, things were a bit different. I went last Tuesday afternoon with Rachel, and Rachel attempted to teach me the basics. Alas, this didn’t go very well, and I fell over a lot. In fact, I pretty much spent more time on the ground than I did standing up. So I decided it would make more sense for me to get a proper lesson. Went in on Wednesday morning, and got the “early bird special” private lesson package, with a great instructor called George. Somehow, everything seemed to make a lot more sense, and the lesson seemed to go really well. I stuck to the basic “schoolyard” slope for the rest of the morning, and in the afternoon got a cheaper group lesson. (I also managed not to fall over, instead of the previous day where I barely managed to stay up.) Since the place was so quiet though, there were only two people in our group, and the other person dropped out after a while because they weren’t quite as comfortable as they thought they were at skiing (it was a “2nd time skiing”-type lesson). So effectively I got a two hour private lesson for $25. Winner.

The instructor that afternoon took me up “Lodge Pole”, the more ‘difficult’ of the beginner slopes. I was somewhat apprehensive about this (particularly since the previous day, Rachel had recommended we go up for the view – which was fine, but getting down proved to be a problem… I ended up getting a trip down on a snowmobile!), but it turned out to be fine and dandy. Did a few runs of this, and the instructor seemed to think I was fairly good at it. So for the last event of the day, we went up “Lake View”, which leads to more intermediate runs, and we took “Freeway” down. I did manage to fall over a couple of times here, mainly because I was afraid I was going to end up accidentally going down some of the more difficult runs instead of going where I was meant to. When I think about it now, I’m not quite sure why I did this, but I guess it was my first time up on one of the “intermediate” runs, so I was a bit nervous!

Anyway, next day, I came back, and was on my own for the day. Ended up trying out Freeway again (which had got quite icy due to the snow melting in places), and after a few runs of that, made the choice to try some of the more tricky intermediate slopes, such as “Popular” and “Penguin”. These were a fair bit tricker – steeper and longer, but rather good fun. Came back again a couple more times over the past few days, and I’m now reasonably confident about some of these runs. Today Rachel and I decided to take a group lesson (and again, ended up being the only people in the group!) to improve our skills a bit – I wanted to try to master parallel turns. This is something I didn’t quite manage to do, but apparently I’m a lot better at it now than I was. In the afternoon, we went up the “Crystal Express”, which is the lift that takes you to the very top of the mountain. The view was quite something – see the photo above – and it wasn’t too bad down, if rather tiring due to my inability to properly perform parallel turns!

All in all, the past week or so skiing has seen me go from falling over a lot, to managing to get down from the top of the mountain without falling over. So I’m pretty pleased about that. It seems skiing is something I shall have to try again in the future.

Over the next couple of days, we’re going to visit some of the local towns and so on and see some of the non-skiing-related sites, before I head home on Saturday. Get in on Sunday (back in St Andrews by the evening), and then the new semester starts on Monday! Project work and an essay due next week too, though, so there’ll be lots of work to be done while I’m here…

Speaking of work, I got my exam results back yesterday. One exam wasn’t quite as good as I expected, but otherwise I’m fairly pleased with the results. 🙂

Well, I’d best try to do some of that work, I guess, now. See you back in St Andrews.

The video is up now

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— orudge @ 25/01/2009 1:01 am

The video of my Google Tech Talk is now up on YouTube. If you haven’t already, check it out. 😉

Exams, cameras, Flickr, California, Google…

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— orudge @ 23/01/2009 7:37 pm

Well, it’s been a busy few weeks, that’s for sure. What have I been up to since my last post?

I finished my move to Thunderbird, and indeed my move to Windows Vista on my main PC. After tweaking it significantly and getting rid of a lot of the guff, it seems to be working alright. A few niggly features, but oh well. Installed the Windows 7 beta in a VM, too – looks like it should be everything Vista should have been!

I revised for exams. And procrastinated instead of revising for exams…

I bought a new camera, a Nikon D40. It’s shiny and nice. After having to wait a few days for things like the memory card to arrive, I took some photos. Here are a selection of photos of St Andrews at night, some of which turned out quite nicely, I think! The camera has accompanied me to California, so I will describe more about that later.

I created a Flickr account, and indeed, migrated my entire photo gallery to Flickr. (Although it seems I need to reupload a few videos that didn’t quite get copied over properly.) I’m going to integrate that into the blog a bit better, but that’ll probably have to wait until I’m back in the UK. Eventually, my plan is to tag my photos properly and so on, although with 5000 photos, it’ll be a slow process! I’m likely to be a bit more selective with new uploads, too – there are a lot of bad photos in that 5000. While I’m not planning on removing any of the existing ones, I may just upload the good photos in the future (I only uploaded a quarter of the photos I took in the St Andrews at night gallery, for instance, since the rest were all a bit too blurry or poor.) Thoughts on this may be appreciated!

I revised a bit more, and procrastinated a bit more.

I sat my exams. Multimedia was the first one, which seemed to go quite well. Artificial Intelligence was next, which everybody found kind of tough, including myself – in a way, though, it’s good that everybody found it hard, rather than just a few people finding it hard and the rest thinking it easy! The last exam was Distributed Systems, which I think everybody was quite positive about.

I went to the dentist on the afternoon after my last exam (to check that everything was OK after my root canal a few months ago), and frantically tried to sort things out (packing, etc) for my trip to California the next day.

I got about 2 hours sleep, then had to drive down to the airport. Well, I drove down to the park and ride, where it seems I can park my car for two weeks free, and just have to pay £4.50 for the bus. Bargain compared to the official airport parking! I then flew down to London, waited a few more hours, and got on my flight to San Francisco. I was flying with United, and economy class was seated in a 2-5-2 configuration. I was in seat C, and there was somebody else in the equivalent seat on the other side – so there were 3 ‘free seats’ in the middle, since the plane wasn’t full. This meant I had a bit more room to stretch out, which was nice! The flight was fine enough, if not overly exciting (11 hours is a long time on a plane). I did rather like the channel on the entertainment system that let you listen to air traffic control though – the ATC channel at Heathrow Airport seemed incredibly busy, the people who work there must be very good at what they do! Anyway, got into San Francisco around 4pm, and got back into Napa by around 6.30pm – rather tired! I’m staying here with my friend Rachel, as I did in June 2006.

So, I got into California on Wednesday, and yesterday was my first full day here. And the first thing I had to do was go down to visit Google, with Rachel, where I gave a tech talk on Wine – specifically, the Wine user experience. I went and met up with Leslie Hawthorn and Ellen Ko, at the Google Open Source Programs Office. These are the people who are responsible for running Google Summer of Code, which I took part in last summer. And what can I say… the experience was fantastic. The talk seemed to go well – it will be put up on YouTube in the coming days, I believe, so you can watch that if you should like. Then we had a brief tour of Google (I’ll put the photos I took up sometime soon, probably when I get back to St Andrews), and we then all sat down for lunch at one of Google’s 19(!) cafeterias! Now, the Google lunch is famous, and rightly so – it was rather good, and best of all, free! There’s no such thing as a free lunch, except at Google it seems! We then went back to the Open Source office and got lots of free swag. I think both Rachel and I very much enjoyed our trip there, and it was very nice to meet Leslie and Ellen “in real life”! Thanks to both of them for having us, and also for putting all the hard work they do into Summer of Code! (As I have said before, I would highly recommend that any students out there interested in programming for open source take a look at the SoC programme, and take part in it!)

After Google we went to the Exploratorium in San Francisco, which is a museum-type thing with lots of sciencey displays, much of which was rather interesting. We didn’t really have enough time there to look at everything, unfortunately, but it made for a fascinating afternoon’s trip!

Today we’re heading off to Tahoe (and my first trip into Nevada), up in the mountains. I shall report more – and take lots more photos – when we get there!

Owen out for now.

A new year, a new operating system

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— orudge @ 05/01/2009 9:37 pm

So, it’s now 2009. I spent Christmas at my Grandad’s in North Wales, and new year with my brother and mum in mid-Wales. I’m back up to St Andrews now, since my first exam is on Saturday, and there is work to be done! Then I have another exam next Wednesday, and my final exam the Tuesday after that. Then, the following day, I shall be flying out to California to see my friend Rachel (who I stayed with back in June 2006). While I’m there, I’ll be visiting Google, which I’m quite excited about, and giving a Tech Talk (assuming I manage to get it written in between all these exams and so on!). It should be fun indeed, although I’ll also have to continue to do work on my senior honours project, for which a deliverable is due in February once I’m back.

In the mean time, I’m planning to finally move to Windows Vista, something which I’ve not really had any desire to do in the past. Having a new DirectX 10-capable graphics card, however (a GTX 260) is one incentive for me to upgrade, though, and I found that Vista isn’t too bad when you turn off a lot of the annoying stuff. So, I’m going to take the plunge and install it on my new hard disk. But one of my major issues is that Windows Vista doesn’t support/include Outlook Express, which I’ve used to manage my mail for some 10 years now – I have approximately half a million pieces of e-mail in my OE installation, which take up about 5GB of space in OE’s .dbx format. I have a couple of options here: I could move to Windows Mail (or Windows Live Mail), which is effectively a newer version of OE, or I could move to a client such as Thunderbird. I’ve used Thunderbird for years on my Mac for accessing various IMAP accounts, but it had (and still has) a few quirks that meant I didn’t really want to adopt it as my main e-mail client. But the alternative, Windows (Live) Mail, wouldn’t be ideal either, as not all that many programs support conversion from it. Plus, W(L)M stores each e-mail as an individual file, instead of one file per mail folder – with 500,000 e-mails, that’s highly inefficient! So, I’ve decided to move to Thunderbird.

I’ve got Thunderbird more or less set up in a way I like (although there are still a few niggly things, some of which I believe will be fixed in Thunderbird 3.0). The main issue then is converting all my existing e-mail. Thunderbird can import mail from Outlook Express, but it then loses read/unread status (I still have a lot of unread mail in my folders), and it doesn’t transfer things like reply/forwarded status in messages. So, I’ve decided to do things in a more laborious, but ultimately better, manner: copy all my messages to an IMAP server (which I’ve set up on obiwan), and copy them back – this way will preserve the attributes and so on. It is, however, a lot slower than the automatic conversion. It’ll take a while, but once it’s done, it’ll be worth it. Also, with Thunderbird, I’ll be able to stick my profile on my local server (obiwan), and share it between platforms, should I want to, which could be quite handy.

Anyway, I really should get back to revision – it’s funny how all these other distractions appear when one has exams or deadlines looming.

Merry Christmas, all!

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— orudge @ 25/12/2008 10:20 am

Well, it now appears to be the 25th of December, so I hope you all have a very merry Christmas. I’ll be somewhat busy over the next few weeks, with exams coming up, so it’s nice to have a break of a few days if nothing else! Enjoy yourselves!

News and suchlike

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— orudge @ 26/11/2008 4:55 pm

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted a blog, as I’ve been quite busy lately (well, that’s not new now, is it?). Anyway, note to self: owenrudge.net is 9 years old on Friday! Nearly the big 1-0!

So what have I been up to? Well, academic work of course – my senior honours project planning has been going on, and specification documents have been written up. Ents work too – I’ve been appointed Technical Co-ordinator for the year, which is nice, but a bit of extra work! I’ve also been in the process of job-hunting, which has gone quite well – I have a job offer from CodeWeavers, working on Wine, which should hopefully all go well – the plan would be to move to Minnesota once visas are sorted (which is hopefully going to be October 2009, or October 2010 at the latest), and until then, work remotely like I did this summer in Summer of Code. I’m rather excited about this opportunity, and I’m looking forward to working on Wine again. 🙂

There’s probably much more to mention, but I have a meeting to get to in the next 5 minutes or so. So briefly: I’ve been playing Left 4 Dead, Valve’s new zombie thriller, which is quite enjoyable. I also attended a couple of Sigur Rós’s UK concerts recently, which were both rather excellent – very nice to see them live at long last.

Right, time to go…

WineConf photos

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— orudge @ 07/10/2008 7:49 pm

My photos from WineConf are up, should you be interested in them. They’re not that fantastic, most are a bit blurry, but I figured I’d put them up anyway. A few other people have uploaded photos, you can see those from the Photos section of the WineConf 2008 wiki page.

I came across a random web site…

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— orudge @ 03/10/2008 9:08 pm

… where the author had written “wierd”, a common spelling mistake, several times. It pains me every time I read this misspelling – it’s just wrong! I wondered how many other people found this annoying. Quite a few, it seems. In fact, I found this blog entry which contains a nice list of mistakes, the majority of which bug me a lot. So next time you’re about to write “wierd”, or mix up your “their”, “there” and “they’re”s, or type “CD’s”, “80’s” or “pizza’s”, please check that site, bang your head against the table, and write the correct thing instead. 😉

En route to home

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— orudge @ 29/09/2008 9:21 am

A brief hello from Amsterdam Schiphol airport. I’m not long off the plane from Minneapolis, and have a flight to Edinburgh to catch soon. WineConf was good, I shall post pictures and more news shortly. 🙂

Things going on

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— orudge @ 25/09/2008 11:08 pm

Hmm, it’s been a while since I last blogged. It’s been a busy few weeks. I’ve been up in St Andrews, pottering around. It’s currently freshers week, so I spent all of last week in Venue 1 getting everything ready, and then the first half of this week in venue 1, actually running things. So far so good, anyway.

You’ll have to excuse the brevity of this post, because I’m currently quite tired. Tomorrow (by which I mean in about 6 hours time), I’m heading to the USA for WineConf 2008, the annual Wine developer’s conference, in Minneapolis. This has come about as a result of my work on Google Summer of Code, which I finished in August (although I still intend to contribute features and patches where possible in the future). My flight leaves at 6am however, which means I have to be at the airport by 3-4am, which means setting off at 2-3am from here. I then get into the USA at about 1pm local time, and still have the best part of a day to sit through. I’m going to be very tired by the end of tomorrow, for sure. Then the conference itself is on Saturday and Sunday, and I’ll be flying back on Sunday night, to get back here Monday afternoon!

So that’s about it for me for now. There are perhaps other things I was going to say, but I can’t really remember what, so eh. I’ll try to update you soon, once the new semester has started next week!

TT meet photos up

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— orudge @ 19/08/2008 3:27 pm

My photos from this year’s TT meet are up in the gallery. Also included are some photos I took of my sightseeing in London the following day. The film of the meet will be following in the probably somewhat distant future.

The TT-Forums Meet 2008

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— orudge @ 09/08/2008 10:26 pm

… was rather good fun. Photos and video coming soon, once I’m on a decent connection. I’m in London until Monday, shall be seeing some of the sights tomorrow, and then getting the train back up on Monday afternoon.

More on that story later.

Twenty-one

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— orudge @ 16/07/2008 2:27 pm

So, what’s new since the last blog? I’ve been:

• Listening to Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust a fair bit, although not quite as much as before
• Finally driving my car now that the log book arrived
• Working on my Google Summer of Code project
• Going to St Andrews for the Graduation Ball
• Playing Team Fortress 2
• Watching more House, Doctor Who (the last few episodes were rather good), Top Gear (the Japanese race was excellent), and other such things
• Swimming
• Driving a bit more
• Turning 21

Yes, the car log book arrived just in time for me to head to St Andrews, which was nice. The car’s a lovely thing, drives very nicely, and isn’t too expensive to run. The ball was very good fun, and nice to see everybody again before assorted people go their separate ways. Then I was back down here keeping busy with Summer of Code and the like. I also decided to take up swimming again, having discovered the local pool in Mold, as sitting on the computer all day is probably not the best thing to do be doing, from a health point of view. I used to swim a lot in Orkney, so hopefully this’ll be good for me.

What else… well, last Wednesday, I turned twenty-one years young. It seems to be pretty much like being 20, except that now I can go and buy a drink in the US if I want. (If anybody wants to volunteer the cash for a plane fare, that’d be most appreciated.) My birthday itself was mostly uneventful, really. On Saturday, I went down to Bristol to see my academic mum, Rachel, as it was her birthday then, so we had a bit of a joint celebration that night – good fun indeed. Apart from that, I’ve been doing some more work on Wine – I’ve got an Add/Remove Programs applet complete, which has been submitted to the wine-patches mailing list, and I’ve been improving the old-fashioned non-shell-namespace Control Panel too this past few days. Last week was mid-term evaluation week, where students had to turn in evaluations for their mentors, and vice versa. I’m pleased to say that I passed (if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been getting paid!), and hopefully should be getting some money to pay the bills over the next week or so.

I’m heading back up to St Andrews in about two weeks, for the rest of the summer (and, indeed, the rest of my final academic year). Then, a week or so into August, it’s the second annual Transport Tycoon Forums meet, this year in London. It’s looking like it’ll be much bigger and more exciting than last year. I’ll be staying a few days in London, to see some of the sights, and hopefully not be bankrupted by the experience.

So that’s me for the time being. Has everybody else been having a good summer so far?

Updates and progress

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— orudge @ 24/06/2008 1:55 pm

Well, it’s been a few weeks since I last blogged properly, so what have I been doing? In no particular order:

• Listening to Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust a lot
• Waiting for my car log book (V5) to arrive so I can actually tax the damn thing and drive it
• Working on my Google Summer of Code project
• Waiting even more for my car log book to arrive
• Visiting Mum down in mid-Wales
• Playing Team Fortress 2
• Watching House, Extras, Doctor Who, the new Top Gear (woo yay), and other such things
• Still waiting for my car log book to arrive…

The most important thing out of all of those, and the one which I probably spent most time on, was working on my Summer of Code project, of course. If you’re not aware, I’m working on implementing proper Control Panel support into the shell namespace in Wine. I discovered that the existing support in Wine was more or less complete, but was missing various bits of “glue” holding everything together. After figuring out exactly what was missing, I managed to stitch it all together, and now we have a control panel that works:

That’s a screenshot of the ReactOS Explorer running under Wine. In some third-party Explorer clone I found online, it looks like:

My patches were applied to Wine this morning, which is nice – my first work committed to the project. 🙂 My focus will now shift to creating some new control panels for Wine, and improving the likes of winecfg. I’ll keep you posted!

Now, what else… hmm, yes, I mentioned Sigur Rós’s new album, “Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust”. In many ways, it’s quite different from some of their previous albums – the sound is a lot more like that on the Heim side of Hvarm-Heim than the sound found on previous albums such as Ágætis byrjun and (), but I’ve really grown to like it. My current favourites would have to be Festival and Ára bátur – the former showcasing that haunting, familiar Sigur Rós song that we’ve all come to know and love, and the latter swelling into something really very majestic. So yes, go and listen to it on Last.fm, or stream it from the band’s official web site, and if you like it, buy the CD. 🙂

Now, as you’ll have noticed me mention in my previous blog entry, I have a new car, but it didn’t come with the log book as the old owner had presumably lost it or something. So I had to send off to the DVLA for a new one, and say they it may take 4 weeks for it to arrive. Well, it’s been three and a bit weeks already, and it’s still not here. As I also mentioned in my previous blog, I’m meant to be going up to St Andrews for the graduation ball this week (indeed, I’m hoping to head up there tomorrow). I can get the train, of course, but the train tends to be expensive, and it’s also quicker to drive generally (while the train is faster, at up to 125mph, the speed advantage is offset by the fact I usually have to spend an hour waiting at the rather depressing Warrington Bank Quay between trains), so I’m hoping that the log book may arrive tomorrow (wishful thinking, no doubt), so I can tax the car and actually drive it. It’s just been sitting in the driveway for the past few weeks – while I’ve been paying for insurance I can’t use, of course.

Oh, and if anybody reading this enjoys a game of Team Fortress 2, us #tycooners are playing games fairly regularly on my server. If you want to join in, come and say hello – it’s quite fun.

Right, well, that’ll do for now, longest update you’ll have had in a while… I’ll be back in the future no doubt with more exciting news. Until next time…

Paris, cars, packing, and exams

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— orudge @ 07/06/2008 2:16 pm

Well, quite a bit has happened since I last wrote in this here place. As you’ll no doubt be aware from my last blog, I went to Paris with my friend Caroline for a few days after exams. Paris was generally nice, if rather expensive. Saw all the usual sights, went to Disneyland, checked out some of the Parisian pubs and cafés, and had a quite pleasant couple of days. Photos are up, as ever, in the photo gallery.

After Paris, a few days disappeared somewhere along with final week festivities, and then it was time for me to head down to Wales to pick up my new car, a 1998 Suzuki Baleno 1.6. With only 70,000 miles on the clock, the price I paid for it is really rather good! A lot cheaper to insure than my old Escort, too. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to actually drive it back up to St Andrews, as I had to send a form off to the DVLA before I could tax the thing… rather annoying. So I had to make alternative arrangements to get back up to St Andrews, and to get all my stuff back down to Wales this coming Monday. I’ve already offloaded a carload of stuff that I want to store in St Andrews, need to finish packing today and tomorrow, ready to head down for the summer. I’ll be in Wales until the start of August, with a trip up to St Andrews in a few weeks for the Graduation Ball (while I’m not graduating this year, quite a few of my friends are). Next week will also see me start properly on my Google Summer of Code project – due to the general hecticness of the past week or so, I haven’t been able to get much done with it yet, but that shall change shortly. 🙂

Finally, I got my exam results back this afternoon. Generally quite happy with them, I think for the most part they were better than I was expecting. Got a 17 in the team project, too, which I think we’re all rather pleased about. And that’s another year of university over and done with… just one more to go!

Indiana Jones

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— orudge @ 22/05/2008 1:33 am

Indiana Jones was rather good fun. Cinema did a midnight premiere type thing, place was packed out. Had the good ol’ audience spirit that previous late night showings of the classic films had. Film itself was very good, I thought – despite his age, Harrison Ford did a pretty decent job. Anyway, I’m off to sleep, so apologies for the short review. Go out and see the film.

Now, I just have to hope that my flight is still going tomorrow, despite this silly French strike. They had to choose the day we’re flying out to Paris to strike…

Exams, Paris, and Summer of Code

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— orudge @ 17/05/2008 8:51 pm

Well, a week on Monday is the official start date for coding for Google Summer of Code, and people are getting excited about it. Unfortunately, I still have exams to get out of the way first before I can start work on the project properly, but I’m looking forward to it – hopefully I can make Wine a bit more friendly for users to configure!

As for exams, had the first one today, Data Communication and Networks – it seemed to go fairly well, particularly with the fact one of the questions was literally taken from a piece of coursework we did a week ago, and another one was an essay question based on presentations we did earlier in the semester, which really was a gift. Of course, I’ll have to wait until the results come out before I know for sure. Logic exam on Tuesday – not looking forward to that one quite so much. Operating Systems is my last exam on Wednesday, which I think should go reasonably well. Then on Wednesday night (well, Thursday morning, at midnight), I will hopefully be off to see the new Indiana Jones movie – certain reviews on the Internet claim it’s not all that marvellous, but I’m thinking it’ll be good fun, even if it’s not all that fantastic as a film. After all, the Star Wars prequels weren’t that fantastic, but they were still good fun by and large. The late night showing of the classic Indiana Jones films were always fun at the cinema here in St Andrews, so hopefully the midnight screening of this will have a similar atmosphere.

Finally, after all that, I’m off to Paris for a few days. I’ve been to Paris before, back in 2001 when I was in secondary school, but it’ll be nice to go there independently (heading with a friend, as opposed to as part of a school trip), and actually be able to use my French – after all, I’ve studied it for some seven years or so, but never actually used it properly in France! The weather ought to be a bit nicer than last time, too, as it was February when I headed off in 2001 (and we nearly didn’t get there, due to snow in Orkney). I get back from Paris a week on Tuesday, and then I’ll be cracking on with Summer of Code, getting dirty with the Win32 shell internals. Great fun. 😀

Aww, still in Memphis

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— orudge @ 15/05/2008 12:35 pm

With reference to xkcd #281. Of course, it’s technically not in Memphis any more, but anyway…

Goings-on

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— orudge @ 23/04/2008 9:52 pm

Well, hello again. Lots has been happening as of late, mainly involving academic work such as that described before. However, I also got some good news on Monday that I’ve been accepted into Google Summer of Code with my application to work on the Wine project. It’s quite exciting, and I’m looking forward to getting started, although I’ve got exams to get through first!

Another new development is that of a new server to replace both Yoda and Dumbledore, imaginatively titled “newyoda” temporarily. It’s a whole lot faster, and has a fair bit more capacity, than either Yoda or Dumbledore, and accounts are being moved over there over the next couple of weeks. This very web site is running on it now, and I’m sure you’ll notice how snappy and fast it is. 😉

Well, I’d best head off and do something more productive, or perhaps sleep – project demos on Friday!

Lots of stuff

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— 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!

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