Archive for August, 2009
Pay day
Tomorrow is the end of our sixth week at Eurocopter and our first pay day. This will be good because we have been living on a tight budget for the last few weeks, we were given an advance last month but that barely covered the rent so this month we will have some money left over. We might actually be able to go out for a drink.
As a result of this, I haven’t really done anything since my last post. I have spent the weekends in, watching TV. Boring I know, but free. I did have the media server and my Xbox shipped over last week. I installed Windows Home Server on it, upgrading from XP. I have to say that it is a really good operating system. It was Tom who recommended I get it as he has been using one for some time. The storage pool is a great idea and works really well. It is very easy to add new hard drives as space runs out or old ones die and then to remove the older ones from the pool. It is all managed for you, you just make new shared folders, set the permissions and WHS handles the rest. A useful feature is also folder duplication. This can be enabled on each share individually and ensures that everything in it is always on at least 2 separate drives in case of failure.
I was thinking about my FYP yesterday, while it might be a bit early to start anything properly, I am thinking of a few ideas for what I want to do. My problem is that I am not sure what is expected. I don’t want to do something massively over the top that takes a long time and then doesn’t work properly because it was too ambitious. On the other I don’t want to go too small and lose marks because it wasn’t ambitious enough. I was thinking about using some kind of version control though, to protect me from myself more that anything. I have lost count of the number of times I have done something, then changed my mind and deleted it all, then changed my mind again but it is too late. I also have several copies of some programs where I have changed my mind about what I was going to do, made a backup of it and worked on. The comes the problem of maintaining 2 copies of the same program. A few months down the line, I come back to it and have no clue what I was doing or why there is 2 copies of the same program, what the differences are etc. I am really my own worst enemy. As to which version control system to use, I am learning towards Subversion, I have looked at several different ones and it seems like it will do everything while be easy to use. TortoiseSVN should help there. Coupled with my new WHS server, I can store the repositories on there and enable folder duplication.
All this however, will have to wait, because if my wages do clear tomorrow I should think this weekend will be spent in a Bier Garten.
1 month
We will have been here in Munich for one month tomorrow and are in the middle of our fourth week of work. Still haven’t had much opportunity to go out and enjoy Munich as funds are a little short. We are still waiting on being paid. It should have been the day after my last post but it seems they didn’t get our details in time and so we got nothing. We managed to get an advance on our salary but that barely covered this month’s rent so now we have to get by until the end of the month.
Two Saturdays ago we went to Feldmoching See to the north-west of Munich, we took a barbecue and enjoyed the weather. This map shows where it is in relation to the city, the centre starts just south of Olympiapark. We had a great day although I didn’t think to take my camera so no pictures of it.
Feldmoching See
This Saturday was Michael’s birthday, he and some other’s from work went back to the lake but I didn’t as the weather didn’t look as good and I was feeling lazy. I didn’t really do anything all weekend other than watch TV. I will go out more once I get paid and hopefully I’ll remember to take my camera with me so I can get some pictures of it.
I haven’t really been doing much else except for working. I am going to get my Xbox 360 shipped over in the next couple of weeks so I will be able to get back to playing some games. There are a lot of new games coming out in the next few months. I will have to get them shipped over here if I want and English box but that shouldn’t be too much hassle if I buy them online. Halo 3: ODST is probably the next one to come out, according to that page on Wikipedia it is September 22nd so I will definitely have my Xbox over here before then. Modern Warfare 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 are out in November. There is probably some more that I have forgotten about as well.
I keep thinking that I should start doing something about my FYP soon but then I also think that it is nearly 2 years away before it has to be finished. I think that I will get settled into the job a bit more yet before I start, although not having any money to go out, now would be a good time to do something. I am considering using C# for development rather than C++ because it should save be a lot of time and trouble on C++ issues by having a managed environment. I thought this for my physics and AI assignment back in March but ended up having problems, I can’t remember what now but I ended up using C++ anyway. At work I am using Java, I didn’t really like Java when we did it at Uni in the first year but now that I am using it again I am finding that it is not as bad as I remember. The GUIs are still annoying, messing around with layout managers and needing to use dozens of panels everywhere to get it to look right isn’t very fun, I’m sure there must be a better way of doing it but it can’t beat the drag ‘n’ drop controls in Visual Studio for C#.