General
Windows Home Server
A couple of weeks ago I had my server shipped over to me in Germany. The hassle that was caused by not having it and instead swapping between several different hard drives became more hassle than it was worth. Including my monitor and Xbox it was £110 to UPS it all. When it arrived, I thought I would try out using Windows Home Server after recommendation by Tom, and before today have had no problems with it. I am quite impressed with it so far, the problem I am having I think might be more due to hard drive failure than anything else. I might have to buy a new one and clone it on to it before it dies completely.
As for Windows Home Server though, I think the drive pool is a great idea. I have a lot of data and media and being able to just add more drives as needed and not have to worry about data being spread around multiple drives is incredibly useful. Until I switched I was using Windows XP in my server and I have to say that it is a great improvement.
The drive pool’s ability to have automatic folder duplication in case of drive failure is another useful feature, while I don’t have this enabled on all my drives, I do have it on the ones with important data that I would be lost without. I would use it on everything but don’t have enough space for that.
I have been using it to back up my laptop as well. Each day in the middle of the night, my laptop wakes up, performs a full system backup, and then, it should go to sleep again. For some reason it doesn’t but other than that it is an excellent system, I have been backing it up everyday for a week now and it is only taking up about 50gb on the server. It only saves the changes each day so the space used is very low. It then automatically maintains the backups as well so will delete them after a certain amount of time.
I have been having a lot of problems with this server’s hardware and think that when I’m back in England next summer I will build a new one. I was trying to remember what parts I have at home and think I might be able to build one with just a new system hard drive and motherboard. The problem is that the CPU I have is a socket 939 and motherboards seems to be increasingly rare. A new processor would then probably mean more RAM as well as it would need to be DDR2 but I figure there isn’t much sense looking into it now because hardware prices vary so much that it could be completely different in a years time.
In other news we have now booked our flights home for christmas, they were disappearing quickly so we thought we should get in there early, just 3 months left to go…
Gallery
Now that I have my camera I am going to be starting to add photos to the site. I have started by adding these of the garden that I have taken. Mainly for the purpose of playing with the camera.
Car scrapped
Ahead of going to Germany next week I have scrapped my car. I thought about selling it but I really don’t think that it would be worth it, it is 15 years old, nearly 119,000 miles on it and it would have failed it’s MOT in September very badly. I got more than I thought I would, £88. I can also get a refund on the tax for it which has 4 months left.
It’s only just over a week now until I go to Germany then I will have to buy a new car when I get back. I think I should get one with a little more power than a 1.1l and maybe even some leg room.
Back in Newark
I’ve now moved out of Stafford, need to go back this weekend to get the last of my things but that will be it then. As Tom mentioned in his blog we are all starting our placements soon. He is moving back across the country tomorrow to start on Monday, we don’t start for just over 3 weeks and moving to Munich in 2. It’s strange to think that we won’t be back at uni for a year. I’m still not spending my time doing anything constructive really, I probably should but I don’t really know what to do. I need to complete some games so I might do that, although I am needed to help build some steps in the garden so that might fill a few days.
A while ago I posted about Project Euler, I haven’t done any of the problems on there since about then so I might do that to get me back into a programming mind set before I start work. I haven’t really done any programming at all since we finished our assignments just after Easter, that’s nearly 2 months ago now.
I still intend to get myself a camera and take plenty of pictures while in Munich so some might find their way on here.
One month on
It’s been a whole month without any posts. That’s mainly because I haven’t done anything in that time. I have another month and then I am off the Munich to start my placement at Eurocopter. I don’t know what I will be doing between now and then but it probably won’t be constructive.
I’m really only posting because I haven’t in so long. I don’t have anything to type.
2nd Year Done
My second year of university is now finished. AI was my last exam and after that there is nothing left. Since I am going on placement next year then it will be September 2010 before I am back in lectures for my final year. I am anxious to get some results from this semester now but it will be at least 6 weeks before I get anything. I’m not worried about what I will get I just want to know.
I don’t really have anything planned for the next 2 months before I start my placement at Eurocopter so I don’t really know what I will get up to. While I am glad that the year is over, it is strange that the last 18 months of my life has been about university and it is nearly another 18 months before I will be going back there, I don’t know what to do as since I started at uni there has always been something that I had to do. Part of me wants to keep learning. That is why I am at uni in the first place, I enjoy learning new things but another part of me wants a break from it.
There has been no new games out recently that can keep me busy. Another game that I can really get into like Fallout 3 would be good. That filled this space after the first semester exams were over as I played it solidly for nearly 2 weeks. The only problem with that was that I played it to completion. I did everything that the game has to offer in a single play-through. I only missed being an evil or neutral person and one achievement for speech successes. I didn’t really have a very high skill in that. I would be tempted to play it again although I don’t think that I would enjoy it as much, maybe doing everything in one play-through wasn’t the best idea.
I have just been looking at the top sellers list on play.com and the only games on there that would interest me are ones I already have.
I am considering making a fully fledged game engine over the next couple of years. I may start some work on the designs or plans for that. I would like to make an engine from scratch that could handle graphics, physics, networking, possibly AI and have a complete tool set for as well. I am think that it may be a little too ambitious for me to do on my own so I may need to scale back a little.
There may be a few changes to this blog over the coming months once I start my placement, this is of course, if I get round to changing it. I was thinking of adding a photo gallery for picture I take in, this will also mean that I’ll have to get a camera.
Firefox 3.1
I’ve been using Firefox 3.1 beta 3 now for about a week and it seems to be quite good. I haven’t noticed any major problems with it. The installation was the same as normal. It did install to a different directory but copied over all my extensions and bookmarks etc. They all worked straight away.
There are only 2 changes that I have seen, the rest appear to be ‘under the hood’. There is Private Browsing, this works the same as in Chrome. It doesn’t save any history, temp files etc. of your session. Unlike Chrome though, rather than open a new window, it will hide all of your existing tabs and open a blank one. Any browsing is then private. Exiting private mode will restore all your original tabs. It doesn’t appear that your saved passwords are accessible in private mode and it won’t save any as well.
The only other change I’ve noticed is that the X on tabs to close them doesn’t appear if you only have one tab open. I use Foxmarks (or Xmarks now) and it didn’t seem to like me syncing my bookmarks between 3.0 and 3.1 but I updated my laptop to 3.1 as well and then it worked no problem.
I have only had a couple of crashes while I’ve using it, and they were while I was closing it down. So not really too bothered about that. Overall it seems to be a good update. Don’t know how long it’s going to be in beta for though but I can’t think that it will be too much longer.
Back in Stafford
I’ve been back in Stafford for the weekend and now my assignments are all done. We have to demo it at some point but that will probably be next week. I’ve still got exams but other than that I am all done for the year. I don’t really know what to do with myself. I thought about playing some games but there isn’t really anything that I want to play. There is still a few games that I haven’t completed but I don’t really feel like playing them. I don’t think there are any games coming out soon either that I would want. I haven’t looked in a while but nothing comes to mind.
I still haven’t heard anything new about my placement yet, I might need to find out about that soon. I don’t really have an exact start date or anything yet. I would like to book flights etc. and work out how I am going to get my things over there such as my PC.
It’s a very sunny day outside, probably one of the warmest that we have had this year. I wouldn’t mind sitting outside and doing nothing but everyone else seems to be busy.
Still home for easter
I’m still at home and still planing on going back on Friday. I spent 4 days over the bank holiday weekend working in the garden. We were preparing for tomorrow when we are going to be getting some big machines and a massive pile of soil. We have also been trying to control the weed problem. It has gotten a little out of hand over the last couple of years so we need to make up for it.
The fruit cage has been hacked back so next year we might be able to get in there to get the fruit. We may still pull out some of the gooseberry bushes as there is just too many. We have also been tackling the Japanese garden as that has become overgrown. There is a lot of work to be done but we are getting through it slowly.
I’m not sure on my feelings about tomorrow. While it will be good to get it done, and it shouldn’t be too much hard work as the machines are the ones that are working. I’m just a driver. It is still about 150 tonnes of soil and we have to do it all in one day.
As for my assignment, it is nearly done now. I think that the programming is basically finished. Maybe just a couple of hours work to tidy it up which I was going to try and get done this afternoon. Then there is just the report to go. I’m not worried about getting it finished on time, I just have lost all motivation to work on it as I have done all interesting bits and now it is just the boring bits left. Once it is handed in then there is just the exams to go. It seems stupid that we start the 3rd term next Monday but we have finished for the year 3 weeks tomorrow after our final exam.
I think I will probably have to come home again after that because they will want my help with something else but we will have to wait and see.
Home for easter
I’ve just come home today for Easter. I was planning on going back to Stafford next Tuesday but it seems like it might be Friday now. I was roped into helping with some landscaping in the garden on what I thought was going to be this Friday, although now it seems that it isn’t going to be until next Thursday.
I have an assignment still to do so I will probably have to get much of that work done while I am here as it is due on the 20th. This will mean development on my laptop, I’m not really a fan of that but I suppose I will have to. It is quite slow, even now as I am typing the letters appearing is struggling to keep up with me. The hard drive is quite slow which means that Visual Studio is quite slow. I have thought about getting a new laptop but I don’t really use this one enough to justify it. I might next year while I am working.