Archive for June, 2006

Hmm…

David Smith: oh yer ive got a a challenge for ya
David Smith: want to see if you can pull off making your own facebook inwhich anyone can join as i cant join the original
David Smith: should be intresting seeing what you come up with
Chris: something similar to www.unimatchup.co.uk no doubt

I really am trying to cut down.

I’m having my ups and downs with Linux. Last night I got Ubuntu to successfully install and boot up which I was quite pleased with and I’ve spent today configuring it. When it first booted up and I found I had nothing but a command line I decided it was best to keep it that way. Throwing yourself in at the deep end is a good way to learn things if it doesn’t matter if your drown.

So far things have gone reasonably smoothly. I’ve managed to configure my ethernet connection and get it on the network so it can download things and I’ve managed to get Apache, MySQL, Postgres, OpenSSH and an FTP server up and running on it so far although they aren’t working together perfectly yet. But I’ll be working on those problems soon enough.

Btw, if you ever need to edit a file on Linux use vi. Just type vi filename and it launch the command line type text editor dealie. Why does nobody tell you that? I had to pour through Linux commands pages from Google search results for ages to find that out. If I want to create a directory then there are a million pages available telling me how to do that. But when it comes to editing a file, it seems to be the hidden secret of the Linux world.

The only problem is, my computer isn’t massively quite, it probably makes even more noise than my laptop so I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep through it which means turning it off and on again every night. Until my parents go away to Canada, then it’s just getting moved to a different room and left on constantly :p.

I will get my old computer working as a test server! Well technically it’s my old, old, old computer but that is how fast things move these days ;). But yeah, I really want to get it working so I can install PHP5 on it and compatability test my scripts more. Plus if it’s networked the file transfers will be blindingly fast compared to uploading it to my VPS.

So far I’ve managed to get the old computer functioning in terms of hardware. I bid on some memory a few days ago which arrived this morning – £2 (including P&P!) for 128mb, I was well impressed. I managed to find the keyboard, mouse and power lead too so that’s all sorted. Also the second hard drive is now working which is what I did my Ubuntu install on.

The problem I am having now though is that when I tell it to boot up Ubuntu at Grub it runs the boot command then just restarts. I managed to find what I hope is a solution on the forums though. Apparently there is a problem with the server disk so I’m now downloading the alternative install disk ISO.

It’s good to be back. I came in here because I wanted to look at the Joblink vacancies but you can only do it from on campus to see the contact details. That or email them but I didn’t want to be waiting around and I was in town to speak to PC World about a job anyway so I thought I might as well wander up.

While I was in PC World I thought I might as well check out the prices of ethernet cables as I was looking for a 5m one to network my old computer up. I have plenty of network cables I could potentially do it with but most are 1-2m or like 10m so I thought if they were cheap I might as well pick up a new one.

£15 for a 5m cable! The cheapest was like £10 for a 1m one and they seemed to go up from there. Let’s put that in perspective. £0.76 for a 2m cable from >Watford Electronics.

Consider this. I could get a 5m cable from Watford (also manufactured by Belkin) and add shipping costs onto the top of that and it would still only cost me £6.14. In fact, for a total cost of £8.63 I could get it tomorrow with premium express delivery!

I went a day without blogging! Did you see that? I actually went a day without blogging. How crazy is that? There was something I wanted to blog about though, as yesterday was the 26th. The 26th of June to be exact.

That means that as of yesterday, I only have 4 months left of being a teenager! I mean, I knew age was really creeping up on me but I mean, it really brings it home when you notice it’s 4 months to the day that you are going to be 20.

So yeah, getting back to last night. It was a fairly decent night, probably not quite as good as previous Oblivions but still good. The problem was the music took a while to get going. They did play quite a lot of music I really like though, I mean it’s normally in the genres I like but they really play some kick ass, that’s what I would play if I had control of the playlist type stuff.

Not sure how much everyone else appreciates it though, they played Lostprophets – Rooftops at the end and most people stopped dancing whereas it’s a fantastic song as one of the final ones as you can really scream your lungs out.

The other problem was that there was quite a high percentage of assholes there. While I would generally agree that there is less tension at alternative nights than mainstream clubbing nights, I don’t subscribe to the idea that goths, indie kids, etc are more chilled out than mainstreamers. I think the difference is between students and locals and it’s just there is a higher percentage of students in the alternative crowds. But in terms of percentages of assholes in mainstreamers vs alternatives I think they are about the same.

Fonze continued his career as a sex stud by pulling again. Not a particuarly attractive girl though and the fact she just walked up to him, said a few things to him and then went off to make out with him shows in kind of in depth meaning their joint activities represented.

After leaving Oblivion we headed off for some food at Luckys and then Lunn suggested we go somewhere else as “me and John are used to staying out till 5 in the morning” which is ironic considering by the end of the night Lunn was the one complaining about wanting to go home.

We ended up at the shesha bar Cafe Denero’s I believe it’s called which is open 24 hours (or so it claims) on a Friday and Saturday. They were shutting as we left though. but yeah, we got two shisha pipes as Lunn wanted one to himself and me and John were splitting one, which Fonze ended up joining in on too. Lunn’s decision to take one to himself probably wasn’t the best given he ended up being sick, or maybe he is just a lightweight :p. It does make you lightheaded when you are doing a lot of it though, I don’t think it’s effected me before as we were passing it round a lot of us but when there is only a few of you doing it, you feel it.

I suppose I should mention these as everyone else has blogged about them. To be honest though, they don’t really bother me much. The first year of uni is all about the partying, as is uni in general really.

But I got some pretty good results anyway…

SY11: 55
MA12: 65
CS12: 67
DB11: 78
SE15: 87

I’m still missing my SE12 and SE16 marks but so far (including both semesters of SE15 and therefore counting it twice) I am averaging a 73 on these results which puts me in the 1st category (even though I really don’t like to categorise as this year doesn’t even count) although if you add in my first semester results it would probably drop below the 70 mark as I was really pulled up here by my stella SE15 mark (it’s worth noting 90 is the maximum I could have scored). Although I’m hoping for a decent mark in SE12 that should drag my average up a little.

So tonight we did Oblivion. We being myself, Fonze, John and Lunn. It was a good night although the music wasn’t quite as good as normal (though still excellent) and the people weren’t that brill. With all the students gone home the percentage of assholes was higher as locals tend to be assholes despite being alternatives rather than mainstream clubbers.

We then went to Cafe Denero’s and did some sheesha which was fun. And explains why why I’m getting in at this time lol.

OMG! Ok, so we were going for pre-Oblivion drinks at the Llama (as ever) and when we got there the door was closed. And locked. I wasn’t about to walk away from the Llama just because of a closed door but it was locked as well when I tried it and the Halo entrance wasn’t open so I couldn’t even go round and ask what was going on.

I might find their number and ring them actually. This is scary, I really don’t want to have to find somewhere else to live, the Llama is irreplaceable.

I ran my code through the W3C validator. It validated fine.

It also displays fine normally. But if you put it in a frameset you get an interesting result.