Blog
First week back
OK, so I’ve effectively had my first week back at Uni now. I say effectively because although it is only Thursday all my lectures for the week finished yesterday. In fact, I only have 6 hours of teaching booked in on my timetable per week. (4 hours on Tuesday and 2 on Wednesday). Suffice to say this is a very short week and far from representative of all the modules I’m doing.
I have 2 hours a week in something called “advanced internet application”. I have another 2 hours in something called “data management” and then a final 2 hours in “web mastery and network management”. I then also have a module called “managing the e-enterprise” which is an online module which involves an essay a week which is submitted and then feedback is received a week later. Then I have the heap that is my final year project.
Now it has to be said that in picking my final year project last year I seriously overstretched myself. It was in a lot of ways my downfall last year. I undertook a system of which each one of the 6 components was bigger than anything else anyone else took on. One of these components was a fully working webmail system to give you an idea of scale.
This year I have already made my pitch to the head of the school for my project. In fact, I did it Monday afternoon. This year my project will be an investigation into moving the functionality of a CMS from within the front end scripting language (such as PHP or C#) into the database engine itself taking advantage of the new levels of power and control in modern query processing engines and T-SQL.
The beauty of this project is it takes advantage of my interest in databases systems as well as being new, interesting and most importantly, without limit and as such, without end. This way I can work on it as much as I like without it having a clear end for which my result to be measured against. I agree there is a danger in this approach that I would fall short of the requirements, however, this is part of what the tutors roles is in helping me manage my project.
This first week has not been without it hiccups and oddities though. Firstly i was reminded over the course of a few lectures and tutorials how many stupid people are still out there. I saddens me to think that the last two levels of the course have not weeded them away. My favourite moment was when we were talking about Biztalk server (which is basically a business process manager. It allows you to set up the middleware or business processes of your applications in one place and it controls the workflow. Someone then asked if this was like exchange server… You what… you mean the e-mail server…. how in Gods name did they come to that conclusion. The two are so very far removed that you would have thought at least a level 3 student would see that…
Anyway, I’m sure I will get over it… Or they will go away…
Pavle Bataveljic
Well today was a good start and yet a rubbish start to uni.
I went into the school office to sort out my module choices for this year. I hadn’t done at the end of last week because I wanted to talk to a few people about what I’m allowed to do. One of the things that came up when discussing me staying on and re-doing the year is they might place restrictions on which modules I could do. I had never managed to find this out so far. So, I went into the school office, picked up the form and then as a side note asked which office Pavle (who is my course head) was. I was told that he has actually died last week.
Now I didn’t know the man that well, but he was the person who helped negotiate with the university for my re-doing the year. I had several length talks with him about what went wrong, what I would do differently etc. He managed to put me at ease over something which had worried me for some time. He gave up a fair bit of time to help me best he could and it would be fair to say that without his help I may not be getting this second chance.
I thanked him many times for his help, but I can’t help feel I didn’t thank him enough. I credit this man with my second chance, he even wrote a letter of recommendation to the course board on my behalf.
This is very saddening news to myself and anyone he worked with him I’m sure. Before today I was planning on going back into university and thanking him again.
Note to self, take opportunities when they present themselves, you never know how long they will be there for.
Backing up!
OK, as I talk to yet another friend who is having trouble with their computer not working, it occurs to me far too few people back up their work. If that is you, please please keep reading.
Firstly, a lot of people simply don’t bother backing up because they don’t think about it or don’t care. I normally find the idea of loosing every photo from the last 5 years makes most people quite upset, as does the thought of the hours of work spend on essays and alike going down the drain. Backing up is painfully cheap, very easy to set up, costs very little and makes life so much better when things do go pointy bits up.
If you are anything like me you have whole swaths of your life stored on the computer, shouldn’t you be more careful with it? Laptops in particular are very prone to disk failure. They are after all laptops, they take a lot of knocks, bumps and generally get a fairly rough life. They are also what almost all students trust their lives with. By their very design they only have one disk built in, it is your single point of failure, it goes and your data goes with it.
There are several ways to do backups, some ways are very simple, other not so much, some cost a fair bit, some are dirt cheap and some require lots of effort, some require none at all.
DVD’s
The most basic form of backup that I can think of is just to back your work up on DVD. Most computers from the last couple of years and beyond come as standard with the ability to write DVD’s. Every major OS in current use can write to them with no special software and they cost almost nothing. At first glance I can find a pack of 25 disks for £4.99. Those disks have 4.7GB of storage on them. To put that another way, that’s 1340 photos from my fairly expensive camera which produces HUGE files. Most current cameras I see don’t make images bigger than tow thirds that. So that’s around 2000 images per disk. So in other words, with a pack of 25 disks you could keep the most important data to you backed-up for a year or so.
External hard disks
DVD’s do have their downsides, they require you to do some work, they require you to update them from time to time and they also take a bit of time to get your data back off if you do kill your machine.
With any form of harddrive (in this case an external one) you can set it up to copy your data over as things change or as I prefer to do, get it to wait a couple of days just in case I want to go to the backup and get an older version of the file. You can pick up an external harddrive for scary money. I have just found 1TB (1024GB) for under £100. Even I would struggle to fill that, so the cheaper options will almost certainly be for you.
As for software to set backing up, I suggest something called Syncback. This has a free version linked to on their downloads page. It is pretty simple to set up, it has an easy mode and holds your hand through setting backups up. You just pick your my documents folder as the source and then your external harddrive as the location to backup to.
Internal disk
If you have a desktop you can take this a step further by adding an internal disk, they are even cheaper and even more reliable, especially as they don’t have to take much in the way of knocks and bumps.
If half this article was too complicated for you, then just copy some stuff to DVD’s and lump it into your bottom draw, its better than nothing. But please please make some form of backup, recovering data from a broken disk can cost thousands of pounds and take months to get back with limited success. If you also don’t think this will ever happen to you, know that i have 2 disks in my computer and 2 outside of it dedicated to backup and I have fixed a awful lot of machines and got back a lot of peoples data, but it isn’t always possible and I’m not made of spare time.
Officially cool
OK, so it’s slightly old hat, but when it works it’s just scary cool. Im using my phones data connection (you know, that unlimited one) via bluetooth and the random bluetooth widget plugged into my laptop to be using scary fast and usable. When i say usable, I’m using several tabs, big pages and collecting my e-mails at the same time.
Now in theory i should have been able to do this for years, and i sort of have before, but now i have a new battery for my laptop this is actually a viable solution long term.
Somethings Tech just rocks, especially when all of this is happening on a train…
Digital life
The idea of a Digital life as I see it is a really really cool (most importantly, useful) thing. I would always define this as having all the data you want and need very accessible to you at as close to all times as is possible.
So this is photos, videos, music, e-mail, the web, contacts, calendars, instant communication etc searchable, accessible, available all the time.
This is something thanks to our modern computing generation we are getting closer and closer to this, however, much as I try, this is still a very very complicated goal to achieve.
For example, all my photos, music, videos, contacts, calendars etc are all on my computer. I have done a fair bit of tagging of my photos based on events and people in them, this makes that data searchable. So, lets pretend I’m looking for some info on Demelza. So I type her name into my computer as a search term. That then spits back all the photos with her in, any videos she might be in, her contact sheet in outlook which contains a profile picture, her phone numbers, addresses, e-mail address. I get back any calendar events she has been tagged to, like me visiting her at home this coming week. I also get any chat logs we have between us on MSN.
Not bad going, that’s my computer fairly sorted. I also carry my phone with me which contains my full calendar, my full contacts list. I also have my task list, my notes, and although I don’t bother for reasons that become clear, I could have my favourites too. My phone also has access to most of my e-mails as my e-mails are mainly IMAP accounts. This means the e-mails themselves stay online and whatever device I’m on just contacts to them, so be that my phone, my computer, my laptop or even webmail, they remain the same for all.
Bookmarks is a tricky one, or even my Firefox session. I’m looking at ways to have all my bookmarks tag-able, searchable online so I can get to them everywhere.
I also did look at having my MSN chat logs online (behind a password) so I could get them from anywhere and again search them. This turned out to be a lot more complicated than you would have though, I also have my logs on my phone, computer and laptop for all IM logged separately with no way as yet to search them all at the same time.
So most of this has come a long way, however it didn’t get there quickly, nor was it easy. In the last year I have taken about 9,000 photos, all of which needs to be tagged for this to work. I have maybe a weeks worth of work on them to clear the backlog.
The technology is just about caught up with what’s need, but its still not easy enough, fast enough or useful enough. I still don’t have all my files available to me from anywhere. I could remote in but that’s not quite the same, I could access the files in their directories but that wouldn’t give me access to all the nice search data i want.
I think i have even forgotten where this post was going, maybe I’m just trying to explain that at the moment, keeping track of your data is a nightmare.
Google chrome - new browser
OK, about an hour or so ago Google launched a new browser called Google chrome. This was in actual fact a mistake, they accidentally launched some of the material about it yesterday so today they decided to come clean, explain and then release.
First, the download link: Google Chrome
Suffice to say, me being me, I have read most of the info about it now and have just installed a copy. The only things really that make it any different from any browser should be that it has tabs on the top, its faster and its more stable than anything else.
But before I get to what it looks like, here is what happened when I tried to install it on my machine:
Basically it tried to shove itself in my auto run before anything else. This strikes me as just not needed and annoying at best. No idea why they needed to do that, i don’t have it set to feedback data to them (You get asked at the point where you download, not in the browser once its up and running, so the installer should not need anything here!). In short, Google, not a good start.
OK, once I gave it a bit more room to move it was installed:
Not bad looking, it works with Aero in Vista which is good enough for me. Interface is very light. Not impressed I don’t seem able to change the quick-start links that come up when you go to a new tab, they change themselves… I would of thought of all the people in the world Google would be happy to make it easier to let me get to what I want to.
Not been looking long, but one thing I did notice which hasn’t impressed me… I would have thought a modern browser, especially made by the kings of speed would be light. Now maybe I’m behind the time but last I looked over 62MB wasn’t small. Especially when I had Digg, The register and Google open.
This said, it is very very fast. Not sure if that’s enough to move me away from a very nice and well suited Firefox setup for me, we will see.
Windows Live Mail
Filters are very very helpful. In the full Outlook I use them to allow me to sort my e-mails into folders etc depending on what they are, who they are from, who they are to etc. Windows live mail (AKA Hotmail) also allows me to do this, however there is one very very important feature missing. In the full fat client I can run a new rule on existing e-mails. So if I decide I want to sort my e-mails in a slightly different way this is very easy to completely change the structure of my inbox despite there being goodness knows how many thousands of e-mails. In Live these rules I create only apply to new e-mails! Argh, maybe I wont sort my Live account then…
Internets images
The Internets has some great images from time to time… I would love to be able to source where this image actually came from… Unfortunately someone else copied it without any clue as to where it’s from…
Picture memory
I did a terrible terrible thing this weekend. I went to Nicolas farewell/Christmas party before leaves for South Africa… That’s not the bad party, that was the great part, the bad part was I actually forgot my camera! It’s not like it’s small, it’s not like it wasn’t charged, ready and on my bed…. People actually asked me if I was feeling unwell when I got to the party, such is magnitude of this uncharacteristic display of forgetfulness.
My camera kit these days is about a grands worth, and for all that money, it really seems pointless when you leave it on your bed! Ah well, there is always next time…
A time for change (US style)
I’ve just been watching the speech by Barack Obama as he officially accepted the candidacy for the democratic party in the US.
The American presidential election is something that is very important for not just America, but the world as a whole. Based simply on the fact that Barack Obama wasn’t George Bush I would have been more than happy to see him go into power. Having seen that speech and combined that with everything else I have seen him say, I want him to be president for his policies, his attitude and his down to earth commitment for change.
America, please don’t screw up this time, this is the chance the rest of the world wants you to take.
