Posts Tagged ‘Uncategorized’
I have a nix desktop again
I finally got round to doing away with the slow-loading, out-of-date, vaguely commercial Fedora Core last night and stayed up rather late getting ubuntu on. I must say, it really advertises itself well as it was insanely easy to install. Boot from the CD, and after a few minutes you have a fully working system. Obviously there are some limitations as its a live CD but it’s a nice philosophy – just run ‘Install’ from the desktop. There are a minimum number of options and it’s painless enough. I wiperised my old partitions and then with a little fiddling (that needed some thought due to an interface that wasn’t an obvious as I would have liked) I got it to create what it needed. Once installed and rebooted it updated itself, which was done very professionally. My task before going to bed was to get the bootloader to default to windows. I got some help with this (and with other things) from my ubuntu-savvy friend nalioth and got this sorted rather quickly. He tells me not to assume anything as the distro is so different – fex, apparently all I need to do to get my printer shared over the network for the benefit of the laptop using a simple applet somewhere. Unfortunately, I may not have time this evening but I hope to. Then I can use it almost exclusively.
I did want to use gentoo but I don’t think I’m really good enough to get it working graphically without frying anything. So, I’m sticking with my current little setup for now and maybe the no root philosophy will grow on me!
xyrael.net v3 // Welcome
So, this is my new site. I wanted a place where I could actually put pages of stuff again in an quick/easy fashion. The design is totally driven by CSS because this is obviously the way to go. Many will complain that it is too boring (try looking at it in FireFox – a curved corner!) as has happened before but I’m using my avatar to make the right area look nice. In fact, this avatar caused a lot of design issues because it moved around depending on the length of the page, so I’ve had to fix it’s y-position rather than having it in percentages. This is a shame. I’m also using Georgia as my main font. Over the past few months I’ve discovered this rather nice one and I’ve realised Blogger (who are still powering this blog, it’s the best way to post and keep a safe version – I hope their beta version still works with this blog) use it in their WYSIWYG. I’m glad that I’ve worked this out because I rather like it. Before now, I’ve used it for wiki stuff.
The backend (i.e. the important stuff) is using SSI to include stuff. This saves time and means that I can change the navbar significantly easier. Wait you say, this blog uses .html extensions! Unfortunately, because I can’t rename the individual post pages it is going to stay like this with an ugly hack causing Apache to parse all pages for SSI stuff in the xyrael.net domain. Another thing – I’ve reduced the number of posts on this front page to two so I need to keep them long in order to stop the right hand column, which relies on a rather simple CSS floating method, from spreading out below the main block. If there is a clean way of dealing with this please let me know.
I need to reorganise my links on the right too. I’m attempting to get more into the blogosphere as I want other people to link to me and vice-versa to help the traffic of both. Hopefully I can achieve this by getting more people signed up to my feed, which seems to be occuring. There is an IRC bot on freenode that broadcasts into a large channel when I make a post 
Since FTP is working again, I can so easily update from school etc. As you can see, I’m ultra-enthusiastic about this blog (yet) again.
This not mean a lot? Unfortunately, this post was only really for me. Now, let’s see if the comments blow up…
Mock exams coming up
Well, our mock GCSE examinations are coming up and I am actually going to have to do some revision. I’ve been very studious and got a timetable ready plus brief words on what I intend to do for each subject. We have some study leave which makes the xmas holiday period longer so I have plenty of time to get things done. Because I can’t read the rubbish I’ve scribbled down over the years I intend to use online revision for almost everything. Wish me luck.
On the subject of this blog, I’ve realised that I really am not going to get anywhere with posting real comments like all these hip blogs nowadays, simply because I don’t have enough time to read through everything in the newspaper. This is partly because I don’t have enough time in the library and also due to competition from others for accessing it. This is a serious disadvantage. Ah well, looks like my dream for this blog is far away :\ Additionally, I’ve been considering the possibility of once again expanding this site to contain things other than the blog. But, what? It’s difficult as I don’t want to break links so I think I’d have to make a new design and incorporate the blog into that, as I’ve had before. Or, I could dig out one of the old designs and use that. This time, I’ll go with a simple design that will actually work – right hand navbar, header, text or something. Usual CSS system, I suppose. It’ll be v3!
Google accounts and the like
As I have gone on about before I presently use hosted gmail for all my webmail and gtalk needs. It’s absolutely excellent however I get annoyed about having e-mails in more than one place, as for a long period of time I used spwhitton(AT)gmail as my only address. However, I discovered recently that my SilentFlame webmail is linked to my original Google account with spwhitton as the latter created the former. Make sense? Somehow this seems more complete for me.
I recently started using a new mail signature on my e-mails, as opposed to my old one:
old-- —Xyrael / Sean Whitton ~ Knowledge is power, but only wisdom is liberty sean@silentflame.com (PGP: 0x25F4EAB7) | xyrael.netnew
--—Sean Whitton (Xyrael) [sean at silentflame dot com]Knowledge is power, but only wisdom is liberty.
So, which one do you prefer? I think there are advantages and disadvantages to each but I’m sticking with the latter primarily because it doesn’t require me to type my name at the bottom of less important e-mails anymore and I think this looks neater, especially to mailing lists.
We’re started to put together our Records of Achievement at school which is an interesting thing to do. I’ve composed my personal statement and have filled in the usual default information, but I’ve also got Christel (I need to get round to blogrolling her) of freenode to write me a reference for my work over there. This is quite nice as it is something unusual that lists a variety of qualities. Otherwise, I’ve got to fill it with photocopyed certificates.