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Tristan und Isolde

2006-10-29T11:51:00.000Z

Last nights performance of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde at Venue Cymru was mixed. I felt that the performance suffered due to the set, which was too big for the stage. Some of the singers had trouble maneuvering around it. Also the set didn't manage to correspond well to where the setting were - for instance in the second act the scene was set in Isolde's chamber, but the set showed it to be in the middle of a road.

The singing was the most mixed aspect. Some of the singers were excellent - Annalena Persson as Isolde gave a truly Wagerian sound, with her powerful voice, Robert Hayward was also an excellent singer in the role of Kurwenal - but other singers I felt lacked the power needed for the music. At times one couldn't hear voices above the music - which is renowned to be very loud.

The highlight of the performance must have been the music. Wagner's score transported you to another place with its sheer power - and I think it is the best aspect of his work, because I find the scenes terribly long at times. Occasionally my mind wandered off for a few minutes and when it returned the characters where still singing about the same thing. Thus I felt that being at the opera from 17:00 'till 22:30 could have been shortened by about an hour if one had taken a machete to the lyrics.

Tor

2006-10-28T14:27:00.000Z

I was up late last night watching The Big Lebowski on Film4. It was entertaining, and well worth the fewer hours of sleep I had as a result.

This morning I've read more of 'Database Nation' and as a result have been reading up on tor. I've tried to get it working for web browsing, but so far my efforts have been futile as FireFox doesn't seem to like using Privoxy to connect to an anonomising port. I'll have a further look into this during the week hopefully.

Tonight I'm going to see a performance of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Including two breaks and a supper-hour it'll last five hours and forty-five minutes; which is very long. Thus we've already had our main meal of the day at lunchtime (lamb chops, mint, cous-cous), and will have sandwiches during one of the breaks given to us. It'll indeed be a marathon. I hope to enjoy the evening.

LUGRadio Live!

2006-07-08T19:19:00.000Z

Yup I'm going 8)

Revision

2006-05-07T08:55:00.000Z

If online people who want to contact me in the next few weeks - I don't see my answering since I am now revising like hell. See you all in a couple of months

Not been here for a while

2006-04-20T12:38:00.000Z

I've not been active here for a while - seem to be blogging more on my other two blogs (blogs.libervis.com and dylunio.homelinux.com).

If any one is interested I'm doing okay, and have about 3 weeks until my exams start - [sarcasm]YAY![/sacrasm]

Have fun ye'all!

dylunio

Roll Your Own Firewall

2006-03-27T00:39:00.000Z

A comprehensive user friendly guide to setting up your own firewall on GNU/Linux.

read more | digg story

Lament of the Lamb

2006-03-25T20:40:00.000Z

I went to Costa Geriatrica today, and as well as getting now shoes, I went to Ottikars - they seem to have setup a 'Manga Collectors Club' where one gets a free volume for every three volumes you buy, so today I got Lament of the Lamb v.2 and v.3, so now next time I go there I'll get another two volumes and only have to pay for one.
Anyhow, I've read v.2 already and it's such a good manga, it's there with Love Hina and Chobits for me, the darkness and on the edge of your seat-ness of it makes it a grand read. I'll wait untill I get to school before reading the other, I'll try and read Furubar in the time being, which isn't quite as good.

A Guide to Understanding /Proc, the Linux Information Location

2006-03-11T07:33:00.000Z

Many don't know much about /proc on their systems. This guide looks at the aspects of running processes and such that are within /proc and how to usalize it fully.

A Reconmended Read.

Cambridge

2006-02-26T18:00:00.000Z

On Friday I went down to Cambridge with my parents for a night to return yesterday.
The main objective of the visit was to alow my to view the town, where I'm currently considering going to University. We went down by train, having to change once in London, where we changed stations from Euston to Kings Cross. The trains were rather nice and everything ran to time.
Once we arrived we took a taxi to St.John's collage where we were expecting a message from one of the Fellows there. As a consequence I got some bumff regarding the collage and engineering at the collage.
After we had walked around St.Johns - which was rather pleasant - we went to visit Trinity collage as well as Kings collage. Both were nice but I felt that Kings was rather posh.
After finding the B&B we were staying in we went to the local pub, and drank some real ale, I had a pint of some IPA and my parents had some Abbot Ale.
After this we proceeded to the St.John's Fellow we knew, for supper, which was very enjoyable. Both the food and discussion were good, which was a nice change from the bordom of North Wales.

On Saturday we saw a few more collages, such as Gonville and Caius, Trinity Hall, Queens, Pembroke, and a few others a can't remember. When we entered Pembroke we ran into one of the Fellows my father knew there, whech ment we had a proper tour of the collage and lunch in the Great Hall, which was a enjoyable experience, it made the place feel human since all the students were eating around us.
After lunch we did some shopping, where I baught a digital camera at the camera
shop (more about this later), and we also went to Heffers (the bookshop). Heffers was slightly smaller than it's Oxford counterpart Blackwell's, so the selection was more limited. Despite this they had there O'Reilly corner, where I picked up a few books, found a seat to sit on, and looked through them. In the end I got myself 'Understanding the Linux Kernel' - a hefty tome of over 900 pages:

I know few things about how the kernel works and such, so I hope this will be an interesting read for me.

After this we collected our stuff from the B&B, and headed home, which took over six hours due to work on the lines.

Today I tested my new digital camera, the Canon PowerShot A610. I went on a a local walk, and took a few snaps, the best picture I got was this one:

Since the camera uses the PTP protocol to transfer the images, I had some trouble finding out how to upload them to this Linux box, but gphoto2 and this blogpost were found and I uploaded the pictures.

I've really enjoyed this trip to Cambridge, it's given me a good idea about how
the place is, how the students conduct themselves in their leisure hours, and an idea about the admin process. In all it's inspired me to work hard so that I can reach my goal of going to Cambridge University

LRL 2006

2006-02-17T16:57:00.000Z

I'll be heading off to LugRadio Live 2006! in July, I hope there are plenty of geeks there - since I've never met one IRL.

My other blogs

2006-02-05T17:15:00.000Z

Over the past month or so I've procured a couple of blogs, one over at Libervis Blogs and one on my own site.

These have partly been the reason there have been fewer posts here recently, the other is that not much happens.

Trusted Penguin

2006-01-26T21:12:00.000Z

I've been TP'd over at LFdO - which is pretty cool, though not as cool as it would have been under J. I'll have to visit their now to show that I'm alive and not dead etc.

Music and Llamas

2006-01-23T21:19:00.000Z

Over the weekend I managed to go to Chester and pick up a few things. While I was there I had some HMV tokens from Christmas so I poped in to the HMV. after half an hour or so I came out with two CD's - A Momentary Lapse of Reason by Pink Floyd, and Give 'Em Enough Rope by The Clash.

Both are great albums, differing styles. AMLoR is the first post-Waters Pink Floyd album I've heard, and it's weird as one might expect, but maybe slightly more grown up than their earlier albums, though I think I prefer Pink Floyd with Waters despite the fact he's an arrogent son of a gun.
The Clash are as punkish as ever, but retain their quirks, and I think have pulled off a great song in "English Civil War".

I've started looking into the Perl language, it's damn interesting and I see it being much more powerful to use than BASh. Larry Wall has made Perl a hard languge to learn, but a easy one to use once learnt, so I'm sure the work I'm doing on it will pay off. Though I must learn C also sometime...

Post exams;

2006-01-20T16:59:00.000Z

I've now finnished my exams for the time being, so now I'll be able to spend some more time on other things. Things that are on my TODO list are:
Learn C;
Lean Perl;
Help translate more software into Welsh;
Catch up on the fansubbs I've missed;
Write a few interesting programs, using wichever langages I know;

'Leccy

2006-01-07T21:16:00.000Z

I was out at an Indian's tonight and we were there waiting for our pudding, when there was a power cut. The waiters did very well and went around lighting candles. So there was light, and a PDA provided some rather crappy music. The kitchen staff had the most problems, since they couldn't see which were the ingredients etc. but they did manage to find our kulfies.

It's amazing how we become so used to electricity, and so many things have to have it nowerdays, including my beloved computers. But each time there is a powercut or some such event we seem to survive, we get out the candles, we boil kettles on the gas hob and so forth, so now all we need is a computer that doesn't run on electricity or is windup, so we can use them without mains or generator electricity.

SVN - Almost There

2006-01-01T22:06:00.000Z

I've finnaly got the authentication working for the Jedi/GNU Project Subversion Reposotory.
So once people have an account on my server, and the right permissions set, it should all work.
At the moment I think that there will be only 3 users who will have r+w over files, lakerdonald over the whole reposotory, and l_n and I over our respective work.

So tomorrow I must:
* Inport the CVS reposotory to the SVN one
* Setup a way for users to set passwords - will most likly use ssh and then a bash script for this.
* Write a guide on how to use SVN and also link to the SVN-book.

I hope you have fun.

dylunio

Post the comercial break.

2005-12-26T17:51:00.000Z

Christmas has just been, it was rather fruitful for me, my parents got me the Cowboy Bebop Boxsets, so I now have the whole 26 sessions to get though, though I've already watched 10 of them today and enjoied them a lot, so after my trip to the south of england I'll be able to watch some more.

Other than that I got some music in the form of `Piper At The Gates Of Dawn` by Pink Floyd:
Which is full of Syd's work, thus rather drugged up. I also got some of the Clash:
The Clash as good as usual, with the mix of styles.

Other than eating, walking, present opening, or physics homework nothing much happened, but it was enjoyable overall.
I hope you all had a merry christmas, and have `Happy Holidays' as they say in the US of A.

Authenticating svn users

2005-12-23T23:18:00.000Z

Okay, I've got subversion up and running well enough to be able to download, and modify and upload code. The only problem with this is it's totaly anonymous, so anyone can change anything, so Bill Gates could come along and futz our work (which wouldn't be totaly crap since we'd have previous versions of the repo, but it'd be damn annoying).

So we must have authenticaton, since the www is such a happy and crime free place. The choices I have are: Basic svn, svn+ssh, or apache authentication. The first being rather insecure, the second being rather fiddly with the users having to have accounts and all, and the third is what I'm working on.
Apache + svn is a pretty good deal, you get to view the repo on the web and you can authenticate via the command line, or a svn client. The problem is it's hell on earth to setup, I'm no pro system admin, once you think you have somethnig right,it goes wrong, or cocks up or something. I'll continue working on this over the holidays though, since I'd like to be able to contribute such things to the Jedi/GNU project.

Manga stock-up

2005-12-23T16:49:00.000Z

On monday I went to Oxford, mainly to look at the bookshops. Since they have a Boarders there I got a chance to stockup on my manga, these are a few titles I got:

I baught volumes 2-4 of Battle Vixens, and as usual it's full of fan service, it's a pitty that the story isn't to the same standard, but there we are.

A harem type manga in the same folds as Love Hina, but this time there is already a relationship between the two main characters, the artwork's nice and the story is okay, but I think Love Hina still has a edge on it.

Lament of the Lamb is a rather good manga, it's about an estranged brother and sister who meet, for the brother to find out that she's a vampire, and that he's turning into one. I found the story gripping and wished that they had more volumes than they had.

Other than these I got Chobits and Love Hina number's 4, both great manga as always.

F=ma

2005-12-11T17:37:00.000Z

I've decided not to do GG1 in January since we have yet to finnish the course and we'll do crap in it since the course we have done I don't think we've done to enough depth, Bledd said he'd pay for any of us who didn't do it out of the department's budget since it was he who was in hospital for half the term with his messed up shoulder, and he couldn't get a substitute teacher in (since I'm in a Welsh Medium Secondary School, they need teacher who teach in Welsh, and they don't exist when it comes to Geography). Also since the Geography textbook the school gave is rather crappy, I'm getting "Essential AS Geography" from play.com, as reconmended by Yuki-chan (as well as "Thud" by Pratchett).

I finnished "Night Watch" by Pratchett and have now started on Hawking's "A Breif History of Time" which is pretty interesting, though I'm finding reading the "Advanced Physics" textbook rather interesting too, with the basics of Chaos and String theory within the introduction.

This weekend I've done nothing realy, except watch a lot of anime, this weekend I've watched 14 episodes of Honey and Clover, as well as episode 7 of Paradise Kiss, and episode 59 of Bleach.
Honey and Clover has been a great series to watch, it has the standard `slice of life` elements, but also it has some calmness which I have not seen before in anime.
Paradise Kiss has been great so far with Yukari totaly changing her life, by not trying to be her mothers daughter, but to be herself.
Bleach has been wanning recently, with lots of boring macho-ismes surrounding Ichigo, realy some of the interesting story is relegated to having a few seconds here and there (such as "what is realy going on in SoulSociaty?"), I'll keep watching, though I might need a new hard drive to store all this anime.

In physics we've finally started on F=ma and all that, I've done it all before in Mech, but the others have not, but it's pretty easy, as long as they remember their Trig.

I hope to go to Oxford next monday sice School will be out for Christmas, I'll get to go to bookshops that sell manga (w00t!) so I'll be able to pick up some titles I wouldn't get otherwise, I'll pick up some more Battle Vixens and Love Hina, since I might as well read some fanservice on the way home on the train ;).

Season's greetings!

Parti 'dolig!

2005-12-08T20:39:00.000Z

Fuodd parti nadolig y chweched neithiwr. Fuodd lot o bobl braidd yn pissed, a nath llawer mwynhau dwi'n credu. Oedd y bwyd yn reit dda, ges i ddau starter a 1.5 maincourse diolch i Gareth E, oedd ddim yn gallu gorffen ei holl bwyd. Rhaid deud oedd rhai or otome yn kawaii iawn yn eu ffrogiau.
Fuodd llawer allan yn yfed cyn y peth a roedd rhai o'r `cymruesau da` yn chwil iawn erbyn y starter, ond mor meddw erbyn y prif gwrs oeddyn nhw'n gofyn i mi am "y mwg drwg".
Aeth y dawnso ymlaen am tua 2 awr rhwng 22 a 0 awr - oedd hyn oll braidd yn flinedig mind, doeddwn i'm yn meddwl basai i'n neud y Macerena, ond dyna fi a llawer o erill mae'n siwr yn gwneud total prats o'n hynain. O leia do ni'm yn rhy pissed erbyn diwedd y noson, a o ni'n gallu cerdded lan o theatr gwynedd i'r ty. Ddoes i mewn am ~ 1:00 am yn teimlo'n reit flinedig. O ni'n synnu pa mor dawel oedd bangor ucha ar yr amser hono. Nes i gyrraedd Bangor uchaf gyda Proben, a Grossman, ac yna es i gartref yn cerddeg gyda Llyr oedd wedi cael chwaneg yn ormod i yfed - dyna pam nath o ddim troi lan i'r ysgol heddi lol.

Water,water...

2005-12-05T18:29:00.000Z

everywere, but it's full of cryptosporidium, so we can't drink it. The local water supply which serves around 70,000 people has been contaminated with the nice bug cryptosporidium, so if we want to drink water we have to boil it, otherwise we get rather ill. This is all reather annoying, if this were China they'd ship in a few million bottles of water, but this is only North Wales, so it's not important.

Admin on lfdo has changed, we'll have to see if this `Core Wizard` chappy can live up to what J did.

I've almost finnished my lamp for this term's lighting project, it looks pretty leet, though it needs a lick of paint as well as to be wired.

Both my Honey & Clover and Tenshi no Shippo Chu torrent's finnaly finnished, TnSC is rather weird, though it is a magical girl title. I've watched the first 6 eps of H&C and it's a great slice of life title, and I see why people compare it with Paradise Kiss.

In January I have some exams (w00t!), so:
C1 :: 10/01/06
GG1 :: 13/01/06
M1 :: 16/01/06
S1 :: 18/01/06

So over the Christmas Break I'll be revising like there is no tomorrow, as well as watching Cowboy Bebop (once I get the series on the 25th).

The 6th form have their Christmas Party this wednesday...it'll be an event shall we say, we almost had booked the same place as the teachers on the same night...which would have been awkward. So if I don't remember anything on Thursday, you'll know why.

REMEMBER TO BOIL YOUR WATER!

Battle Vixens

2005-11-26T20:35:00.000Z

I went to Llandudno today, so I managed to get hold of the first volume of Battle Vixens. The first volume is a bit thin, but the storyline is pretty...how does one say it...weird? Basicly it's about a bunch of people who fight, and they have the souls of dead Chinese Warriors within themselves. But since this is more of a shonen title there is a lot of fanservice, so when a punch is thrown at a girl...they seem to loose most of there blowse. If your one of the `chapel three times on a Sunday` kids that go to my school, this is what you are missing:

Other than that I have done next to nothing, though I have plenty of math to do tomorrow between Physics and Maths - fun, fun, fun!
I've had the dates for my exams in January, I have maths on the 10, 16, and 18, and GG1 on 13, so this Chrismas I'll be working on my maths, as well as trying to watch the whole of Cowboy Bebop.

H&C download: 52.17%
Tenshi no Shippo Chu download: 14.36%

f(x) = polynomial

2005-11-20T22:49:00.000Z

I tried SuSE 10 (OSS) on my testing partition on my win machine, it's okay, but I prefered last weeks install of ubuntu, which was much faster, and let me choose dvorak keyboard at boot. SuSE hasn't inproved much since my last outing with it (9.1), it still has the crappy .rpm package manager and YaST (eek!). The only plus it realy has is the tonnes of packages that come on it's 5 cd's, but other than that, it'll be formatted and replaced by next weeks test distro...whatever that will be.

FMA and Wolf's Rain were on TV today (w00t! anime on TV), both look very good and I'll be watching the rest of the series'. I also got to watch Paradise Kiss episode one, I rather enjoied it, it's an interesting and origianal story, and with Franz Ferdinand in the closing titles is rather cool.

H&C download: 39%

Engineering Lecture

2005-11-16T19:59:00.000Z

Today I want to an engineering lecture at the Uni. It was all about mobile comunication, and the history/future of the industry. The guy who gave the lecture was chair in Bristol University, and the Managing Director of the Toshiba R&D lab there, so he gave a lot of airtime to the name "Toshiba", with how great it was etc. But it was interesting, Yuki-chan's mother was there with the 6th form St.Gerards class, she said hi, and mum blindly ignered her...typical. The stuff on fule cells was interesting.

Despite having 4 hours sleep and running on caffine I managed to get through the day which was pretty good. Though the Geography lessons involved being in the 6th form computer room - which has no AC at all, and no windows...so with ~20 boxen running 24/7 it gets VERY hot, so we all nearly fell asleep as Bledd went to `photocopy` or talk to `Mrs Jones`. I've been asked by the people organzing the Children in Need thingy to yet again get out my leet browny baking skillz since people thought they were so good last time, haha.

Got to watch Bleach 57 today, which is cool, though the second half of the episode was a bit stagnent after the interesting flashbacks into Yourichi and Soi Fong's past together.

H&C download: 28%

I'm Dying...

2005-11-15T22:37:00.000Z

Well that's how I feel (I know we're dying all the time...but you get what I mean). Last week I was on my exam diet of Lucozade, and sleeping pills (as well as the normal foodstuffs), but I've passed that point now...I'm on copious amounts of caffine, Mars Bars, lucozaide, and anything with chocolate in it. I feel like I havn't slept in about 3 weeks, I'm SO tired...so I havn't been able to do much *cough* homework, or extra projects like SVN (which I'll get back to once a) I get my sleep back b) I return from hospital after colapsing from exhaustion).
I hate the fact our bodies are so crap...we need to sleep eat, and do things to sustain energy...so crappy....anyhoo....sleeeeeeeeeeeeep.p....iuk

Podcasts

2005-11-12T22:22:00.000Z

I finnaly today followed the sheep and downloaded a podcast, well three of them from tho O'Reilly Network, the two most interesting ones were in audio format where they disscused the future of media in the computing world, and the fact that people go onto itunes, check out which albums they like, before popping of to BT the albums haha. There also was an interesting interview with some Peter van der Something who's written a book about how to start up in Linux, and bases most of the book around the thorny Linspire distro -- the debate on the matter was very interesting, and was a cool insight into the even newbier side of linux that LFDO doesn't even reach.

Other than that i've been recovering from working like a dog on my schoolwork, watched a 1959 flick about the British army taking a Indian Prince accross Kashmir with a bunch of people after them, it was rather a good example of the "The Great British Empire" flicks that were around at the time as the old colonies were slipping away.

Nuts amount of work to do, hopfully I'll have recoverd sufficiently to do some more tomorrow, and hopefully do more work on SVN.

I've been having more of a bash at C, and the use of fgets followed by sscanf instead of scanf and the ways one multiplies things and basic programs such as:

#include < stdio.h >

char line[100]; /* input from the CLI */
int total;      /* total minutes */
int hours;      /* number of hours (calculated) */
int minutes;    /* number of minutes (calculated) */


int main()
{       
        printf("Number of minutes: ");
        
        fgets(line, sizeof(line), stdin);
        sscanf(line, "%d", &total);
        
        hours = total / 60;
        minutes = total % 60;
        
        printf("%d minutes = %d hours and %d minutes\n", total, hours, minutes);
        return (0);
}

which converts minutes into hours and minutes -- rather boring program, but a pretty interesting exercise.

H&C download: 21.33%

Momentum = M*u

2005-11-11T21:17:00.000Z

I got "vi Pocket Reference" in the post today...w00t! Since I'm a vi and VIM kinda guy (never got to understand Emacs) it'll be usful so I can use it's search, substitute and yank funcions, as well as the many, many other little quirks.

My C might be slightly improving, I've been reading about why one should comment ones programs, as well as why scanf is so messed up. The difference between int and float etc. is rather interesting, and the use of fgets for the standard imput et all.

Dad came home from a confrence tour of Washington and Boston in the good old USA. He seemed to have enjoied himself, which is good, and he came from the nice Boston weather in the 70 farenheit, to gale force winds and heavy rain lol.

I hope to do more to the subversion repo over this weekend -- I'll have to do my mecanics work on cinematics, and momentum, as well as my physics work on light and polarization, which all will be a lot of fun.

Due to the stormy weather we've been having here my internet access went down for 1-2 hours this afternoon (~16-18 GMT). Sorry for any inconvenience to the rysnc users...not that I think there are many at the moment.

Have a nice weekend :)

SVN continued

2005-11-10T20:34:00.000Z

OKay, so far I've setup Subversion as a repo, and it works via apache, so things are improving. I can download a file, edit it via eSVN, and then commit it, as can anyone...since I have yet to get authentication working...which I'll cantinue working at over these few days. I also need to set it up so that we can have more than one project e.g. you don't download force-get and fs-make the same time...

H&C download: 17.05%

Subversion

2005-11-09T22:12:00.000Z

I've started installing SVNon my server, and I hope to be done over the weekend, since one needs to add a few mods to apache to make it work via apache etc.

I just hope that my parents will let me keep this server up while we're away over the Christmas holidays...I hope they do, since we'll only be away for three days *crossess fingers*

foo bar

2005-11-08T22:17:00.000Z

Today in school I played around with the ceramic chip furnace, so that I could bend the weird `thingies` for my lamp. It's going pretty well, though since I only have 3 hours a week to make it in...it's going slightly slower than I expected.

It's about four episodes into season 9 of `Stargate`, I miss RDA, as well as Amanda Tapping (though from the opening credits it looks as if she may yet move out of area51 :) Since the Gua'uld have bitten the dust, we now have to face the threat of the "Orai", who are like the accended Ancients...but evil, and want every one to worship them...how nice. With the last episode they managed to give a good sense of fear towards the Orai, which was pretty good, I hope Stargate-SG1 will keep up to it's pretty high standards and not stoop to the levels of Stargate Atlantis -- which is rather dire.

Not much else going on...though I now must decide on going to bed, and doing my geography homework in the morning, or to do the homework now and not sleep as well and be tired in school tomorrow...choices...choices.

I'll mostlikly have a bash at installing SVN on the server over the weekend (if I procure more time frome someware)

H&C download is at 9.72%

nlambda=dSintheata

2005-11-07T19:27:00.000Z

Mech is currently going okay, though there are a few questions with the last homework that are a bit strange...

Stats is boring..but you all know that. I've been looking into integral calculus and I find it interesting how 2x^3 can then turn into 6x^2 with differential calculus, but when using integral calculus on 6x^2 you can get 2x^3 +K where K can be 9 or -30 or whatever (though these are observations on what I've read...which is the first page in the integral calculus chapter)

I'm toying with setting up a svn repo on my server...though I'm worrying more about the space than the bandwidth it'll take up.

gentoo rsync

2005-11-03T17:56:00.000Z

Since I now have two gentoo machines, I decided yesterday to make my server into a personnal gentoo rsync server, so that I only have to sync it, then my other machine can sync off it. It's not that important but it's handy since it lets me update both computers on the same day without breaching Gentoo's rules on syncing their servers.

In other news, Phys, Maths, D&T and Geography are going quite well, now Bledd is back I only get 3 free lessons a week :) so less lolling about the commonroom watching others play pool. Since I get M1 in January, and Mr.Owen can't teach me for the most of December I've started doing "mass cores" (not sure if that's the correct translation) in school, which is quite cool. Stats is a bit boring, and it's really annoying that I have to do S2 if I am to do further maths, I'd prefer to stick to calclus and machanics, and any Pure that helps me with Mechanics.

DNS

2005-11-01T10:11:00.000Z

DNS is realy pissing me off, I've been using dyndns for around 10 months, and they have been fine, but nw they delete my host (dylunio.homelinux.com) almost weekly for `abuse`, which is updating to regulary, okay, but I don't have any deamons installed to update...so how the hell am I updating?

Now, I've re-setup the host, and the info is all fine, but it will not forward to my IP address, thus no-one car reach my server, which is a bit annoying.

C

2005-10-31T21:04:00.000Z

Since I already know a scripting language (bash), and learning another like perl would be cool, but it's not the same as learning a compiled language, so I'm trying to learn C, which is a bit weird but it does seem mostly logical. I've looked through the Strathclyde ITS tutorial which is good at the basics, but is a bit low on the examples of scripts one could use and modify for ones own use. So I'm out hunting more tutorials, since I'd love to get proficient in C, so that way I'll be some help with more of the Jedi/GNU project as well as be able to write programs for the odd task on my computer.

So far I can just about write the following off the top of my head:

#include 

main()
{     int number;

      printf("Type a number: ");
      scanf("%d", &number);
      printf("You typed %d", number);
}

Programming's for the lazy ...(that's a good thing)

2005-10-28T00:46:00.000Z

I've started to look at the Lama Book I got when in Oxford last. It's gotten me thinking, since the best way to be good at anything is practice, be it the piano (which I need to practice much more), or a new programming language, since if you don't use it, you'll loose it.
The main problem I've come accross with this, is that I never have any idea of what to write, since I'm not the laziest person on the planet, and we all know lazy people are good programmers, since why write the C compiler instead of imputing everything in binary?...because we're lazy. The best fruit of my laizyness so far has been fs-make, which is there because I could never remember how the file formats were for fs files, and I didn't want to be checking the website every two minutes. So when it commes to things computer-ish, I'm not very lazy...I should be though so that I spend time writing neat little scripts that are probably usless to others...but who cares it it's usful to them?
O well I must think of a few projects to have a bash (or a perl :P) at so I keep up my practice, ext2ext wasn't even born of my own lazyness, it was born of dressod_in_blacks laziness when it came to renaming his .mp3's into .jpg for downloading music in school....

o well, happy scripting...

fs-make

2005-10-25T17:10:00.000Z

I had a bash at fs-make today and I added the stuff to echo the xml stuff into a file, hopfully it ain't to crappy

geta

2005-10-23T18:35:00.002Z

I finnished the first incarnation of my geta today:

I need to totaly re-do the straps since the current ones are a bit thin and loose, though they are rather cool to walk in.

Don Carlos

2005-10-22T22:32:00.000Z

I went to the opera tonight, to see a WNO production of Don Carlos. I enjoied the night and I must say the soprano from China was amazing, her diction and voice were second to none, as well as her, the choir was great as well, giving an energy to the singing to match the energy in Verdi's score.

We got a new dvd player today *jumps with joy* and now it plays dvd's without jupming all over the place, and it should also be able to play reigion one ntsc disks, which is rather usful since it lets me import flicks form the States.

HALFTERM

2005-10-21T19:58:00.000Z

Halfterm started today, so 10 days without school, but plenty of schoolwork :B
Most of today I computed, procrastinaded, watched animed or worked with wood. For computing I learnt more bash, for procrastinating I played `SuperTux`, for anime I watched the second volume of Fruits Basket, and for working with wood I started making a pair of wooden geta, of which I'll post pics of when I'm done.

gentoo hicough

2005-10-20T16:33:00.000Z

I had a slight gentoo hicough today today, it booted but it couldn't find any /dev save the root partition, so that also ment no /dev/console etc.

I fixed the issue by booting Slax, chrooting gentoo, syncing portage, and then updating world (while I was playing kbounceballs). I think the problem was down to having emerge --sync && emerge -uD world last night, as well as then runnig etc-update I updated the file in /etc, and I think this was the problem, since it regarded udev, which was updated today when I emerged -uD world, so I had a config file for a newer udev than I had...or something like that.

Hope your all having fun, I've just started half term break, so I hope to do some things, I might even go to Cambridge, though I dunno.

lambda = ay/D

2005-10-19T15:39:00.000Z

Bledd was back today...so at last we got a geography lesson that wasn't `teach yourself`. Though he sent us back to the 6th form room in the first lesson so that he could `read over our files`, though it seemed that he'd done as he'd said by the fourth lesson, he didn't even go `to photocopy` during it, which is a rare occurance, though we did have an exam questin to awnswere.
In phys we carried on with light etc, with things such as the work of Thomas Young. While Pricy was holding a razor blade in his hand describing how he made a slight grove in a slide, he almost fell off his stool, which as it's Pricy is rather humorous.
Apparently there's a 6th form christmas bash at the start of December. Since it's on a Wednesday night, I dunno how many people will be in school the following day. Despite booking a nice place for it, it seems that we're having a buffet, and a DJ, I'd have much prefered a three course meal and a jazz band, a buffet and DJ is slumming it rather. The problem is that it seems to be formal, so I'll have to procure some clothing for the event from somewere.

Estroniaid

2005-10-17T19:32:00.000Z

Wyddwch erioed byth yw bod yn estron. Mae'r ysgol yn ffordd da o ddysgu bod yn estron. Chi byth yn teimlo fel bod yna neb arallyr un lamda a chi. Maent yn mynd trwy eu bywyd, ac mae eu bywydau nhw mor estron i chi...y pethau maent yn eu gwneud, y pethau maent yn ei hoffi, y pethau maent yn eu ffindio'n ddoniol. Mae'r holl pethau yma'n estron i'r estron. Taw beth....

Azumi

2005-10-16T19:18:00.000Z

Gwyliais i Azumi yn ystod y wythnos, stori am `assasins` sydd yn Siapan sydd wedi ymarfer cydol eu oes i lladd cadfridogion sydd am creu rhyfeloedd. Mae braidd yn waedlyd gan ei fod yn oes y Samurai, and felly mae na llawer o gleddyfau yn mynd trwy cnawd. Mae'n plot yn eithaf sych, ond mae Aya Ueto yn eithaf kawaii ^_^

Mi oedd Zoolander ar y box neithiwr, braidd yn ddoniol, gyda male model oedd di colli ei goron yn cael ei brainwashio gan pobl ffasiwn i lladd prif weinidog Malaysia sydd am cau lawr y `sweat shops`. Neges dda tu ol i'r stwff ddigri.

Hmm...strange things.

2005-10-12T19:55:00.000Z

Some rather strange things were happening today between Toride and Torakuta. I also found out that Yuki is off with the mumps, let's hope she's back soon.

Oh and this is my D&T project:

Merkel to be Chancellor

2005-10-10T18:36:00.000Z

It seems that Ms.Merkel, is to be Genmany's newest Chancellor. After wrangling with the former Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, and his party the SPD, it seems that Merkel gets to be the chancellor, though her CDU party is he have less Ministers than the SDP. The full story...

I started assembling my lamp for D&T today, it's going...erm...okay, though it's looking a bit rough at the moment.

I gave my first maths lesson today, to some kid from year 7. His maths was rather good, and I hope I helped somehow...heh. Save that we carried on with our pur and stat math as per usual, though due to a huge drowsiness I did almost no work.

I was supprised to see lfdo go down today, but hey, I'm amazed how it's up theway it's almost always up, J. does a good job of the forums.
Not much else has been a happening save the fart I've started writing things for the english section of my website.

Chobits

2005-10-09T16:50:00.000Z

While in Llandudno over the weekend, I managed to buy a couple of volumes of Chobits from the bookshop there, since I can't get manga in my home city. So since they didn't have Love Hina volume 4, I thought I'd continue the Chobits series with vol.2 & 3.

The narative is getting more interesting, with Chi's history and `other` comming to light, as well as the antics of Hideki's teacher Ms.Shimizu. The way Chi seems an inocent though slightly dumb persocom, thoug still has a darker streak to her is interesting.
I like CLAMP's work with this manga, and will be looking out for titles in other genrers by them.

Bleach #51 came out so I BT'd, and watched it. The fate of Rukia looks more doomed, but the infighting beteen the 13 Court Guardian Captians gives everything a sense of uncertainty, look forward for #52 to be fansubbed.

Indochine came with the Indie yesterday, I hope to be able to watch it this comming week.

cockpit gtk frontend

2005-10-08T09:27:00.000Z

I've been playing about with lakerdonald's gtk frontend for cockpit, and have done things like add selections to the menu for Shells and Groups, I was thinking it would be a good idea to put all the force-gettable shells in the drop-down list, and then the admin could pick one, and if it wasn't installed on the system already, the api would tell force-get to force-get that shell?

The only problem i'm having when it commes to glade, is when I build and then compile, the source, when I open `cockpit` all the windows in cockpit open up, instead of just the main one.

y=mx+c

2005-10-07T16:19:00.000Z

Hmm, wythnos arall lawr, n o wythnosau i fynd. Mae'r cylch y wythnos ysgol yn ddi ysbaid. Dwi newydd taro 3700 o `posts` ar lfdo, sy'n reit dda, dwi di gorfod lleuhau fy amser yn gwneud hyn yn ddiweddar fel fy mod i gyda amser i wneud gwaith.

Daeth y siwmperi yn yr ysgol heddi, edrych yn reit rhad, ond dyna ni. Dwi di bod yn anghofio fy nhei'n aml yn ddiweddar, ac anghofio, nid 'anghofio' dwi di bod. Wn i ddim rili pam ddylwn i gofio, dwi'n cofio trwsys a crys gan fy mod angen i cadw'n dwym, a dwi'n cofio siwmpwr i cadw'n dwym, ond gan fod tei'n hollol ddiwerth, dwi'm yn ei cofio, dydy ddim yn cadw fi'n dwym, dydy ddim yn gorchuddio darnau anwyddus or corff...felly beth di'r pwynt, mae'n peth hollol retrograde.

Nath llyfn `Advanced Physics` cyrraedd i mi heddi, mae'n edrych yn reit neis gyda lluniau lliw etc, sy'n well na beth sydd gennym ni o'r ysgol, a nath Pricy reconmendio fe, felly bydd yn dda mae'n siwr.

Gen i lai o waith penwythnos yma, mae Price di bod yn slacio, ond mae na eithaf lot o fecaneg i neud, *sigh*

I've had a firt bash at a favicon/small logo for Jedi GNU/Linux and have posted them on the forum

La Haine (Hate)

2005-10-06T20:08:00.000Z

I watched La Haine one I got home today since I was shatterd. It's a flick about the troubles between the working class Parisiens and the Police, or as they are known in the flick `Pigs`.
Due to the fact a youth from a rundown esatate is attacked by a policeman, violent riots start between the disafected youth angry at the hospitalasion of a friend and the police. During these riots buildings a torched and looted, and one of the police loose their gun...

As the flick continues, we are shown the poverty and the hardships the estates people are under, and the power of crime and the gun, for saving life, as well as destroying it.

It's a powerful flick, though not much happens, save running away from the police and beating people up. If you ever see it for rent or on offer, I'd get it, but otherwise I'd wait until it's on offer.

`The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down`

Hybu'r Gymraeg

2005-10-05T22:09:00.000Z

Mae angen i ni hybu'r Gymraeg yn yr ysgol. Felly mae Dyfrig di cael ni'n y chweched i trio feddwl am sut i wneud hyn ym mlwyddyn saith etc. Daeth Hime lan a syniad da o cael athrawon i ddarllen `chat up lines` i'r plant yn y cofrestr. Falla bydd chwanag yn ifanc i'r rhai ifanc, ond mi fyddain't yn ei chael hi'n ddoniol yn gweld rhai or athrawon yn eu deud nhw lol.

Tai, Gwaith, Iaith!
Meibion Glyndwr Am Byth!

sintheata1/sintheata2 = refraction index

2005-10-05T21:34:00.000Z

I got GITS SAC (vol.1) in the post today. For it's visual's I understand it's rave reviews, but I found the story rather dull. It might be due to the fact it was only the first four episodes, but compared with the first episodes of Fruits Basket, Love Hina, or Genshiken I wasn't urging for more. I've heard the flick is good, so I'll try that sometime, but for the meanwhile I'll hold out on getting the rest of the series, and move on to NGE or something.
I hope I'll have time to watch La Haine which also came. It's B&W despite the fact it's from 1995, but I believe this is to convay the depressing and violent nature of the narative.

`Wish You Were Here`

[Insert Good Heading Here]

2005-10-04T18:29:00.000Z

Not much has been happening, I've been listening to Pirnk Floyd's `I Wish you were here` album continusly, since without music I can't work for some reason.

I left my mech homework a bit late today and totaly fucked up one of the Q's, but hey, at least I learnt something from it - I hope. But now it's on the Pricy's physics homework, which consists of waves, waves and more waves, at least he didn't give us the A-level Q's to do since Pixi ain't in the Wednesday lesson, and Pricy wanted something for us to do in the lesson.

I've now started on my lamp for D&T, which is quite cool since we are alowed to use the chopsaw for the steel, though Deiniol keeps on fusing it, and is now scared of the thing. Nick is just being a bit of a prat, since he's not in the clique of GCSE D&T guys. This makes some situations rather funny since he doesn't know where things are, or how to do things, the rest of us BS him rather a lot due to this.

The server seems to be running fine, though it's using a fuckload of mem and no swap, I'll have to look into this, since I do expect some swapping.

`Welcome to the Machine`

Slight update to my website.

2005-10-03T18:14:00.000Z

I've been updating some of my website, and have made the /test directory live so that people can access it (hopefully). I've also made a portal page that gives a choice of language: Welsh or English, though the English site is undeveloped.

Ideas I've had for the website are to have a /projects page will info on my FOSS projects etc, I might even delve into php to get some more out of the website.

Otherwise, not much has been happening, I've downloaded laker's cockpit api demo, loked at it, but since it's in C it might as well be in French, which means, I can understand the jist of what's going on, just not quite how it's going on.

force-get ideas

2005-10-02T11:38:00.000Z

Just a few ideas I've had about force-get. One is so let users use it to install source packages that are not in the force-tree, or are older versions or what not. So people will be able to download foo.tar.gz and then force-get --option foo.tar.gz and then maybe incert the install command such as ./configure, make, and make install and then force-get would install foo. The problem is dependancies, since I don't know a way one could dynamacly descover the dependancies, this would be a problem. The only way around this is if there is a file with a list of dependancies so that force-get could try and get them. But the problem with this is that you have to have a package with a dep (or whatever the name would be) file in it so that force-get could find the deps, thus it defeats the purpose.

Another idea would be to have limited support for packages that are not in the force tree, where force-get would automaticly use '/configure && make && make install' but again this means some software will not install since not everything installes in such a way.

These ideas are slightly fruitless, but I was thinking about YaST, and the fact it could tell use which deps the third party rpm needed, and it had these deps in it's own reposotary, it couldn't install them automaticly, you had to do that, and one was in dependancy hell for a long time.

I think a good way to get rid of needing to be able to install third party source (e.g. not via the normal use of force-get) would be to develop ebuild2fs. I don't know if lakerdonald has started on this yet, if so I'd like to see it, though if he hasn't yet started I might play around with a version of my own.

`Have a Cigar`

Configging the penguine

2005-10-02T01:00:00.000Z

For the best part of today I've been configuring gentoo on my server. I've got apache working (mostly), and tomorrow I hope to remove any trailing glitches. I've been using shorewall as my firewall, it's quite nice, though it does have some perculiarities, such as apache will work only when it's on, and emerge can't get the files if it's on. So that's more fiddling for me...woo!

I ordered a few dvd's today, GITS - SAC vol.1, La Haine, and Azumi. They should arrive around midweek, the next chalange is to find time to watch them, hehe. I also today got "I wish you were here" by Pink Floyd, which is very good with `Shine on you crazy diamond`, I also got "The Band" by The Band, I got it seen they have been on BBC4 latly due to the fact the Beeb are having a Bob Dylan season, and The Band was one of his backing bands.

Catch 22 is rather an interesting book, I've read 119 pages so far, and the querky philosophy behind it's weird logic I find interesting, also the names, the fact there is a Major, who's real name is Major Major, thus he's Major Major Major, and the fact he can be a recluse on a camp of a few hundred people. I hope this quality continues through the book, and not taper towards the end like `Yn ol i Leifior` did.

I've been lazy today, doing my Gentooing, and then watching The Shawshank Redemption on the TV, (which is a realy good flick), thus I must work like a devil on hot coals tomorrow on my maths and D&T. The CAD for D&T is realy frikken hard, since the project consists of very onganic shapes, thus geting Pro-D to let me do what I want is going te be fun.

Gentooing my server - Finished

2005-10-01T00:17:00.000Z

Today after 4 and a half days of installing, gentoo is ready. Now all I have to do is settup the webserver apps and I'm away. The only hiccoughs I had was due to my stupidity, one was forgetting to change the fs types from ext3 to reiserfs in the fstab, and the other was to forget to change the keymap. But that wasn't hard to sort out.

I now have two gentoo installs under my belt, and I realy can't see what all the fuss about it being hard to install is. As long as one folows the handbook(s) one will be fine. I did have some teething circular dependancies in the Stage 1 install I did, but some googling sorted that out. But the stage 1/3 was much easier, it just takes about double the time, but as far as I can see it's install is much more stable, and I highly reconmend it over any other stage.

I got the last episode in the second season of Bleach today, and I look forward to seeing it once I'm happy with gentoo, then I'll be on to maths, maths and more maths ;-).

'Rhen Mr Price

2005-09-30T20:32:00.000Z

Mae Mr Price braidd yn ddoniol, dudodd heddi ei fod wedi bod yn reit "easy going" gyda volume y gwaith cartre oeddwn ni'n cael ganddo...jeez, ar hyn o bryd dwi'n cael y mwyaf o waith ganddo e, mae'n fwy na Stats, Pur wedi rhoi at ei gylydd, lol.
Aeth y bore coffi'n reit dda gan codi tua 96 o bunnoedd, sy'n well na naeth 6-1 bl diwethaf :-) Dwi'n gobeithio nad wyf wedi gwenwyno gormod o bobl gyda fy nhacennau i, ond taw beth.
Tybed pwy fydd yn cael ei rhoi ar cyngor yr ysgol, mwy na thebyg bydd Oriana-chan, a Yuki ar y peth, falle hyd yn oed finnau, hmm, wn i ddim oes bydd na'n dda, fallau bydd yn rhoi rwbeth i mi wneud gyda'm amser mynpwyol yn yr ysgol.
Heh, mi oedd Yuki a Hime'n edrych yn eithaf shoujo-ai -esque wedi cinio heddi, ond dyna sut yw nhw gyda bron pawb lol. Mae'n dda gweld fod cylchau ffrindiau'n newid chwanag a phopeth.

Gentooing my server - Part 5

2005-09-30T17:39:00.000Z

At the moment I'm on the second of the current emerge -e system, and that's after 4 days now. Hopfuly it will be finnished tonight or by tomorow morning so that I can setup the kernel etc. tomorrow. It's gone well so far, with no hitches, so let's hope the whole thing will go smoothly. One great thing I've discovered doing this install is to do it via ssh. That way all I have to do is bootup the gentoo cd, and then start sshd and I can then go over to this computer and continue with the install. This makes it easier do to the fact I now can read Bob P's guide straight from the internet and not have to print it; it also makes finding the packages to download on the mirrors much easier.

The coffee morning went down a treat today at school, and we raised over 90pounds for the MacMillan Cancer charity. Even my botched cooking of chocolate brownies was given praise, which to be honest was a shock -- thank god no one saw me cooking them ;-)

Save gentooing my server I hope to the load of homewor I now have, but at least none of it's stats and the physics Q's look interesting.

Gentooing my server - Part 4

2005-09-29T17:29:00.000Z

3 days down, and the install is currently rebuilding the toolkit (again), and then twice emerging an emptytree system, but this time it's got updated USE flags, and so far it seems fine.
I've found that (so far) doing the 1/3 stage install is much better than the stage 1 since you start off with the stage three tarball and then play with it so you get optimization auf a stage 1 install. You get a stability inprovment over a normal stage one install because you start with a stage 3 tarball. I remember things like dependancy loops and the emerge -e system just dying on me when I was doing my stage one, none of these have happened so far with the 1/3 install. The only qualm I have is that it takes AGES to do, I know that might just be because it's a PII, but the fact is that you have to emerge -e system twice etc. to make sure everying is complied against the same version of gcc etc. So in general it takes a long time on any system. If I'm lucky I'll be able to start compiling the kernel sometime over the weekend.

Meddyliau

2005-09-28T20:05:00.000Z

Dwi di cael fy nraftio i mewn i gwneud brownies siocled ar gyfer y bore coffi dydd gwener, diolch byth fy mod i'n gallu eu gwneud nhw :-)

Er hynny mae Ffiseg di dod chydig yn annoying, does gen i ddim problem gyda'r gwersi, a does gen i ddim problem gyda'r gwaith ei hyn gyda'r gwaith cartref, ond mae'n annoying cael pawb yn gofyn i mi am help gyda'i gwaith gartre, jest oherwydd dwi'n deall mwy na rhai. Oherwydd hyn doedd gen i ddim amser i neud llawer o waith Daearyddiaeth sydd angen ei wneud *sigh* falla bydd gennym well siawns yfory o gwneud fy gwaith Daearyddiaeth.

Mae'r holl gwaith dwi di bod yn neud ar hyn o bryd yn ddiddorol, yn enwedig y Ffis, Maths Pur, a'r Maths Mecaneg. Dydy Stats ddim more ddiddorol, ond mae'n syniad i mi adolygu heno tuag at y prawf ar debygolrwydd yfory.

Mae'r Dirprwy di trefnu peth i'w wneud gyda hybu'r Gymreag yn yr ysgol, oeddwn gyda syniad o efallau cael `English (k)Not` i'r rhai sy'n siadad saesneg. Hmm... mae'r gentoo install yn cario ymlean fel arfer, a bydd yn mynd am tua wythnos mwy na thebyg.

Hwyl am nawr.

Gentooing my server - Part 3

2005-09-28T17:28:00.000Z

Okay, two days down, still a few more to go. So far I've fixed up the partitions, before downloading a stage three tarball and portage to the new partitions. Then I've chrooted in, setup the date and time, before writing an initial make.conf. After this I enabled gcc4.4, and synced portage. Once this was done I built the system toolkit with gcc 3.35, then I selected gcc 3.44 as the default C compiler, before rebuilding the toolkit with gcc 3.44. Once that was done I updated the Cflags in make.conf before emergeing the system twice. I am currently ~17% into the second emerge of the system. Th next stage is to update the use flags in the make.conf before, again emergeing the system twice.
Once that's done I have to prune the old version of gcc and then update the world. The nice thing about a Gentoo install is that it takes time, but it doesn't take up much of ones own time, since you can just leave it compiling in the corner of the room, while you post on your blog or something.

Gentooing my server - Part 2

2005-09-27T16:16:00.000Z

Ok, it's been 24 hours now since I started installing. Rebuilding the toolkit took most of the day, and now I'm ~5% into emergeing -e system. Once that's oult of the way I still have a fair few things to do before I can install the kernel, but let's hope it'll be done by the end of the week. Between BobP's guide on the Gentoo forums, and the standard Gentoo handbook the install hasn't taken up to much of my time, which is good since the number of fundamental frequencies and phase differences I must find for physics is immense.

Gentooing my server - Part 1

2005-09-27T06:59:00.000Z

I started my stage 1/3 install of Gentoo yesterday evening on my PII, and so far it's taken 13 and a half hours. As so far I've built the system toolkit, as well as configured gcc, so that I use 3.44 not 3.35. I'm currently rebuilding the system toolkit, so that it's compiled with gcc-3.44 not 3.35, so that should have finnished by the time I'm back from school (with any luck). I hope all this time is worth it, though I'd have thought the learning curve is worth it even though it may not work.

I'll update as the install goes on, as well as post any problems/resolutions with the install.

Gentooing my server.

2005-09-25T07:42:00.000Z

Since I got my network card as well as my network cable yesterday, I hope to start installing Gentoo stage 3/1 on my dad's old P2, and then use it as a web and rsync server. The server will be replacing the server capabilities of this computer (hosting my crappy site), as well as hopfully running the rsync needed for force-get, so that yet again we will be able to

force-get --sync && force-get foo

Though, I must finnish my ton of homework before I do that.

curses

2005-09-23T18:39:00.000Z

For the last couple of days I've been playing with the curses C library...and it's been interesting to say the least (I don't know why it uses y,x instead of the more standard x,y). But save that I've finnaly got my new calculator for school...all 35 quid worth of it, that's rather expencive one might think, but man this calculator is neat, no longer will I have to do simultaeous equations by hand (save in the C1 module). It's come with a tome of a handbook...which I'll have fun reading over the weekend so that I learn how to use it's multitude of functions.

I have rather a lot of work to do this weekend, between the 9 maths lessons I have each week, and the physics work on waves that we're doing. I might even bring out TeX so that I can print out some neat equations, instead of the scrawls in my notes.

So far, in the last three weeks of school I've been given 5 textbooks, which ain't too bad, though the two CBAC ones for maths (espicialy the Stats one), are rather anorexic, and written in a confusing way, the other three books are deicent tomes that we can learn something from, which is important for Geography especialy since Bledd the teacher is off until half term with an operation, and we are not getting a geography teacher in his place. Other than this things are going ok in school, 6-1, and 6-2 now mix more which is nice and the grand segregations of 6-1/6-2 and males/females is corroding.

I'm comming to the end of season 2 of Bleach, which is a pitty, but some of the background narative has picked up, and the death of a few Captins have been interesting.

Lunchtime thoughts

2005-09-21T16:33:00.000Z

Just before lunch today I read lakerdonald's latest post, and then over lunch I thought about cockpit etc.

I came up with a few random ideas. I was thinking of the google and beagle desktop search toolabars, and then I thought, why not have one for force-get or cockpit? which might have intergated beagle support, as well as list the current song playing and time (or something). So the toolbar could be open and at any time you could force-get a program. Of cource this will create some problems when it comes to users installing things...since they don't have access to /usr /etc and so forth, so why not alow each user to install programs to his or her home directory. So each user would have a ~/.force/ directory with configuration files for force get in it (maybe even certain compilation options). Thus this way each user could install his or her own programs without needing the admin to help them and also while not messing up any other part of the filetree save their home directory.

Another idea is, once you install e.g. `Samba` the `Configure Samba` option will be available in the cockpit, but if it is not installed...you will not be given an option to configure it.

But I think it is inportant for cockpit and jedi to alow the user to edit the files manualy and it will work...not like the situation with SuSE and YaST.

Anyhoo..these are just some ideas...

Yr henaint yn dod.

2005-09-19T19:34:00.000Z

Auf fy nhad a fy nhadcu, dwi'n dueddol o fod yr un tawel yn yr ysgol. Y rheswm? dwi'n ffindio lot or plant yn boen. Mae llawer yn siarad tripe ac gyda dim diddordeb mewn unrywbeth diddorol (yn fy marn i ;-)), gewch chi ddim dadl dda am y problemau economaidd yn yr Almaen, na Mugabe yn Zimbabwe a pa mor anheg ydyw ar pobl Palisteina. Yr unig peth sy'n eu ddiddori hwy yw cylchgronnau twp, chwarae'n bwytu. Dwi'n lwcus i cael siarad ag unrywun, mae Sara'n digon neis i siarad gyda fi am chydig ar MSN, ond mae siarag gydo unrywun yn yr ysgol yn anodd, dwi'n gyffyrddus yn siarad gyda'r bechgyn...ond dydw i ddim yn meddwl eu bod yn son am unrhywbeth ddiddorol; tra fod siarad gyda'r merched yn golygu ddim yn gwybod beth i siarad amdano ond yna, ond mae'n ddiddorol os dwi'n gallu cael sgwrs gan eu bod yn pobl mwy ddidorol ar y cyfan. Felly rhwng y `carreg ar lle caled` ydwyf. Ond y peth od ydy...os yw'r pobl yn acedemyddion neu pobl dros 21 mae'n hawdd i mi siarad gyda hwy. Falla dwi'n jest rhy fyssi, ond dwi'n findio e'n ddiddorol i gallu siarad am pethau fel gwleidyddiaeth a fod yn socio-liberal etc. oedd dweu fy mod yn anfyddiwr yn creu digon o stwr yn ei hyn *sigh*.

Wrth edrych ar y plant yn yr ysgol, mae yna rhai diddorol, ond os ydyn't maen't hefyd yn gallu bod yn gas, neu ddim yn fy hoffi neu wbath, ond mae'r mwyafrif yn jest siarad a gwneud tripe. Dwi'n gobeithio bydd yna rhai cyfarfodydd NWLUG i nadu mi fynd yn wallgo. Ond mae'r pobl yn yn yr ysgol mor fucking annoying weithiau...fel Iwan D. etc. yn deud fy mod i'n darllen "Japanese pr0n" pan oeddwn i'n darllen manga, taw beth...falla bydd y fath darlun ohonaf yn dda i mi...hehe. Piti does yna ddim cymdeithasau neu unrywbeth yn lleol...yr oll sydd i weld hyd y gwn i yw WI a "Band" (Borth).

Bleh...dwi'n ces yn dydw...heh...dylai neud rwbeth amdano...ond dyna fe...bydd rwbeth yn digwydd rwbryd.

Sorry for the english readers of this post...time for you to learn Welsh ;-)

cold

2005-09-16T20:36:00.000Z

I have a bloody cold, so there is only one thing for it: a hot whisky.

ext2ext 0.1 arrives

2005-09-10T11:12:00.000Z

Well this morning I finnished the first release of ext2ext. So as I said before it changes extentions on specific files or the extentions of files in a directory. It currently can't remove an extention, and it can't give an extention to a directory of files who don't have an extention.

So since it's GPL your welcome to play with it.

ext2ext

ext2ext

2005-09-09T21:10:00.000Z

I've rechristened (the now feature not-so-poor) pseudojpg: ext2ext which is basically `extention to extention' since it can replace one extention with another in a file or a whole directory. It can also give a specific file which has no extention an extention (e.g. foo becomes foo.txt), though this feature lacks being able to convert files within other directories. This is the basic usage:

Code:

Help:

ext2ext [options] [oldextention] newextention file

ext2ext [options] oldextention newextention directory

Options:

--help :: Get this help message

(thank lakerdonald's bb2html for the Code: table)
I hope to release a less buggy ext2ext than there is at the moment sometime this weekend.

pseudojpg

2005-09-07T21:03:00.000Z

Since I was board today I bashed out pseudojpg. It's a program that changes the the end of any .mp3 file into .jpg (so foo.mp3 turnes into foo.jpg), it can also rename directories full of mp3's. Why do we need such a program? well it's so that you can let people download mp3 files at places which block any file ending with .mp3. Mplayer will play the renamed .jpg files the same as if they were .mp3 since all that's changed is the name. If you want to play with it grab it from here.

Nol yn yr ysgol (Back at school)

2005-09-06T19:32:00.000Z

Well, I went back to school yesterday after the summer holidays...and you've guessed it, the first lesson was how to ware a tie. Yup a tie, the 6th form school uniform is VERY retrograde. Oh well, having tie sucks, but hey some of the girls look cute ;)

I've been getting up early to learn about the in's and out's of the Bourne again shell...it's rather interseting all the things I've known were there but not how to use...and the things I didn't know were there at all. Well all I have to do now is to think of something useful to do with all this gained knowlage...heh I'm crap of thinking of ideas for useful programs...maybe mostly since I see that there is a program that does somethig similer already...but hey one sees tonnes of look-alike projects on SourceForge...so I may be unimaginative and nick someone else is idea ;).

After a few cock-ups I looks like I'll be doing my Maths A level in a year...so w00t! One teacher told me that I'd have no social life...but hey, what's the diference to the life I now leed (Yup me life is that crap :P).

Mr.Roberts went over our D&T course...which consists of two small projects, one big project, an exam and work experience for AS, and a big project and an exam for the full A level. At the moment I'm thinking of making some kind of bookshelf in an organic design...or somethig. I did think of a trying to think of an inovetive way of cooling computers...but I thought that that was a bit...well...not me at this time, since I like wood a lot, and I have too many cases as it is; I might make some cooling system on a spare case I have...or something.

Since I only had one lesson today I spent the morning and lunch reading the Indi, Love Hina and Chobits as well as `Yn ol i Leifior' by Islwyn Ffowc Elis.

Oxford

2005-09-03T17:45:00.000Z

I highly reconmend visiting Oxford, it is a very tastful place. Staying at Keble Collage gave me an insight into how the collages are, though I must admit that it's chaple is rather high chirch for my liking. But I got to go and see other collages such as Maudlen, Christ Chirch, St.John's and of course Jesus. Of all the collages I must say that I thought Jesus was the best, though Maudlen was rather close with it's dearpark and extencive grounds.

The bookshops in Oxford are great. Blackwell's has a huge veriaty of books on computing, with a whole 3 bookcases dedicated to O'Reilly -- out of which I baught `The Lama Book'. Boarders bookshop has a good choice of manga... four bookcases full, though they didn't have all the titles I was looking for, I managed to browse at my lesiure, eventually I came out with a volume of Chobits. We'll have to see if Cambridge can have such a good choice when it comes to books.

Well this it my summer holiday comming to an end...and like every year one feels like he has wasted it, though I did find some of it rather tastful, such as the trips to Bern and Oxford.

With the new school year I will try to keep up with my computing as well as not fail in my education...

hmm....got my GCSE's

2005-08-31T20:11:00.000Z

Well I now have my General Certificate is Secondary Education, it all I got 6 A* grades, and 4 A grades, though I will not bore you with the details.

Most of today I have beeing typing up the Linux Pocket Guide book using the LaTeX markup language. It's not the most obvious language, but the way it handles some things like footnotes and content lists put WYSIWYG word processors such as MS Word and OpenOffice to shame. I do reconmend that you try it out, since If X ever fails and you need to get that essay in by tomorrow...it'll save you.

Other than this I have been reading up on the bourne again shell, as well as learnig some C...though I don't think I'm very good at it. Over this holiday I have seen a few new anime and got my first manga. I have seen fansubbed series of Haibane Renmei, and Maria-sama ga Miteru -- both were very good. I also have bought the whole Fruits Basket series and also enjoieded that a lot. All these anime concentrate on the people and the way people behave and how diferent thef react to diferent people and situations. The manga I got was the first two volumes in the Love Hina series.

I am off to visit Oxford tomorrow, and I hope it will be interesting.

Got gentoo

2005-07-01T17:05:00.000Z

During my gcse's I installed gentoo, it was real fun, I made a stage 1 on my first attempt. I't seems a neat distro and the package managment is great. I just 'emerge foo' and foo will install.

not much

2005-05-15T11:41:00.000Z

Not much has been hapening lately, Jedi GNU/Linux 0.1.0 came out on time, and works ok, but it is still chroot only. Buh Andy is working on 0.2.0 at the moment as well. Force-get is coming along now too, about 16 packages at last count. Also force-get has a source-forge site and listing which is good.

I'm going to be doing my GCSE's soon (oh, smeg!), wish me luck ;)

Dvorak Keyboard

2005-04-10T12:03:00.000Z

This week I took the weird step of switching to the dvorak keybored layout. See this pic:

Fun layout aint it :)

Well to switch the CLI to dvorak in Linux type:
loadkeys dvorak
and if you want to change X use dvorak instead of us or uk in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Scroll Wheel in Slack...

2005-03-16T22:30:00.000Z

I couldn't get my scroll wheel to work in slack, so I did some editing of my xorg.conf file, nothing worked untill I copied a few lines form my SuSE XF86Conf file, Slack has scroll working with:
Driver "mouse"
Identifier "Mouse1"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"
Option "Name" "Autodetection"
Option "Protocol" "explorerps/2"
Option "Vendor" "Sysp"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"

Distro's

2005-03-16T22:29:00.000Z

I've been doing a lot of distro moving. Over the weekend I installed Yoper, but wanted more partitions, but with the old settup this was impossible, so I re-formatted the hard drive with 9 nice partitions :-)

So with these partitions I had used suse to settup (partition majic wasn't working, I have a suse 9.2 personnal partition, a Slackware 10 partition, and a Ubuntu 4.10 partition. I'm using fluxbox with Slackware at the moment, which is very nice (i used slapt-get to update it from 0.1.14, to 0.9.12, a big jump, and well worth it. An ubuntu is lingering in the background, since I have yet to get it to fully work because it will noc accept my passwords :-(.
I will instal Yoper (again) on my system over the weekend, and also fix Ububtu.
Jedi 0.0.4-2 is coming out today :)

One day 'till I do my installs of Yoper, and Slackware

2005-03-11T17:20:00.000Z

Tomorow I will re-settup my partitions so that I can install a fe new distros, Yoper, and Slaclware for sure, and maybe even ubuntu since I have 10 install disks for it :-)

I got irssi working in jedi today with
tar -xzvf irssi-0.8.9.tar.gz
cd irssi-0.8.9
./configure && make && make install
since it works I am happy, and have made a .fs file for it.

Problems with X in jedi

2005-03-09T23:15:00.000Z

Compiling X in jedi has failed with the error:

make[4]: *** [xcursorgen.o] Error 1
make[4]: Leaving directory '/opt/force/packages/X11R6.8.1/xc/programs/xcursorgen'
make[3]: *** [all] Error 2
make[3]: Leaving directory '/opt/force/packages/X11R6.8.1/xc/programs'
make[2]: *** [all] Error 2
make[2]: Leaving directory '/opt/force/packages/X11R6.8.1/xc'
make[1]: *** [World] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory '/opt/force/packages/X11R6.8.1/xc'
make: *** [World] Error 2

Hopefully laker can sort this problem out :-)

Playing with jedilinux

2005-03-09T23:02:00.000Z

Since SuSE is very borked, I've been playing with jedilinux today, looks a very promising dirstro, especialy with its force-get system. I've force-get[ed] bash, gcc, autoconf, automake, as well as other things on the force-get list, and I'm currently compiling X, its gon over 45 minutes so far, so I hope it works.

I'm planing to do all my partition and distro juggaling on Saturday, after hopefully finnishing my English coursework, and a bunch of homeworks. I'm trying to think if there is time to install gentoo, but I'm not sure at the mo', o well I will at least install it in the Summer :)

Giving up on libperl and SuSE

2005-03-09T16:03:00.000Z

I've given up on libperl and SuSE, I'll keep my SuSE partition though, but just make it smaller, and make a few logical partitions in the 'gap'. I'm thinking about installing Yoper, Ubuntu, Jedi (which has a pertition allready), SuSE as a boot/backup partition.

Jedi's going well, I've got force-get working (with a lot of help from lakerdonald). I will try and give it vmlinuz and initrd files so I can boot it off grub somtime this week.

jediliunx

2005-03-08T20:52:00.000Z

Been trying to setup my jedilinux which I've put on hda4, I'm having trouble with the fact I have dhcp internet conection, si I can't do force-get :-( Hopfully Laker will be online tonight to give help.

Regarding SuSE, I'm going to leave it as it is for the time being, and make it a smaller partition, then I'm going to add a bunch of other partitions, logical most likly in the 'gap', and just use SuSE as a thing to boot via GrUB, since I like the SuSE settup of the bootloader so much.

Yet another day without libperl.so....

2005-03-08T17:21:00.000Z

I have yet to find a source copy of libperl, but I'll find it, I'm also starting to settup jedilinux :)

libperl is still being a pain in the &@#!...

2005-03-07T23:56:00.000Z

Ok, I've downloaded irssi rpm, that didn't work, sdousey was kind enough to put perl-5.8.5 up for download, but installing it I get an error saying it is already installed :S.

It is a real pain, I'm starting to think of trying another distro... yes it is that problematic.

Posted a few Q's...

2005-03-07T21:21:00.000Z

Since Lakers suggestion didn't work, I've posted to that effect on the forums, and I look forward for an awnser, if I don't get one I'll have to re-install libperl.so from scrach.

Messed up SuSE...

2005-03-07T16:23:00.000Z

Yesterday I managed to mess up SuSE (life is great ain't it), by ignoring a few deps when I was doing a few YaST installs, in the future, source only I think.

Laker has given me some advise on how to fix my libperl, which has borked, and sdousley has sent me his libperl setup, so it's looking better;

dylunio