Moving Blogs

I’ve had enough of wordpress now and so I decided to move to blogger (the google service) and buy myself a nice domain name. I’ve got www.xrob.eu now so you can visit my blog there. WordPress wanted to charge me an additional $10 a year to link this blog to my domain so that’s why I’m switching blogging engines. I’m still going to leave this blog up here however so that people can continue to visit and look at the couple of tutorials and articles that people frequent. If you can’t access www.xrob.eu just yet don’t worry, it’s probably just the DNS propagating around the internet.

A Few Problems with School IT departments

I’d like to begin this post by saying that I have nothing against individual IT departments but I direct this post primarily at the whole of the school-focused IT industry; I do this because I feel that school IT departments simply follow by example (the example being that of what is set by the IT industry). Although I think that it is mainly the IT industries fault individual school’s IT departments are not entirely blame-free as they collectively have done what they’ve been told.

I’m going to break this down into 5 sections and discuss each individually and then come to a conclusion; the sections will be: Computer Hardware, Networking Solutions, Choice of Student’s Software, Use of Monitoring ‘Spy’ Software and Communication with Students.

The UK Government’s Agressive Advertising Campaign

More than ever now you see and hear benefit fraud adverts on the TV and on the radio warning people about Benefit fraud. Every day on my bus to school I see an advert giving me a number to call to inform the Government about any ‘benefit cheats’ that I know of and it seems like a campaign of terror by the government to stop people who they consider to be ‘benefit fraudsters’.

Update

Well, It appears that I haven’t posted a blog post in a while so I’ll just post an update since I last posted .

Programmer Sex

So…. I’m sitting around in #teenlug (irc.freenode.net) and I decide that I want to piss fophillips off … so I strike up a conversation about how stupidly laborious C is as compared to Ruby and it suddenly strikes me! Programming languages are a lot like sex…

German Exchange

Well, the German exchange looms closer than ever now for me, I leave on Wednesday flying from Birmingham to Dusseldorf and then going on to Bochum. I think I might die on it because it seems that we’re constantly doing so much…

Wednesday: Get up at 4AM, go to Birmingham by train, go by plane to Dusseldorf and then by train to Bochum. Meet host families and listen to a really long (most probably boring) speech. Then we’re going on to see a musical; “Starlight Express” – I’ve heard it’s good but it’s 3 hours long and finshed at 21:30 – I think I might fall asleep in the middle of it. That’ll probably be atleast an 18 hour day at least :/.

Thursday: We’re going to Cologne (Koln) and going on a tour of the cathedrals and museums.

Friday: Following our exchange partners around school for the day and perhaps going to Hattingen

Saturday: Going to a football match – VfL Bochum vs. FC Bayern Munich

Sunday: Whatever the host family wants me to do

Monday: Following exchange partners around school and bowling in the evening

Tuesday: Following exchange parners around school again and then going home on the train and then plane and then train again

I am going to die!

Gnome Applications In Menu Vanish

So I performed a full system a few weeks back and gnome was upgraded but something went wrong; I logged in and loads of stuff was broken (I ended up using XFCE). Thankfully another full system upgrade (up to gnome 2.2) fixed a lot of the issues but left me with one problem. There were no applications in the application menu on the gnome panel! ARGH!!!! After a hour or so of searching and messing around I realised that the problem hinged on a file, /etc/xdm/menu/applications.menu. It turned out that the applications.menu should also have been in ~/.config/menu. So I copied it and chown’ed it to my user and it all worked fine

Code:

cp /etc/xdm/menu/applications.menu ~/.config/menu && sudo chown $(whoami) ~/.config/menu/applications.menu

Zim – A Desktop Wiki

In the past couple of days I discovered Zim a new kind of wiki (still in beta) that can be used on the desktop. I tried it out and have decided to use it to write my school notes in for the next year (starting 4th sep).

I love rowing

It’s true, I love rowing, it’s fantastic. Just got out on the water today for the first time in about 2 months and it was bloody great. Got my technique going well again and shocked my coach a bit (it was bloody awful at the beginning).  I just need to get to work on the fitness side of things; although I might just leave it until winter training this year and get it going then. I think that I’ll be trying to get into the novice eight next year for when they go to tideway. If I can nail the whole fitness thing then I think I have a shot at being a good rower – I have been told before that I would make a very good one if I lost some weight.

Today was a beautiful day to be on the water, a nice strong current to be fighting against, a cooling breeze and a nice bright sun – the only real annoyance was the fishermen and their lines. I think that soon I’ll really be needing to lose some weight otherwise I won’t be able to go out in my single anymore :\.

I also think that I need to improve my fitness so that I can start winning some regattas so that I can use rowing as a leverage to get into Uni in a few years. Maybe I  should start now – summer hols – lots of free time.

Teen LUG!

Well, Teen LUG is a go go! Zach (formerly of linuxteens.com) has setup the website TeenLUG.com for all you Teen Linux enthusiasts out there! Get onto it, populate it, test it, love it! Unlike linuxteens.com, TeenLUG has more freedom to operate thanks to the admin Zach finding the hosting and buying the domain so the website isn’t under control of the evil macteens overlords! YAY for TeenLUG!