Havent been up to much at the weekend – went out on Saturday night to The Spot with everyone before me and Fran came back to mine about midnight. Didnt do much Sunday, watched MOTD, UFC and had Sunday dinner mainly.

Spent Monday after work installing RHEL 5 on my spare machine – very nice O/S, but confusing to get used to- especially SAMBA – my god is it confusing. Maybe a RHEL Engineer out there reading this could comment – but why, when i create my samba share, open the firewall ports, create username/groups, permissions, etc does it still come up as “192.168.1.6/guest” as username when i try and mount a share, and i cant edit the username field. This is irritating the crap out of me lol. Aside from that, its a very robust OS, and second to NONE when it comes to driver support – absolutely superb. 8/10 so far.

Aside from geeking it up, i havent done much really. I bought 2 Gigabit NIC cards and a 5 Port Gigabit switch, so my network is now fully 1000Mbps Full, which is nice Ive also been working on creating a security box, using PF Sense, a Linux distro, which is verrrry cool, along with SmoothWall 3.0, another sweet OS. These can do IPS/IDS, Firewall, NAT, IM Logging, Email logging etc. Secure to the max.

The usual stuff is planned for the weekend- im going out tonight with everyone, staying at Frans, same again Friday night after work, then the rugby is on Saturday and ill probably head out Saturday night and spent Sunday in bed recovering! Action packed – but we love it.

Have just noticed that 90% of my posts start with “well..” lol, so im going to try and mix it up!

So, i havent done much this week really. Except oh yeah, build an awesome new gaming PC, spec as follows:-

Intel Q6600 G0 Stepping, Gigabyte P35-DS3P Motherboard, 4GB OCZ PC2-6400 RAM, XFX GeForce 8800GT, Antec Nine Hundred Gaming Case, Coolermaster 550W Modular PSU!

All in all it is a very good, very fast machine which makes me happy Im retiring my old faithful to be a potential solaris box, depending on whether i can be arsed learning Zfs or not. If not, then its off to the glue factory! Next stage is to get myself a 24″ Acer for micro-d (only £200), but that can wait until payday i guess!

Geekery aside, ive not done much else -Me, Toma, Jamal and Gibbs have spent the last couple of nights in the gym as everyone is skiing so not much to do, and as Fran is with them i cant go round to hers either! So im sat at home twiddling my thumbs.. well, my thumbscrews, woo new PC Goes very nicely with the new Logitech Z-5400 system, the P35 based motherboards have optical 7.1 out as standard, so im deliberating whether to install my Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro soundcard.

Well, i think ive just recovered from the tiredness that was, the i-series of 32.

Got there Thursday morning and sat around doing nothing until dinnertime, where we went to a pretty posh nosh resteraunt for dinner. 35+ quid a head meant it was verrrry nice, and we went back to work on a full stomach. The rest of the day was spent frantically setting up PC’s, Plasmas on the walls, racing simulators, servers etc. On friday morning, we did some final configuring, set up the monitors on the PC’s and opened the stand to the gaming public.

Friday night came, and we went out into town for an Indian meal and beers with the boys from Scan and NVIDIA. Ended up getting totally hammered with the XFX models and stumbled into our room about 4-5am for a 9am start. Saturday flew by, as i was on the racing simulator and COD4 all day, and saturday night we decided to chill out mainly and just play on the stand etc till late. Sunday was pretty much the same, and we had a  chinese and played Battlefield2 / COD4 8vs8 against the SCAN lads (which we won ). Ended up getting back home on Monday an going straight to work to finalise a project, so im still knackered.

@Special Mentions ;-

1. Crazy receptionist guy ” ROUND THE ROUND ABOUT “
2. Russian bloke on bench ” STEAL A LIFE “
3. Bens random sleep talking and telling the cleaners he “didnt want any free beer!!”
4. The random crap on Swindon TV.
5. The black guy outside Liquid with no shirt on who thought he was a gangsta.
6. The random asian bloke who sat that the racing simulator assaulted him and didnt stop following us around all weekend.
7. Taxi driver who skanked Ben out of 6 quid
8. Train driver who skanked me by charging me 19 quid for a single.

Well, been a pretty busy few days to be honest!

Thursday-  Went to the Spot with Jamal and Andy Li, after drinking 2 bottles of wine in 10 minutes beetween us for warm-up! Needless to say it was a pretty eventful nights with Lockwood getting a massive lovebite on his neck haha.

Saturday- Went to Steam with everyone to watch the England match (get in), decided to go for a curry afterwards with Raj and Gabe in the Kyhber which was nice. Ended up in Savoy watching the New Zealand game before stumbling home at 12 which wasnt bad!

Also, from a Tech point of view, i thought i’d give Linux another chance at being my desktop as im sick to death of Vista, so below is my…report if you will:-

+- Vista = Very gimmicky indeed. It looks good, like Suse, but like Suse it doesnt do much compared to other flavours. The main benefits of Vista compared to XP are 1. Ipv6 (which no-one uses) 2. Hard drive encryption (again, no one uses) 3. Media centre (Which is crap, i might add), and a few gimmicky GUI tools. Couple that with the fact that, A) Lots and lots of hardware isnt supported, i.e. Webcams, TV Cards, etc. B) Its so resource inefficient its untrue and C) XP is a lightweight version, does the same job, less hassle and a lot easier.

Now, onto Suse 10.3. A year ago to this very month, i installed Suse 10.1 (IIRC), and after a weekend of trying to make it work i gave up, due to the sheer fact that it is so unfugging usable. DEVELOPERS – You cannot expect average joe users, even techies like myself to go into a config file buried in the OS just to enable dual screen, coupled with the fact its not really dual screen because you cant span applications across them or even drag apps across. When you start to take the Redmond philosophy into account with its usability and assumptive knowledge then you will start to make headway in the home user market. At the moment, there is a distinct lack of support from Vendors, ATI, Creative, etc. There is a lack of effort from developers to make anything remotely simple, and to be honest, Windows is still dicking all over Linux in the Desktop market and will continue to do so forever until the Heads start to sort out their roadmaps.

In summary, Vista – Like XP but with gimmicks and stuff nobody is using.  Suse- totally unusable.

My suggestions, XP for Desktop, stick with Ubuntu for Server (Desktop what matt says about Gentoo and Solaris).

Well, after coming downstairs yesterday to the smell of burnt PCB, i found out the heatsink on my GeForce 6600GT had died. Meaning it was running at 100oC, frigging hot in other words. I dug a few fans out and brought it down to 70oC, which is fine. This morning, i turn my PC on, and the card is dead. It looks like that the RAM chips have cracked due to over expansion / contraction due to cooling / heating of them rapidly. So, naturally i was fecked off. Ive bought myself a new Radeon Ati X1650 pro, which is a verrrrrry good card for 50 quid, aswell as a new Zalman 20 quid heatsink. Everything is costing me bloody money!

Well, not much going on recently. Me and Matt boshed out some ASP.NET, other than that uni’s been really quiet. Went 5th Ave with the boys on monday night, had a great night, cheap drinks all round so we couldnt complain! Ended up getting a taxi back and had a few more drinkies at ours, was good fun.

Site update : Anyday now Akeel should be rolling out my new Wordpress blog design, so watch this space.

Hardware update : Recently bought an External 250GB Western Digital drive for my critical backups, because my samsung 200GB died for no reason (i thought it was heat but it wasnt). I phoned samsung up and they are replacing it free of charge for me, pretty nice eh? So i can add that to my 500GB Sata2 Seagate and 200GB Sata2 Seagate in my NAS to give me a near 1TB NAS (im using 650/700GB at the moment so its needed!).