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16th-Jun-2007 08:10 pm - May the Shell be with you!
Well the last week has been quite interesting, but what I really wanted to write about is my new geek-passion - the cygwin shell. I've had cygwin installed on my system for some time, but had only ever used it to connect to my university Computing Science account via SSH when in practicals. But now that I've started working on my website on earnest, I've realised that there's a lot more to it then just browsing files. I've been interested in UNIX for some time, but have always had trouble getting my head around it. But it seems that now that I have something to put my energies towards that I actually enjoy, I've more motivation to learn. And each day I find myself learning new commands and new shortcuts. I can now do a lot of the file manipulation activities under UNIX that I can within Windows; indeed I do all of my site backups, file editing, database handling and more within cygwin. It's really quite logical and I think it also teaches you to focus more closely on exactly what you want to do before you instruct the computer to go and do it. I've had a couple of close shaves, such as when I thought I'd deleted the forum database (when in fact I'd only printed the contents to the screen) and when I thought I had overwritten the entire public_html directory (when in fact it was just a tar/gzip job running on top of itself and basically doing nothing) but otherwise it's been quite exciting. I strongly urge those into web design and who are serious about working on their site, and who want to save time and learn some of the tricks of the trade at the same time to try UNIX as an alternative to Windows. It's particularly useful as you can write a script that will do a number of actions one after the other, particularly if you do them often, such as taking a copy of your website, compressing it into an archive and transferring it to your local computer. If you run Windows, you've got to try Cygwin, which is a UNIX ported to Windows and that uses many of the traditional UNIX applications.

In other news, I have a job for the summer! Yes, I saw a request on the Digital Point Forums looking for someone to write reviews of moible phones. I express my interest, was asked to write two sample reviews, they were accepted and so I now have another batch to write. I'm being paid a set price per review, they're fairly short in length and so I can get through them fairly quickly. At the least the pay should cover my web hosting costs each month.

I also received an e-mail today advising of a new scholarship being run by the Mike Devenney Trust for disabled students that provides help with University funding for tuition, accommodation or equipment. I'm going to apply for it and see what happens.

Received a rather alarming e-mail today 9well actually it was sent last week but I only received it today as there have been e-mail problems) from my Distributed Systems lecturer saying that he has never received my coursework. Apparently the system stripped out the attachment which I sent back in May. I'm quite worried about this as there is a possibility that I could receive no mark for this, which would fail me the course as you need a pass in both the coursework and the exam. I've offered to meet Tim Norman (lecturer) in person to discuss this if he wishes it, and I'm seriously hoping everything works out. I refuse to accept being penalised on the grounds of a purely technical issue. Please wish me luck and hope that all goes well.

I've been having fun testing out MobileSpeak some more on my Nokia N91, my latest feature test being web browsing using my WiFi network. Actually, I forgot the phone had WiFi to begin with and use the O2 WAP service to view just a couple of pages. Unfortunately this took me over the 100kb free quota I get each month, so it'll cost me - how much is to be seen. I can't wait until I get back to Orange in August, with their much more generous internet usage limits.

I guess that's about all for now. Remember, may the Shell be with you.

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