Countdown to Christmas

Christmas is fast approaching from all sides. This year, it really does seem to be sneaking up on me. Oh well... I will of course keep you up to date on all the happenings.

Since I got back from Computer Science 2008, I spent Thursday just relaxing around catching up on a few things, Friday organising what I need to get done and then tidying up the house a bit, then playing on EVE before going to watch a movie. Today I woke up late and have spent the morning playing with my younger brothers, Logan and Byron.

All in all, I've had quite a few unproductive days. So hopefully in the next coming week I can actually get some real work done. Anyway, until my next blog post!

A Fresh Start

Hello everyone!

Through my wonderful use of OmniFocus, the great tool for both my Mac and iPhone that I'm starting to use more and more to keep track of things, I am planning to update my blog on a far more regular (weekly) basis, and hearby name Friday "Blog Day". I will use the evening on Friday for posting a blog entry representing the past week.

I will also be looking into updating my website as there are various parts of my website that are really out of date. I've just been so busy doing other things that I haven't had the time. Especially with my third year at uni, and all the other projects going on in the sidelines.

Finally, I may very well be posting up more pictures like the one I did on the 1st November. That was a great game!

Anyway, let's move off what I plan to do and move into what I have done. Well, the last few weeks have been the busiest weeks possible at University. This was because it was assignment season. I had four projects I had to do, one for each of my courses; and some of them were quite difficult. I should be getting my results for each of them over the next coming weeks.

I'm also getting back into finding time for EVE Online. I plan to get up to 65 mil on the game and then finish off my trading spree. I also intend to revamp the Media Center, not that anyone uses it mind; and that includes replacing the video tutorials with written tutorials (and screenshots) at some point.

Well, I am going to finish there. So until next week, have a good time!

Into July

6th July! 6th July!!

Well, this is probably the longest time I haven't posted since I started posting. Heh. So I guess I'll bring you all up to date on the latest happenings.

Home
At home, I've been busy sorting out my room. The lighting is being organised as we speak, and the carpet has already been ordered. The curtains will be next, and then the accessories, such as LCARS Posters, will finish the room off. So not long to go.

As I said in my previous post, the summer party in July is approaching fast, as well as my birthday on the 25th. Preparations for that have already been put into motion as well.

Finally, my brothers have joined me and have broken up from school. So we are now all no-longer attending educational classes...

Uni
And with that, I move onto my University. I have recently received news of preliminary results stating that I have passed the second year. Which is awesome! As for work on GooLife, I am trying to move forward on that in my spare time but it is proving difficult to. My aim at current is to see if I can get a prototype of JXTA, the P2P Java networking tool. However, it requires ANT to work, so I need to get that configured first.

And finally, I am going to re-kick start my 3rd year project as we need to begin to move that forward as well. Hopefully both these projects can be pushed forward.

Work
At work, I've been working on two tasks. Firstly, I'm continuing to program my demo-app for the iPhone. It is getting there... slowly. Soon, I will be able to show people what I have done on it. The second task I'm working on is the Digital Vega website. The reorganisation and restructure of the CSS of the site is almost complete, just a few more images to change and then I can present it again.

Gaming
There are a few games I am playing on recently, both website-based and installed on my computer. They are the USS Andromeda, LCARS Terminal Forum RPG, a game on Facebook, EVE Online, Guild Wars, and of course the legendary Sims 2.

As you can probably tell, the majority of these games are multiplayer-based; ie, you play online with real people. Hey, I love MMORPGs!

Lastly, the Avatar: The Last Airbender is reairing from July 14th and airing new episodes every day until the finale on the 19th. Care to say I will be hooked when that happens... can't wait!

Final Note
Well, I hope this has shown you that I've been busy both working and enjoying my summer holiday so far. We have a plan to go to France and then Spain in August, so perhaps I will be able to post about that a little better then my last vacation...

So, until my next blog post, farewell!

Back to the Net

Well! It's been just under a month since my last blog post, so I thought I would update you all and hopefully go back into regular blog posting. So, here's what I have to say (once again split into sections...)

University
My second year is over! Exams are outta the way and I've now got four whole juicy months ahead of doing things other then University work. Does that mean I am not going to do anything for Uni? Nope, of course not!

I still have the development of GooLife to continue, and re-spark back into life. And I have recently released the Project Presentation and Project Report's for my third year Uni project, that is the LCARS Terminal Starship Commander. Just click that if you want to see them (apologies for the poor sound in the presentation, but there's not much I can do at the moment to fix that).

But other then these two projects, that's it for Uni work until my third and final year kicks in mid-september. Just check the number of days I have left on the time shown on the right... yeehar!!

My Room
I have pictures! Although my room is quite messy, I can point you to my web album that is holding the latest pictures of my room, including my new Sliding Door Wardrobe, and soon my new Desk and Chair! The album will be updated as and when I get new pictures, but my room is far from finished yet and there's still a way to go.

Gaming
Recently, I have been playing quite light games on my Mac and Windows PC during the free moments I've had, as I've been quite busy catching up on things (such as Blogging!)

Hopefully soon though I will be back in the game that I really want to return to... EVE Online. I want to celebrate my summer holidays by going online for an entire day and trading throughout that day non-stop, making lots of money. So I will look out for a day that's relatively free to do that sometime in the future.

And of course, now I'm on Summer holidays, I can get to play other games too!

Online
I also have to sort out my website at some point, and I'm still planning on moving away from basic XHTML to PHP produced XHTML. But that is a big project so I haven't had time to take part in it yet.

Final Notes
So, as you can see, even when I'm off from Uni I still have a lot of things I want to do! So I will be just as busy throughout the Summer holidays, also owing to the fact that I will be working on iPhone development throughout the holidays as well.

Until the next blog post then!

Happy Easter plus My Catchup on Stuff

For all who support and follow Easter: Happy Easter to you all! For all who do not follow this festival: Happy Chocolate Giving and Receiving Day to you all! Go out and buy lots of chocolate anyway!

This is going to be one long post. So I'm going to divide it up into sections.

Goldsmiths
So, what is going on at my university? Well, as you may or may not know: I'm on Easter holidays until the 21st April! So what you should be asking is: what has happened at my university?

And in fact, the last two weeks of Term (in fact the past two weeks) were so busy there were times that I thought I wouldn't have time to finish all that I had to do. Late nights and early mornings had ensued and it was only on the Wednesday just gone that everything came to a climax and then quickly fell again when deadline extensions thankfully came in for my two remaining projects. So what did I have to achieve?

Well, in Java we have put together, successfully, GooLife. In fact, it's so good I've even produced a YouTube video that shows off this fantastic application. This group project was fantastic; and it wouldn't have been the program it is today without all the contributions that people have made to it. From a personal point of view; it wouldn't have happened without them. Congrats to you all! It is of course going to still be in development, so who knows where it will go now?

In Website Design, I have built an PHP\MySQL\XSLT\XHTML based RSS News Aggregator that supports a backend database with a frontend PHP interface to allow for multiple users to register; choose from a variety of BBC feeds; and most importantly, filter, sort through, limit and hide chosen feeds.

In Software Engineering, I had to hand in a Project Report in regards to the LCARS Terminal Starship Commander. This report specified exactly what my plan was going to be in designing and building the program. I will, in due time of course, post up both this report and my presentation for private viewers who are related to this project (most specifically, LCARS Terminal themselves).

Finally, in Databases, which was a smaller group project, we have built a DVD and Video Game purchase and rental store. Although this project is the only project that is still ongoing (without being marked yet), it is nearly all finished. I intend to hand it in on Wednesday this week at the very latest, as this weekend has been extremely busy at home (as will be explained next).

Home
As said before, I have been extremely busy at home during this weekend. This is due to a very exciting change that is taking place before my very eyes: the redesign of my room. I first intended it to be a Star Trek bedroom as close to that from the USS Voyager as possible; but now I think it will more be a Star Trek 'themed' bedroom rather then an exact or even close to exact copy. This is due to three main reasons:

1. The fact that we are on a budget that doesn't support such a design
2. The fact that at current we have or have ordered furniture that isn't exactly found on a starship
3. And the fact that we live in the 21st Century; there really isn't that much demand for 24th Century designs

But it's still exciting and will still look like a darn good room when finished!

Website
My personal website will also be going another redesign. As I have learnt more at University, I intend to simplify and enhance my website by converting all of the current files from basic XHTML into PHP enhanced XHTML. This will allow me to not only have a single web page for navigation links (rather then at current having to edit each individual HTML page to change a single link appearing on all those pages) as well as to add in extensions that only PHP can provide.

In the present, I have just upgraded my Web Portal to that provided by Netvibes. This again will allow my Web Portal to become more then what it is, propelling it out of a webpage and into a miniature website in a single webpage. It will still be the centre of my web existence, but it will be greater then what it is now by a long way.

Of course this blog will adapt to service the new Web Portal, but don't worry, it's position in my web empire is to stay! I have no intentions of removing or replacing this blog anytime soon.

Final Note
As you may have noticed, I am extremely busy at the moment. And during the holidays, I get to take on more work! So I am perhaps even more busy now then I was during the University term. Anyhow, I want to inform all EVE Online people that my return to full-time gaming on EVE is imminent and won't be affected by my current amount of work that I have been given. See you soon in space!

Reading Week (Again!)

Dear me! Look how long it's been since I've last posted! I haven't even got my diary sorted out from South Africa... hopefully I can get that sorted out soon.

So, let me bring you up to speed on what I've been doing since I've returned from the Cape. Well, it's been University as usual up until this week, which happens to be reading week. During the past few weeks, I have done some pretty neat networking Java programs, studied normalising databases, learnt how to do some pretty neat stuff with PHP, and decided my 9-month long 3rd year project: none other then the LCARS Terminal Starship Commander.

This game, based off Star Trek, will allow prospective Captain's around the Alpha Quadrant to take on the position of commanding a starship. They will be able to choose their crew and ship, and then go off on missions whose very ending is affected by the decisions they make. That's right! These missions will provide for multiple endings, all based on the players decisions they make as the proceed through the mission!

Of course, the game wouldn't be complete if it didn't also have a fully operational mission editor, allowing players with good enough imaginations to come up with some pretty interesting stories to put into play. However, it is still a long time in production, so we shall see how far this gets.

In other news, in my online MMORPG EVE Online, my corp has moved. They are now stationed as 7th Sense, to avoid any confusion the old name had with us. Apparently there was another corp called Chaos Industries who were some pretty tough pirates, or something like that. Anyhow, as we are a non-PvP corp, we decided to move away from the name as we don't want to be associated with PvP. At least... not at present.

Now we finally get to his week... Reading Week. As you might have guessed, a lot has been done this week, but they are all trivial things. I spent a busy weekend with my family... went to see The Water Horse which was fantastic (despite mixed reviews, I guess it's a "you either love it or hate it" kind of film). Monday was spent doing a few things around the house, as will be tomorrow (although I will fit some Java in as well). Today was spent at work; catching up, sorting out a few things, and upgrading Firefox with a new look and feel with a new theme and some extra Add-ons.

I have continued to provide updates to the various websites I own. I just want to add here that I will be adding some extra Addons to my recommended Addons page, and removing a few too. I will also be adding a new page: my recommended iTouch programs. I have quite a few!

Well, for now, I will bid you farewell. And hopefully I will have some diary entries soon as to what I got up to in Cape Town!

Xmas Time!

Merry Christmas to One and All! I hope you all got what you wanted for Christmas :) I certainly did!

I got an iPod iTouch, quite a few DVDs including Princess Mononoke, a few games including Trainz Railway Simulator 2004, and a large poster detailing the inside of the USS Enterprise-D.

Brilliant!

The week before Christmas took a wonderful turn when on Saturday, we went down to the Honda garage and they announced the car had arrived! It is available to be picked up on Friday, so I will have a new car for Christmas too!

I have been quite busy during the week, doing some work for work and Uni, as well as playing EVE a lot. On EVE, I bought a new Thorax and an Iteron IV (a Cruiser and a Trading vessel) with the Thorax being a great EVE Christmas present!

Anyhow, I will finish off this bizarre blog post by adding that over the next couple of days I will be online on MSN, so if you want to catch me you can.

Christmas Hols: The Beginning

Long time no post, I know... but the weeks after Operation Gold were extensively busy. For starters, I had two assignments to deliver by Tuesday last week. One was a Database systems coursework, and another was a Data Communications assignment.

The Database coursework was mostly easy, if long, except for two particular questions that were designed to be extremely difficult, and a challenge for even those skilled at SQL. The Data Communications coursework involved analysing PING packets sent to ten different hosts in South Africa and the Middle East (supposedly) and took a lot of time to complete to perfection.

Add on top of that the biggest Java lab of all (GooChristmas), as well as all the other stuff that goes on, and things just got in the way.

The Christmas holidays began early on Friday after the Java lecture was cancelled. The day after was spent mainly out in Guildford at the LaserQuest (and Burger King for lunch) for my brothers late birthday party. Saturday evening, my brother hijacked my laptop for a 'through-the-night' gaming session, that ended at midday the next day. As would be expected, he has since slept for the past two days.

Sunday's highlight was a trip into Redhill to visit Honda. I planned on getting a new Honda Civic Hybrid, but when comparing it with what the original Honda Civic offered, the latter was chosen. Other then that, Sunday was quite a relaxed day, and I found out that our Corp had been declared war on in EVE. Magical!

Today I went for a test drive of the Honda Civic. It drives beautifully; feeling like a manual car turned auto rather then an ordinary automatic. In that respect, you get to feel the gear changes the car makes, and Honda's intuitive 'paddle sticks' on the steering wheel, in conjunction with the gear stick, allow you to switch between controlling the gears manually and letting the car do the hard work. Not to mention the car looks like something out of, say, Star Trek... and I love the dashboard! (Similar but not quite right picture). Enough said!

Tomorrow is also going to be a busy day, but that's for a future post!

I also want to announce here that I intend to release GooChristmas on my website over the next few days, as well as put more work for my group up on the dotProject site, do some work for work (my job), and carry on playing EVE. So the fun never stops!

Operation Gold

In my last blog, I stated that I was working on a secret operation that involved my close family. This is Operation Gold (and Operation Flashpoint that was within Operation Gold). The results of these two ops are coming to fruit tomorrow, with the surprise party of the golden anniversary (50 years married) of my grandparents!!

Obviously, to be a proper surprise party, it's not on their anniversary, but sometime after...

Anyway, what have I been up to the past half-month? Well, University, Work and Personal Life have been all crushing in on me and demanding more and more attention. What with Operation Gold tomorrow, the end of the school term in two weeks, and the creation of my EVE Corp's website (Chaos Industries), I've had more and more things to do.

For EVE, I've finally reached 40 Mil ISK; I'm planning on reaching 100 Mil by Christmas, but we shall see!

For Uni, I've got three assignments to do; one of them is a group project managed by my good friend Rohan Sherrard, the other two are data communications and database systems (the latter being longer then the former).

And of course, we're finishing off Java as well (for Uni). My favourite subject!

Well, sorry to everyone who hasn't been able to read my blog lately. Hat's off to you! And a special mention to Luis Kals, I know he'll want to be somewhere in here (with his famed GOO Cube!)

I'm back to blogging! :)

Reading Week Part 2

The end of reading week has come and gone and I'm now back at Uni. Last week went by quite quickly, and because of a lack of a charger for my university laptop, I was unable to do very much university work.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, therefore, was spent playing EVE or working on my Java projects for work. Friday was spent playing EVE in the morning and working on Java in the afternoon.

Saturday and Sunday were quite unique days in that among my spending time on EVE, I also worked on two secret operations that my close family is working hard to perfect. Although I cannot talk about this (yet) on my Blog, suffice to say that only my family will be affected by the operations. And they aren't medical (the operations I mean, lol).

Monday (yesterday) was slam-dunk back into University. Monday's are always the longest, and yesterday was no exception to that rule.

Oh and I want to add that on EVE, Saturday and Sunday were filled with Mining Ops that I attended. I hoped to be able to stay on for longer then I could, but I had other priorities... Still, they were good fun! And last night, I finally went over 15 MIL Isk. For those of you who play EVE, it's not very much; but I still feel rich!

Reading Week Part 1

This week happens to not only be my brothers birthday, it happens not only to be the week all my brothers break up from their half-term holiday and go back to school, but it also happens to be the week I temporarily take a break from University to work at home instead. Funny that...

So welcome to Reading Week, the zaniest week in the University term.

To start the week off, let's talk about the past weekend. Saturday was, of course, my brother Andrew's birthday. We lounged around in the morning and afternoon, taking a break to open presents. Then we went to lunch/dinner at Pizza Express, and finished the evening out with a bonfire and fireworks display.

The bonfire consisted of a 45-min walk around the village (not the one where I live thought) holding torches, led by a marching band, which of course we didn't take part in. Once the people had returned from their walk around the village, they all gathered around the bonfire and lit it with the torches (which by that time had a nice Guy Fawkes on the top). This was followed by a great fireworks display, which included themed elements and a whopping 250 fireworks fired all at once which literally lit up the sky.

After that we returned home and finished the day off with a movie of Spiderman 3.

Sunday was a day where we just simply stayed at home, and I played EVE Online. EVE Online is an MMORPG with a difference (they all mostly are, aren't they, lol) but EVE has a single living vibrant server and the most unstructured way to play ever. You are basically put into this living world, and told to go on your way. What you do from there is up to you! (I intend to become a trader). Brilliant game!

Monday was spent doing very much the same thing, except I also did some Java work for work and did a little of an assignment.

Until next time!!