Student Blogs

For pretty much as long as I can remember, I have always wanted a Mazda MX5. In my opinion it is an extremely good looking car and even though it has some obvious impracticalities such as having only two seats and Britain only have 2 sunny days a year, I still wanted one.

For many years it was just a dream, however last month I found myself in the position where I could afford to buy, run and maintain one. Actually it would be cheaper to buy a ‘05 MX5 than my current car, an ‘06 Ford Focus!

A couple of weeks ago I went down to my local Mazda dealer with my Dad to have a look at a couple they had for sale. The salesman was doing his normal job of talking up the cars and they did sound impressive; “rear slip diff, low profile tires, 6 speed gearbox”. However, as soon as we started looking round them faults started to emerge. The chrome had blistered on the trim and alloys, nearly all the closures were set incorrectly and generally they looked a bit warn. Even worse, when sitting inside I discovered the seat was as far back as it went and I was a little cramped, and that’s just for starters. The interior was like something out of a ’80s Maestro, just not construed so well.

So I’m sorry Mr Salesman but I’m really not interested in booking a test drive. I don’t see the point. It was a good dream but onwards and upwards, I’ll just have to find something else to aim for!

Ever set up a server? Ever managed a server? Ever wondered if there’s a tool out there to help you do these things? Well (as far as I know) there isn’t such a tool out there in the open source world yet.

That’s why Paul and myself decided a while ago that it would be a good idea to make one! I am hoping that we’ll actually get round to doing some work on it now that we’re both going to be working in Coventry. That is assuming we actually get some spare time!

So, watch out for it!

So today I’m in Stafford because Helen has an assessment day for the police which is being held at Stafford University. I dropped her off there about 30 minutes ago and then decided to pop into the town centre to see what’s around. It was 8:30 so all the shops were pretty much shut apart from the coffee shops, some discount shops and McDonalds. I was quite hungry and really needed a coffee so I thought I’d grab a McDonalds breakfast!

Anyway, whilst ordering I noticed a sign saying free WiFi, so I got my laptop out and here I am, on free WiFi in McDonalds! It reminds me of Canada where there was free WiFI EVERYWHERE - and I do mean everywhere. It’s a good sign of things to come in the UK.

So this is the first time I’ve ever written a blog post whilst eating a fast-food breakfast! Needless to say, the breakfast certainly hit the spot!

I’ve been doing some work recently on a couple of websites (one being for Riverdale) and in order to test the sites I set up virtual hosting on the copy of Apache which came with Leopard. There’s a few tweaks/issues with Leopard’s Apache which I thought I’d write down incase it helps anyone else, or helps me in the future when I forget what I did!

So to setup the virtual hosting you need to first change some details in /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf. You should make sure that the line for the virtual host module is not commented out:
LoadModule vhost_alias_module libexec/apache2/mod_vhost_alias.so

Then, at the bottom of the file, add in the following:
Include /Users/username/Sites/vhost.d/*.conf
Where username is your own username.

Then you should create the directory /Users/username/Sites/vhost.d and into it, put these two files:
00_default.conf:
NameVirtualHost *:80
<VirtualHost *:80>
   DocumentRoot /Users/username/Sites/
</VirtualHost>

01_virtualsite.conf:
<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName virtualhost1
   DocumentRoot /Users/username/Sites/virtualhost1/
   <Directory "/Users/username/Sites/virtualhost1">
      Options +ExecCGI +Includes +FollowSymLinks
      AllowOverride All
   </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Again, where username is your username.

Then, in /private/etc/hosts you need to add:
127.0.0.1 virtualhost1

Restart apache and check out http://virtualhost1/ - it should work!

The big problem with Leopard is that you can ONLY share websites from your ~/Sites directory. It works though if you put a symlink in there to another directory (such as in ~/Documents), but keeping your vhost pointing to the directory in ~/Sites.

A couple of days ago I took my MacBook in to be fixed as it had a crack on the front case where the lid closes on the case. They took it in and said they’d order the part in and that it would take 24 hours. I picked it up, 24 hours later and it looked like a good fix. But when I got it home I noticed that they’d put on a US keyboard!!!

So I took it back in today and they managed to find a UK keyboard (already assigned to someone else, hehe) and they took just 30 minutes to fit it and now I’m sitting here typing on my brand new UNITED KINGDOM keyboard!

Now that I’ve decided when to start my job with Senokian on the 15th September, I have just under 4 weeks left of “holiday”. So, what shall I do with the time? I’m going to be doing some research into the work I’ll be doing, so that should take up some time. Also, there’s a certain wedding to go to on 30th August and we’re off to Keswick for just over a week, so maybe those will keep me busy enough…

I really was not sure what to expect. This is by Lucas so should be good but the trailers really were not very convincing! I enjoyed it though. Cant say it is a work of genius but it is very funny in places and it fills in some gaps in story. It also seems to create a couple but Lucas has never seemed terribly bothered by plot holes. I reckon if your a star wars fan it is worth a watch.

Shockingly bad. Boring. Rubbish. Not even remotely funny. I could go on but hopefully my meaning is understood.

I’ve just managed to deploy Google Apps on the domain for Riverdale (my parents’ house in Keswick - http://www.riverdaleinkeswick.co.uk/) and it went very smoothly again. This time is took me about 15 minutes to set up 5 email accounts and all the back-end framework. It really is groovy.

The great thing with this is that my parents and Dave & Sharon can share all their documents relating to Riverdale, so they’ll mostly be using Google Docs I’d have thought. But I also thought that the calendar feature could be useful because they’ll be able to put information in there about when the house is booked up.

Anyway, another successful Google creation…

Since the release of MobileMe by Apple, I’ve been wondering about what I’m going to do with my galloway.me.uk domain now that there’s options like this out there. I looked into MobileMe but it doesn’t allow you to have email addresses like @galloway.me.uk - only @me.com. This is a bit pointless for a domain hosting service!

So I looked into Google Apps which is essentially a free equivalent of MobileMe. I’ve found that it’s absolutely amazing. Quick & easy to setup and very easy to use. I’ve had a GMail account for a while, but now I have one setup with my matt at galloway dot me dot uk account. This gives me all the benefits of GMail along with IMAP access, Google Docs, Google Calender, etc, etc, etc.

The dashboard for our new family Google Apps is at http://partnerpage.google.com/galloway.me.uk so check that out. I’ve not quite finished porting everything over, but that should happen sometime this week.

Anyway, thanks Google - very pleased!