Hot off the press
I am no longer a student. I had my graduation ceremony in Canterbury Cathedral last night - it was really nice. I couldn’t think of a nicer place to graduate. I enjoyed spending the day with my family and friends celebrating finally finishing my degree.
After nearly four years, I guess this will be the last post in the University category.
Next step: The ‘real world’, whatever that is. Maybe I’ll post here more often… but then again, percy pigs might fly.
More mac crap
Anyone who doesn’t care about me buying a Mac has probably stopped reading now! Sorry :p.
I got 2gb of RAM arrive today from Crucial, and did the switch from 1gb to 2gb this afternoon. My mac now runs loads faster, and when I changed my VMWare fusion Windows XP VM from 384 to 512Mb of RAM, it certainly sped up and OS X didn’t struggle and page loads. Fifty quid well spent, although the upgrade was hair raising as I don’t like playing around with the inners of computers when I have spent lots of money on them 
.
I’ve found another annoyance in OSX, and it relates to the crapness of how it handles selections with the keyboard. In Windows, you can use Shift+Up/Down to select from a list in any application. If you accidentally select one file too many, you can press the Shift+Up/Down (the other direction) to deselect that file. In OSX you can do the same to select, but if you press the opposite it just adds to your selection from the other end. The only way out is to use the mouse and then shift-click the item to deselect it. I don’t want to use the mouse! It’s so much quicker with the keyboard and it’s a pain having to use the mouse when I (inevitably) select too many items. Grr.
Final year results
Module Coursework Exam Final
CO525 (Dynamic Web) 99% 84% 87%
CO528 (Intelligent Systems) 88% 90% 90%
CO600 (project) 78%
CO634 (Security) 88% 80% 82%
CO637 (Natural Comp) 85% 89% 87%
CO831 (Ubicomp) 88% 68% 72%
CO634 (Schools) 80% 85% 84%
That’s 82.25% in total… adding that to my 86% placement and second year (89%) it means i got 85% overall. Wicked 
Vmware fusion beta 4
When I first got my Mac I spent loads of time installing a copy of Windows XP in a BootCamp partition. This allows me to switch between Windows and OS X easily, however it meant that I had to reboot each time, and to me that is a considerable pain. It’s annoying to have to kill conversations/browser windows just to run an application in Windows - such as 4od.
I installed VMWare fusion beta 3 and set up a small-ish XP Virtual Machine that had some apps that I use including Windows Media Player, 4od and Digiguide (there is no Mac version 
) and I use it semi-regularly, although it’s much quicker to go to the Radio Times site than it is to fire up a copy of Windows and look at Digiguide.
It’s certainly a good technology to have available, and it’s surprisingly fast - my 384Mb XP VM runs quick-ish, although there seems to be a considerable knock-on effect to OS X which makes it page loads (seems it cant cope with ~640Mb of RAM that well) and run quite slowly. It means that I only keep XP open when I need to. I’ve just ordered 2Gb of RAM which should enable me to dedicate a gig to OS X and a gig to XP and hopefully I can have my VM running more often now, enabling me to use some Windows only applications a lot of the time (MSN messenger would be nice).
The latest version of the VMWare beta includes a new feature called Unity. It’s seriously cool. Unity hides the Windows desktop and lets you use and run Windows apps as though they were normal Mac applications. There’s a cool video of it in action here. I can’t seem to get it to work that well when I’m waking up a suspended VM but when it does work it is very good. It makes Fusion as good as Parallels Workstations, which has many of the same features but seems to be a bit less reliable (I used VMWare a lot at work and I trust their applications).
With something like virtualisation, Boot Camp is unnecessary and saves loads of unnecessary reboots to run a few simple Windows apps.
Macbook part deux
So it’s been a bit longer than a few days so I thought I’d write a bit more! In no real order:
- I have found some very cool apps. Matt’s recommendation of Quicksilver was brilliant - it’s a really clever piece of software and the global hotkey is enough to replace the loss of “Start>Run” in Windows. Other good apps are smcFanControl for looking at the CPU temp of the iron on my legs and coconutBattery for some battery-related statistics. Fugu is a really good graphical SCP client, and I’ve installed VLC as I was told to (not used it yet!).
- I installed Firefox over Safari, just as I’m used to it. Firefox seems to be nicer in Wordpress (as it has the clever Javascript stuff to write a post) but I’ve had weird problems with it not being able to decompress files I’ve downloaded. Case in hand: I downloaded Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection in FF and it tried to open the .bin file in VLC and so I couldn’t install it. I did it in Safari and it extracted it ok, mounted the dmg and I could install the application. I’m not sure why that is. The other issue is that I can’t seem to preview PDFs in Firefox - they have to be downloaded to my desktop first and then opened. This isn’t the case in Safari. I found a FF plugin but it’s for PPC only which isn’t much help!
- I can’t get my Logitech MX3000 laser desktop fully supported in OSX. The software only lets me do stuff with my mouse (enabling the back and forward buttons) but removes the ‘middle click’ ability that I use in Firefox. The keyboard does still work but has no media keys (except for volume up/down and mute) which is a pain. I think it’s just one of those things I will have to live with . To make matters worse, some keys are swapped, so the Alt key is actually the Apple key, and the Windows key is the Alt key. great.
- iPhoto is actually very cool. It is much easier to connect my phone with the cable rather than Bluetooth, as that lets me sync my photos to the application in a much more streamlined way but at least Bluetooth works. It also arranges files based upon ‘rolls’, where each roll is a folder in your iPhoto library. That’s how I did things previously in Windows so it’s no problem! Also I have a plugin that lets me upload and tag files to Facebook, and I installed another plugin called iPhoto2Gmail which allows me to easily send photos via email without having to use Mail.
- I’ve not actually booted into Windows since installing it. Whoops.
- The way you install and remove application is very simple. Drag and drop the icon into your Applications folder to install, drag and drop the icon into the Trash to remove. I am impressed!
- Spotlight is very neat. I don’t need to know where anything is on my computer - in 3 keystrokes I can load pretty much any application or locate any file/folder on my hard disk. Again that’s cool!
There’s a load of other stuff to talk about but I’m certainly impressed with what I’ve seen so far:).
First day with a Macbook
So my lovely glossy white Macbook arrived today. It looks soo nice and it’s a beautiful piece of kit. I loved the fact that I turned it on, it asked for my username and password and then a few seconds later I was up and running.
Once I’d spent a bit of time getting to grips with OS X I’ve started to realise what a pleasure it is to use. I’m certainly a fussy windows user and I like to have control over the way things are done on my computer as generally I do it in the most efficient way, even if it only makes sense to me! But using OS X there’s generally only one way of doing something, and that’s the way that makes sense. It’s quick and simple to do.
For example - I connected to my k800i using bluetooth, downloaded some photos and added them to my own album in iPhoto in less than two minutes. The only ‘issue’ is that I don’t know where everything is stored, and I’d quite like not to spend ages organising all my photos to realise that there’s no way I can export my set of albums to another photo management application. I can imagine on XP that it’s a little bit more complicated than that, especially the bluetooth bit.
I then spent a bit of time fooling around with BootCamp, mainly because im a complete geek and I love the idea of being able to do multiple OSs on this thing. I had some issues with the wireless–eventually I found the source of my problems was an incorrect WEP key. Whoops. Everything else was OK, although using VMWare fusion seemed to mess with my BootCamp XP install making it think for a couple of minutes when I restarted in BootCamp. I think I’ll keep them seperate from now on, as I have a few XP keys going spare due to my MSDN account at uni.
XP took ages to install (and I had to put on 80 updates!) but it’s blazing fast once its going. I’m certainly impressed, although its quite a powerful laptop. Will be interested to see how it runs with 2gb of RAM.
Top bit of software for the day: Adium instant messenger client. It’s absolutely awesome and I find the duck icon so cute it more than makes up for the fact that it isn’t MSN messenger.
Annoyance of the day: My HDD space is currently a bit limited and I’m trying to keep my music on my iPod only, but I can’t seem to get Front Row to read the library on my iPod. I will eventually have to have a store for my music, but I’m not sure where it will be (don’t really want it on an external disk) and how I can share it between OS X and Windows!.
All in all I’m *very* impressed
End of uni stuff
It’s a bank holiday, it’s raining and I’m bored. So I thought I’d do the unexpected: post TWICE in a single day! That is more than in February, March and April combined.
I’ve been reading through my archives (*yawn*) and realised that I always write a post about the year I’ve had at university. I can’t be bothered to write in as much detail as before, but here’s the rundown:
- For the first time ever I had to choose modules. It was very scary as you never really know what something is like until you do it, and then it’s too late to change. Thankfully everything worked out OK and I didn’t hate any of them.
- I did a group project called Net2. It was a network simulator, with the aim of teaching students about how network protocols (layer 2 - CSMA etc) work. It went very well too, and we wrote about 15,000 lines of code in total. Also we used eXtreme Programming and followed it pretty religiously throughout the project. It was challenging at the start but I actually understand how it works and what its strengths and weaknesses are.
- I did a module where I spent a day a week teaching in a local school. That was singly the most rewarding thing I’ve done at university and a great way of improving my communication skills, confidence and much much more. It was hard work but so worth it.
- Doing a placement makes your final year a lot easier. Well.. that’s almost true. You can have an easy final year by not doing any work, but doing a ‘real job’ for a year makes you realise that university life is actually quite easy and gives a work ethic that should result in better grades. There’s a strong correlation between people doing placements and getting firsts.
- I’m so happy I never have to revise for a university exam again (or at least for a very very long time!). Spending so much time in the library drove me insane. It was also a stressful period, what with being ill and everything. I’m very glad that is all behind me.
And that’s about it. I know my time is up here in Canterbury and I’m actually very glad about it. I’ve had a great four years but I’m looking forward to other challenges and the ‘real world’.
More signs of growing up!
New Toy
I’ve been thinking about buying a laptop for ages and ages, and I got some nice money back from the tax man at the end of March which I put away until a rainy day (and until I had finally made my mind up on what to buy).
I wanted to treat myself now all my exams, vivas, illness and everything else had finished, so on Friday I bought a Macbook. I’ve played around with them in the past and they were pretty cool (I’m just trying to justify buying something because it looks nice!) and so I’m now eagerly awaiting the man from UPS ringing the doorbell. Annoying that today is a bank holiday, meaning no deliveries .
Switching from Windows to OS X might be a bit of a challenge, but the blow is softened by being able to use a Windows VM inside OS X, and failing that I can just run Windows XP/Vista using Bootcamp.
I’m sure I will have something to write on the subject of switching over the next few weeks!
Rob writes a post!
Tell the world!
I’ve pretty much been non-stop this year workwise - I’ve had essays, lectures, a final year project that sucked up about 20 hours a week (twice that for the last few weeks!) and then I did a module where I spent a day a week in school teaching IT.
That gave me exactly four minutes a week to myself until the start of the Easter holidays when that and more was taken up by revision for 5 exams.
The good news is that it’s all over! I’ve done my exams (last one was on Thursday), had my project viva and even had glandular fever recently, which led to a nice week in bed unable to eat, drink and talk except for when I was on a tasty mixture of anti-inflammatories and pain killers.
So now some free time beckons. I really don’t think I’ve had a few days to relax since February.
Results day: T-3 weeks.