The purpose of this site is both professional and personal; it's intended to allow prospective employers to view a sample of my work and to quickly demonstrate my suitability for their company. Viewing the 'PORTFOLIO' section will allow you to see projects I have undertaken with brief explanations of the problem that needed to be solved and the approach I adopted to achieve a satisfactory solution.

My CV can be viewed here: 'MY CV'

On the personal side I have 'Gallery' and 'Guest book' sections to allow friends and family to stay in touch.

Last week I plug in my nice shinny new 200GB hard disk and enjoyed once again the feeling of having lots of spare hard disk space. That was until on Friday my computer died and wouldn't start up. I did all the usualy, remove all the PCI cards, RAM etc and nothing seemed to work. That was until I went to remove the power supply connector to the motherboard which disintergrated in my finger. The entire connector had burnt up from the inside meaning I was pretty lucky not to have had my entire computer go up in smoke.

Luckily I'm still inside the three year warrently my dad insisted I buy and Dell are sending me a new machine, oh yeh baby!

Although it does mean I'll be with out a home PC for half a month :(

Continuing on my path to the light side over the weekend I installed Thunderbird. Which in it's self has come enough from a couple of years ago now to be useable a primary email client. Although there are two extensions which add a real edge:

minimizetotray - This works for both Thunderbird and Firefox and as the name suggests allows you to minimize your programs to the system try.

WebMail - An excellent app which allows you to download your web based email to Thunderbird. this includes Yahoo, Hotmail, Lycos, AOL and others.

You could also install either the calendar plugin or Lightning to provide calendar support. However neither of these products are really upto scratch at the moment although Lightning looks promising.

Well I've been running Ubuntu for a while now and I have to say I'm still very pretty impressed!

The only bit of real configuration I've had to do is setting up the wireless network to cope with Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption. By default it only supports WEP. Having had a quick read of the howto and typing in a few commands I got everything up and running pretty easy.

So to make things even easier for everyone else I thought I'd post the sets I followed to get it all running...

1. Open Synaptic (a program in Ubuntu that searches the web for all available software found under System > Administration) and install a program called network-manager-gnome

2. Disable the wireless interface in Ubuntu's default network manager (System > Administration > Networking) usually called ath0

3. Open a command prompt and type (where NetworkEssid is the SSID of your network):

        `mcsig@mcsig-linux:~$ wpa_passphrase NetworkEssid

You'll be prompted for your passphrase.

3. Your done. You should see a new icon in the top right which when you left click on it will allow you to choose which wireless network you'd prefer.If you don't might need to restart and see what appears.

Oh and while I'm on the topic of Linux, the new version looks promising: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/knot2
 

Well time for an update I feel. On the weekend I spent a fair amount of time (over a day) trying to install the Windows Vista Beta on an old laptop I had spare. After all sorts of Blue screens and differing errors I gave up more than slightly annoyed at the how much time I’d wasted. As well as being quiet disappointed Microsoft still really didn’t seem to understand why so many people are becoming disenfranchised with them.

Having failed so spectacularly with Vista I still needed an operating system so before going back to XP pro I thought I’d take a look at how Linux was coming along. Every year for the last 5 years I’ve tried to make an effort to install Linux and have a play at least once a year. Each I’ve always installed Linux had a play, thought that the OS had come a long way from the previous year but then gone back to windows as Linux just wasn’t up to the same level.

Well this time was different. Last night I set Ubuntu downloading and when I got up this morning I had my ISO file. I burnt it to CD and stuck it into my laptop, which had no OS and an unformatted hard drive after Vista’s attempts at killing the machine. 30 minutes later after about a minutes user input and me having a shower before I went to work I had Ubuntu Linux completely installed and up and running on my network.

As you might imagine I’m ecstatic and seriously considering switching my main development machine over.