Long time no update, huh?
For one thing, there just hasn’t been much to write about. A couple of things came up from time to time, but I never really gave myself the time to write up my thoughts about it properly. I also want to avoid turning this into a “what I had for lunch today” type of thing which would be of no interest to anyone (myself included).
Well, here goes.
Since moving to Cork back in August, I’m still in the process of settling into the house. For the most part I’m relatively comfortable, though there are a few bits and pieces to sort out, holes to patch (damn coat hanger coming off the wall) and annoyances to resolve.
Also, I’m pretty happy that in my time there I have yet to lose a sock to the dryer! 
I have been in the process of building myself a proper place to get some work done. After years of being restricted to a tiny desk barely big enough to hold the tower and the monitor, I am after paying out for a good, decent slab of work station real estate. I also invested in a proper, supportive chair. Once the desk gets delivered I can get up of the floor.
I bought an iMac. I was nearly put off the whole Apple scene for life a couple of years back, but I realise now that that was down to a really crumby OS 8 installation we had to use during a Multimedia section of my college course. Honestly, opening a video editor would bring that system down.
My trusty laptop has been given a new lease on life after getting rid of Windows and installing Ubuntu Desktop Edition. If you have read my blog before, you may know that for some time I ran Ubuntu Server on my personal file server, so the transition was pretty painless. The installation experience was also much nicer than the last time I tried as well, as the installer now correctly detected my graphics adapter and ran at a resolution higher than 800×600 – last time I tried to install Ubuntu this was all I could muster, and the installation options window didn’t (doesn’t?) function correctly at that low resolution.
While startup times are still kinda slow, performance while working is a multiple fold increase. It helps not having to run a couple of dozen extra real time applications watching every interaction to make sure that I’m staying clean and safe. There are still some things I have to sort out, like getting my Wifi card to get detected automatically rather than manually calling ndiswrapper into work whenever I need to get online, but that should all be a matter of reading and a couple of hours hackery.
Now I also need to build myself a nice Windows machine for gaming and work, and a proper Linux based server for storage, development and testing. Each of these will also being used for Folding@Home number crunching, as my current machines are.
Finally, I also have a project that I want to work on. More on that at a later date, but its based around a concept and a technology that has interested me for some time now, and its exciting to finally have an idea that I think could add some real value for people. It could be a while before I get anything out on it, as I have some protocol research and testing to do.
There are a couple of other ideas floating around in various stages of development, but as this one kinda fell into place quickly and seems to make a good dose of sense, its getting priority.
Well, that was pretty much what I wanted to avoid, wasn’t it? Well, now I am what I hate.
