Again, long time no see, no write.

Makes me wonder why I can't keep a diary going properly. I know of some distinct cases of people who can actually keep a weblog for quite some time (say, Alan Cox, Dave Jones, or Rik Van Riel) but I, for one, surely can't do it. Still to find out why. Anyway, just felt like writing tonight. And while we're at it, what a shame Alan decided to start writing his diary in welsh.. Hopefully he'll come back to his senses and start writing plain english again. Or not.

So, since last entry (which I can see was by end of January), I guess I'm better off updating on the major changes that happened both in me and in my working/studying environment. In terms of tools, I've decided to make a Linux distribution switch and instead of using my (forever) faithful Slackware, I turned to Mandrake Linux. This is not too important of course, but it was interesting as it happened out of the blue. Basically, Mandrake 9.1 ISOs were out a couple of weeks ago IIRC and I decided to leech them from Uni and give it a try in a spare partition on my laptop. To my surprise (or not) I got it up and running on no more than 10 minutes, not counting some partition tweaking that was in order before I could proceed with the instalation. And buy, was I stunned with the looks of it. I know, looks matter next to nothing, but honestly I've always been AA fonts fan and Mandrake has it nearly perfectly with KDE 3.1. I once tried to get AA with gtk, a good few months ago but gave up waiting for the day when AA fonts ceased to be a simple hack. That day has finally come.

Well, not only that, I also started coding more seriously so I felt the need for a good text editor. And that editor, while FAR from perfect, is KDE's Kate. I hear some of you shouting 'use emacs, you loonie' while others blab about Vi, but honestly I have nor the time nor the patience, at this very moment, to learn how to use any of them. And I confess that if I did so, I'd go for Vi. I've been using it ever since I got into Linux since 97 or so but never got past the basics. Maybe one day. I have no doubts it's as powerful as editors gets. (I said editors, not OSes *hint*).

On a different front, the Championship Manager work is at long last finished and wrapped up. I think we did a good job on localizing it and quite honestly, CM is probably the last thing I want to hear about for a couple of months. Now if I could only get my well deserved $$$..

On the Uni side of things, been pretty much happy coding away on sockets programming. I honestly didn't think at first that it'd be this interesting. Fortunately we're past the _very_ basics, while still at the basics I guess, but the third assignment, which I've nearly finished now, is quite interesting. It's basically a mini-inetd which regulates the date, echo, put and get services. I also wrote clients for those and it turned out to be more challenging that it seemed at first. Anyhow, jolly good fun and I hope I have a good mark on it.

Well, it's getting late (01:48am here) and I better get up early tomorrow. Tucking into bed reading a bit of a book, reminds me to tell anyone who's interested and reading this that I'm finally taking some time (not as much as I'd liked to...) to read Dune, the Frank Herbert classic. Honestly, I'm really enjoying it, it's just a shame I get lost in a multitude of programming tasks, thus not leaving time to read more. I have an enormous pile of books waiting for me to read them, you see. I'm actually taking a few days away, going up north, from Thursday to Sunday but unfortunately I have a test on Tuesday so I'll have to focus on that too instead of releasing myself completely from Uni/technical duties. Tough is the life of a graduate student.

Oh yes, some musical recommendations for anyone who happens to same roughly the same tastes as I do. My bands of the moment right now are: Tool, Evanescence, Opeth, Masterplan, Gotan Project and Cold. Check them out. Well worth it!

:wq!